Is there a free codec similar to Cineform?

Sebaz wrote on 8/24/2008, 8:33 AM
Is there a codec similar to Cineform but free? I have a lot of AVCHD footage to edit. I tried with Huffyuv, and about 4 minutes of footage took about 10 GB, so it's out of the question. And Cineform Neo HD, the only one I could use in Vegas, is $600, definitely out of my range.

The Cineform VFW version that comes with Vegas is useless, I don't even know why it's there. I tried using it to pre-render, and to render normally, and it gave me an error on both. I rebooted and tried it again just in case, but same thing.

While I was in Argentina recently, since I videorecorded a lot of my family and friends, and I only have two 16 GB SDHC cards, when I finished one I copied the whole contents to the hard drive of my mom's computer and then in turn copy that to either two double layer DVDs or four single layer ones.

When I came back to the US, I found the nasty surprise that a lot of the footage has visual glitches in it at random places, and because of those glitches, the stupid Pixela Imagemixer software cannot edit them. Well, it can, but when it comes to actually finishing the movie, it stops with an error.

Because of this, I have no choice but to edit all the footage in Vegas, which really pisses me off because it will mean recompressing all of it, something that I was going to avoid using ImageMixer, which smart-renders AVCHD. The problem here is that Vegas by itself will not render AVCHD to 1920x1080, only 1440x1080, and it shows a quality degradation. If I had buttloads of hard drive space I could render to Huffyuv and then load it up in DVDA 5 and set it to compress to AVC 1920x1080 at 20 Mbps, which would at least give me a better picture quality, but for that I would need a humongous disk if I'm going to work with Huffyuv, or a better codec that doesn't show any degradation. So I really need an intermediate codec that doesn't have a huge space footprint but also free. I know I'm asking for too much, but well, there might be something out there.

Comments

JohnnyRoy wrote on 8/24/2008, 10:15 AM
The Cineform codec that comes with Vegas should work. You might want to contact Sony about why it doesn't. You can also use the Sony YUV codec which ships with Vegas. It's listed under the AVI type with templates like "HD 1080-60i YUV" as the name. This will be larger than Cineform but smaller than Huffyuv. There is also the Lagarith lossless codec which is like Huffyuv but claims smaller file size.

~jr
Laurence wrote on 8/24/2008, 11:58 AM
The free Cineform with Vegas should work, but only at a maximum of 1440x1080. To go to 1920x1080 you need one of the more expensive commercial versions of Neo since Neo HDV only goes up to 1440x1080 as well.

Does going down to 1440x1080 really bother you that much? It looks fine to me on such shows as Discovery HD. What camcorder are you using? What kind of degradation are you seeing when you go from 1920x1080 to 1440x1080?

There are several options available, but most of them involve working at 1440x1080
fldave wrote on 8/24/2008, 3:00 PM
The free Cineform that comes with Vegas will NOT work with Virtual Dub, or probably any other third party software. It only allows you to encode to Cineform from within Vegas, VD generates a message in the encode telling you to buy the full Cineform product, which I never have.

I use HuffYUV, but I just downloaded a new codec modeled from that called Lagarith. Haven't tried that yet.

For $99 you can get 500GB hard drive, a much cheaper alternative to Cineform.

You should be able to go to free Cineform within Vegas to 1920x1080 to do your edits??? Supposedly it is better to work with than native m2, so I would imagine AVCHD also?
Marc S wrote on 8/24/2008, 3:09 PM
You can also give Cineform a try for 15 days free. I use Neo (249.00) and it's worked out very well for me but is limited to 1440x1080.
fldave wrote on 8/24/2008, 3:41 PM
Yes, I tried the free built in Cineform and did get an error trying to render to 1920x1080.

The cheapest solution may be a new hard drive?
Sebaz wrote on 8/24/2008, 3:53 PM
I guess getting a 1/2 TB drive might be the cheapest solution. I just need to stop spending money right away to stop accumulating CC debt.

