Cineform for AVCHD

sgsp wrote on 9/12/2009, 5:17 PM

I have been using Vegas Pro 8 for about a year. Just bought a Cannon HFS10, it records in AVCHD. After doing some rough editing I rendered to an intermidate .AVI file as suggested in by Sony. Now I am doing my detail editing and so far no problems. Many posts have stated that Cineform makes a big difference if you record in AVCHD.
What is the advantages of Cineform over using Vegas to render to .avi????

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 9/12/2009, 5:26 PM

AVI is a wrapper. It can use any of dozens of codecs.
Cineform is one of them.
So you can do an intermediate render to a Cineform AVI file in Vegas Pro 8.

Other types of AVI files include DV-AVI, MJPEG AVI, HuffYUV AVI, Lagarith AVI, Microsoft 1 AVI, Sony YUV AVI, Uncompressed AVI, etc., etc., ad nauseum

So therein is where any comparisons would lie.

johnmeyer wrote on 9/12/2009, 9:34 PM

Two advantages of Cineform:

1. The editing performance on the timeline is generally faster than if you edit AVCHD directly.

2. If your workflow involves render portions of a project, and then later re-using some of that footage in another project which then gets rendered again (i.e., multiple generations), there is much less degradation and loss than if you edit in AVCHD and render to AVCHD.

I have also heard that you can achieve more accurate color control, but I have never dealt with high-end color grading, 32-bit video, etc., so I cannot comment on this.

The two downsides of Cineform are:

1. It takes extra time to create them, meaning that you can't get started on your editing right away.

2. The files are quite a bit larger (about 50GB/hour compared to 13GB/hour for HDV and 8 -13 GB/hour for the various compression levels found in the different types of AVCHD.

For me, when editing HDV or AVCHD, if I am doing a project that is mostly cuts-only with a few fX and transitions, I just use the native files. I render to a final format, and I'm done.