Nasty Cineform Issue in VP8

Stuart Robinson wrote on 9/25/2007, 9:56 PM
I've just rendered a Cineform intermediary out of Vegas 8. Good job it was a short project because the result is pretty nasty-looking:



All those bands and coloured blocks move according to frame content. This is with a clip rendered out of Vegas from an HDV m2t timeline, I don't have Neo. The same clip viewed back in Vegas looks just the same, as is the case in Virtualdub.

Any ideas? I'm having to resort to HUFFYUV.

Comments

Serena wrote on 9/25/2007, 10:04 PM
Doesn't look good. I presume you have the last version of ConnectHD v3.42 b38. I'm having no problems using NEOHDV in Vegas 8.

EDIT: just to check I did a render from m2t to DI, but of course using NEO.
Stuart Robinson wrote on 9/26/2007, 12:16 PM
Thanks Serena. No, I don't have ConnectHD, just the Cineform CODEC that ships with Vegas. The "Render As..." video tab displays it as Cineform VFW CODEC v2.8.

I believe the latest version is 3.3 and installing the NEO player might be a way to upgrade to that level while retaining the render abilities in Vegas.

Previous Thread

I'll give it a try...
Stuart Robinson wrote on 9/26/2007, 3:53 PM
OK, installing the NEO player, which includes the v3.3 CODEC seems to have done the trick. I suppose it's something anyone who doesn't have a paid version of CineForm could benefit from since the CODEC bundled with Vegas is getting fairly long in the tooth.
Terje wrote on 9/26/2007, 3:57 PM
Well, I am not willing to accept this I think. Vegas ships with the Cineform codec, and it works very well in V7, it doesn't however work in V8. Someone screwed up BADLY, and this should be fixed. Now.

Why should I have to pay several hundred dollars extra, in addition to the upgrade price, to get the same functionality out of V8 as I have from V7?
Serena wrote on 9/26/2007, 4:05 PM
The NEO player is free.

http://www.cineform.com/products/NeoHD.htmsee near "downloads"[/link]
Stuart Robinson wrote on 9/26/2007, 5:45 PM
"Why should I have to pay several hundred dollars extra, in addition to the upgrade price, to get the same functionality out of V8 as I have from V7?"

As Serena says, you don't have to pay. Download the free NEO player and it includes the new CODEC. It replaces the one Vegas uses and due to the Vegas licensing, you can create new files out of Vegas 8 with it.

From David Newman of CineFrom, taken from the thread linked to above:

"NEO Player does allow you to create new CineForm AVIs within Vegas, although without the quality controls/benefits of the full NEO package. NEO Player includes the latest "free" CFHD components and upgrades the Sony license. Sony is welcome to ship this component (which would have avoided this thread), however the new v3.x CFHD components require SSE2 instructions, so it will not work on the (now very) old Althon XPs -- and therefore Sony discussion to stick with v2.8."

While this is all well and good, the fact that the version bundled with Vegas causes many problems seems to be a far worse situation to be in than the lack of compatibility with a few AMD processors.
Terje wrote on 9/26/2007, 6:34 PM
Download the free NEO player and it includes the new CODEC. It replaces the one Vegas uses and due to the Vegas licensing, you can create new files out of Vegas 8 with it.

That would have been great, but I downloaded the NEO player, and it doesn't help at all. In fact, it creates a video file that looks a lot worse than before.
Stuart Robinson wrote on 9/26/2007, 7:48 PM
"That would have been great, but I downloaded the NEO player, and it doesn't help at all. In fact, it creates a video file that looks a lot worse than before."

Can you tell us what you're rendering (SD or HD etc?) and perhaps post a frame? It'd be interesting to take a look at what you're seeing.
Terje wrote on 9/27/2007, 12:08 AM
It doesn't really look like it is an issue. I just tested it, and got some weird results, but nothing that really matters. If I open the cineform intermediate file in Windows Media Player, or any other AVI enabled player on my system, the video flickers like mad, is of the wrong aspect ratio and also is placed wrong on in the player, you know how old TVs some times was, you got 4/5 of the picture on the right side of the screen, a black bar to the left of that, and the remaining 1/5 to the left of the black bar, as if the image was shifted to the right a bit, circled around and comes out on the left side of the screen.

As I said, it doesn't seem to be a problem though. If I open the intermediate in Vegas it looks perfectly fine and it also renders to MPEG perfectly fine, and fast. So, it seems it is mainly a player issue, my players are having problems with the intermediate, but the intermediate is exactly that, and not something I am going to distribute, so that is fine. As long as Vegas has no problem with it.

I did open the AVI in Ulead Movie Studio, which had the same problems as Windows Media Player, but that is also probably not a huge issue.
Serena wrote on 9/27/2007, 12:19 AM
Cineform creates a digital intermediate. If you want it to play in WM you must render it to the necessary format.
Terje wrote on 9/27/2007, 3:05 AM
Not to pick nits, but the intermediate is an AVI, and with the appropriate decoder, it should play fine in any media player. But that is nit picking. I am just glad it works in Vegas.
Stuart Robinson wrote on 9/27/2007, 9:45 AM
I suppose it could be a CPU or system resources problem. In the Cineform NEO folder the player added to your start list, there should be two scripts, one sets playback to full resolution the other to a less intensive scaling resolution.

It might be worth trying that, it won't impact how Vegas behaves and you can always change it back again if it doesn't work (run the other script).
StormMarc wrote on 9/27/2007, 10:38 AM
For some reason Cineform does not play nice with windows media player. There is a thread about this on the DV info forum. I just bought Neo and it's working great in Vegas 8. I decided it was worth it for the enhanced quality and especially the capturing outside of Vegas directly to Cineform files. I've got about 60 hours to capture so it saves me quite a bit of time.

Marc