In response to Laurence, I do see a degradation between 1920 and 1440, especially if the source is as pristine as the Canon HF100 is. If you talk about editing HD feeds from Discovery with Vegas and outputting to 1440 AVC, it doesn't look bad, but the original source wasn't that great to start with, just MPEG 2 at 15 Mbps average. Even working with ATSC, I can still tell the difference. I encoded Gillian Anderson's interview on Leno from about a month ago, and I did two encodes to see the difference, one to 1440 AVC from Vegas, and then the same to Huffyuv and then imported it as an item in DVDA 5 and let it encode the Huffyuv to 1920 AVC at 20 Mbps. I can tell the latter is better when comparing both. Sure, the 1440 doesn't look bad, but since I'm working with footage from my family and best friends, I want to get the best possible quality out of it.
Laurence wrote on 8/24/2008, 4:39 PM
The http://www.pegasusimaging.com/picvideomjpeg.htmPegasus M-Jpeg Codec[/link] isn't free, but it's only $28.00 US for a non-commercial license. It looks very good and will do 1920x1080 or whatever other size you want it to do. It is also very efficient with Vegas, both in previewing and in rendering.

They license the codec from Main Concept according to http://www.mainconcept.com/site/news-9/2006-21671/pegasys-11552.htmlthis[/link] article.

You can also buy the codec from Main Concept directly http://www.mainconcept.com/site/prosumer-products-4/motion-jpeg-codec-785/information-797.htmlhere.[/link].

It should look exactly the same since it is the same codec, just bundled differently.

At highest quality I can see no difference between this and the source footage. I wouldn't use it for a string of successive renders since (unlike Cineform) this isn't what it is designed to do, but for your uses it should work fine.

M-JPEG is different than MPEG2 and MPEG4 in that all the compression is done within a given frame rather than referencing previous and following frames. It is basically just a string of jpeg stills with the same compression we are used to looking at in still photos online.
Laurence wrote on 8/24/2008, 5:39 PM
On further thought, you should be able to convert your video to the same 1920x1080 35mbps .mfx format that is used by the EX1/EX3.

Unfortunately, on my system the render settings for this seem to be stuck at 1440x1080. Is there some extra bit of software that EX1/EX3 users have access to that the rest of us don't know about?
Laurence wrote on 8/25/2008, 6:11 PM
According to a post towards the end of http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=609648&Replies=9this thread[/link], http://www.vasst.com/search.aspx?for=4096&entity=16&sort=priorityAVCHD Upshift[/link] will keep the 1920x1080 resolution of your source AVCHD. That is probably your best bet for now. It isn't free, but it is reasonably priced.
jabloomf1230 wrote on 8/25/2008, 7:56 PM
Unfortunately, there's really nothing close to Cineform for free. The next best thing is the Morgan MJPEG 2000 codec. Here's a discussion about it from www.hv20.com:

http://www.hv20.com/showthread.php?t=3246

I have a copy and for roughly $30, it is almost as good as Cineform, except it is very slow. But with a Quad core CPU, you might be okay. The version that I have works fine with Vegas 8P.
John_Cline wrote on 8/25/2008, 8:39 PM
"They (Pegasus) license the codec from Main Concept according to this article."

No, according to that article, Pegasys, the authors of TMPGEnc, license the h.264 codec from MainConcept. The two companies, Pegasys and Pegasus, have similar sounding names and you have them totally confused.

The Pegasus "PicVideo" MJPEG codec was written by Pegasus and it was available long before the one from MainConcept. I use it and I like it just fine. It's a really good, "Swiss Army Knife" type of codec. It will handle all sizes, can be adjusted for the desired size vs. quality and is very fast.

By the way, MainConcept is now owned by DivX.
blink3times wrote on 8/25/2008, 8:43 PM
You can do your editing and then render over to uncompressed avi at 1920x1080. Then import this to Ulead Movie Factory 6. MF6 will of course compress but then uncompressed avi is lossless so there will be no degradation. MF6 will work with avchd at1920x1080. I have done this before and it's a long process but it does work. The down side is that you need a BIG drive.... about 750gigs for and hour of avi.
John_Cline wrote on 8/25/2008, 9:15 PM
There you go with that Ulead stuff again, are you sure you're not a shill.
riredale wrote on 8/25/2008, 9:47 PM
Do a search on this forum for the PicVideo M-JPEG codec, which is used by quite a few of the folks here as an intermediate. More info here.
blink3times wrote on 8/26/2008, 2:59 AM
There you go with that Ulead stuff again, are you sure you're not a shill.

