Cineform v3.2/3.22 color rendering issue...

Sunflux wrote on 11/13/2006, 9:09 PM
As mentioned in the thread on Cineform crashes, I've encountered a bug when rendering to the Cineform intermediate codec. Now, first just to clarify what comes with what:

* Vegas 7.0 ships with Cineform encoder v2.5 - this does not experience the issue.
* Connect HD v3.2 and v3.22 ship with encoder v2.7 - this has the bug.

The issue is with certain solid colors, for example red, blue, yellow and so forth, set to the full RGB values. For instance red is RGB 255 0 0. When rendering such colors, Cineform will encode the WRONG COLOR (this is not a playback problem nor seemingly a Vegas issue).

So, when I drop a "solid red" graphic from Vegas' Media Generators window and then render that to a Cineform file, it comes out green. Blue comes out dark green. Yellow comes out aqua, and so forth.

I've determined that colors that aren't as "strong" will render correctly - for example instead of RGB 255 0 0 it will work with 249 0 0. However, even when doing this in the "real world" you can still get speckles of green flashing in the finished video on antialised edges, where the color borders other colors, and so forth, so it's not a real option.

So, for now, I'm between a rock and a hard place. The default encoder v2.5 (or whatever Connect HD v2.1 comes with) will render correctly but is difficult to edit with for performance reasons. Connect HD v3.22 is better to edit with, but won't render correctly in these circumstances. And swapping from encoder v2.7 back to v2.5 is not easy - I have to fully uninstall both Cineform *and* Vegas or v2.7 seems to hang around. And when I uninstall Vegas I lose my customizations, have to re-register and all that jazz.

I have been through the whole tech support process with Cineform in mid-October when I first noticed this, and they have confirmed the problem. But so far no fix or update on when a fix might occur. And needless to say I'm not that happy to have specifically upgraded from v2.1 to v3.22 for use with Vegas 7.0 and then end up having these issues.

Here's a screen capture of what I'm talking about. The first track is the original dropped solid colors from Vegas' Media Generator. The second track is a render of that track with Cineform encoder v2.7. The third track is the same render but done with v2.5. Note what happens to red, blue, yellow and cyan.

Again, this only affects Connect HD v3.2 or v3.22.

Comments

Wolfgang S. wrote on 11/13/2006, 11:21 PM
Yes, I remember that I have seen that long time ago, when I tried to render solid colors to support the development of AV-Cutty (they asked me to produce pure color clips to be able to test the scene separation in that tool). So, it is no new issue at all.

The point seems to be that it takes place with pure color only - so 255.0.0 for example. When you use colors that are not pure, it seems to be true that this does not take place. Otherwise all editing with the intermediate codec would be impossible.

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