AVCHD vs. Cineform vs. ??

Guy S. wrote on 1/27/2010, 3:23 PM

I've shot some test footage with our new Panasonic GH1 and it seems to work just fine in Vegas 8.1 (64-bit) running on an HP Xeon quad core -- timeline performance feels equivalent to 1080p HDV footage.

Yesterday I downloaded a trial version of Cineform NeoHD and converted a few AVCHD 720 60p clips to Cineform's CODEC (24 fps framerate).

What I noticed is that the 60p AVCHD clips played at a higher frame rate in a 24p timeline than the Cineform clips. This does not seem right and I'm wondering if there are settings in the Cineform conversion and/or Vegas project properties that I might be missing?

Is there another CODEC (with batch transcoding) that would provide a better result than either of these?

Also, is anyone using Cineform's First Light program for color grading? If so, how is it working out for you? (I installed the trial version but couldn't get it to work).

Guy

Comments

David Newman wrote on 1/28/2010, 7:33 PM

General performance advantages to CineForm are in the Preview - Half modes, that way you are using the advantage of wavelets (multi-resolution decoding.) For a fast PC, the full resolution decoding is likely RT for most codecs (other than high bit-rate AVCHD which is typically the slowest for many systems.)

We have many users that do their color correction exclusively in First Light. On some systems you maybe need to run as Administrator (sometimes only once) for all to work correction. Particular seen this on Win-7 x64. Please contact support if you still can't get First Light to work, it will change your workflow.

David Newman
CTO, CineForm