No... I'm not a "shill" John. I'm a devoted and dedicated Vegas user. See my previous posts on the issue. Vegas DOES have shortcomings though and working with avchd at 1920x1080 is one of them. Another product is therefore needed to fill the gap. Ulead is cheap, good.... and it works.
farss wrote on 8/26/2008, 4:52 AM
Seeing as no one else has mentioned it have you tried the Sony YUV codec that comes with Vegas. File size is big but not as huge as uncompressed.
I'm also somewhat interested in your being able to see a noticeable degradation between 1920x1080 and 1440x1080. If you were starting off with footage from a $100K camera with lenses to match and projected on a big screen I'd be included to accept you'd pick the difference. Therefore are you rendering from 1920x1080 to 1440x1080 at Best?

Also worth asking. When you say the picture qulaity is different, how so.

Bob.
Laurence wrote on 8/26/2008, 5:11 AM
>No, according to that article, Pegasys, the authors of TMPGEnc, license the h.264 codec from MainConcept. The two companies, Pegasys and Pegasus, have similar sounding names and you have them totally confused.

Wow those are similar names. You're right. I had them, like, totally confused:

http://www.pegasys-inc.com/en/index.htmlPegasys[/link] vs. http://www.pegasusimaging.com/picvideomjpeg.htmPegasus[/link]

Of the two, I would agree that the latter, http://www.pegasusimaging.com/picvideomjpeg.htmPegasus[/link], is the one to get. Like many here, I've been using it for a couple of years now and it is simply outstanding.

Unlike other MJPEG codecs such as the Morgan MJPEG 2000 codec, the Pegasus one is extremely fast, both in terms of previewing and final renders.
Laurence wrote on 8/26/2008, 5:26 AM
If you're not doing color correction, why not just convert to Bluray compatible 1920x1080x25mbps MPEG2? That way you'll do one conversion in order to edit in Vegas, and the end project will smart-render into a Bluray compatible MPEG2 master.

You could automate the conversion of the raw footage with a script like Ultimate-S.
Sebaz wrote on 8/27/2008, 4:55 PM
"If you're not doing color correction, why not just convert to Bluray compatible 1920x1080x25mbps MPEG2? That way you'll do one conversion in order to edit in Vegas, and the end project will smart-render into a Bluray compatible MPEG2 master."

That would be a good choice if I were editing for BD media, which at least for now, I'm not doing because of the cost, both the burner and the media. So when you write a 25 mbps MPEG 2 file to a DVD in BD format, it plays, but after a few seconds it begins to stutter and that's it. At least my BD player, the Sony BDP-S300, can't handle that bitrate on BD5s or BD9s.

As for Lagarith, for whatever reason DVDA 5 doesn't like that codec at all. Whichever method you used to compress the file, RGB, YUY2 or YV12, what you end up with when DVDA 5 converts to AVCHD is a video that interlaces one black half frame with the other half frame of real video. So you get a very flickery video.

Another thing I tried which comes in handy if you don't have a lot of drive space but you still need to render to something intermediate for DVDA 5 to convert to 1920 AVCHD is to render from Vegas to a Mainconcept 80 Mbps MPEG 2 elementary stream (80 Mbps is the max allowed) and it renders a great quality file that compresses great in DVDA 5, without the huge drive space of Huffyuv.
Xander wrote on 8/27/2008, 6:47 PM
I tend to use Lagarith for swapping recorded video between AE and Vegas. If I am doing AE to Vegas, I will load the m2t in AE and render as Lagarith and work with Lagarith in Vegas.

I would probably wait a couple of weeks - by the rumors flying around, either Vegas 8c or Vegas 8.1 is being released. My guess is they will support 1920X1080 AVCHD. Not tried it, but I remember reading somewhere that Vegas Studio 9 supported 1920X1080 - might be worth downloading the 30 day trial.
Sebaz wrote on 8/27/2008, 7:12 PM
Well, Vegas 8.0b renders to 1920 in AVC, the problem is that the result is rejected by DVDA 5. So I'm not sure if it's that Vegas renders crap or if it renders something legit that DVDA 5 cannot understand.
Laurence wrote on 8/27/2008, 8:34 PM
Then use Ulead Movie Factory. It's cheap, works well, and will keep you going until DVDA catches up.
Sebaz wrote on 8/28/2008, 10:41 AM
For the price of Movie Factory, I'd rather buy a huge hard drive and let DVDA 5 do the encoding, since the drive space might be useful for more stuff. Plus, I think I tried authroing a BD5 on that program and it didn't play on my BD player.
Eugenia wrote on 9/15/2008, 11:35 AM
I wrote a comparison of some intermediate codecs here, it might help you decide:
http://eugenia.gnomefiles.org/2008/09/15/intermediate-codecs-the-face-off/