CineForm Prospect 2K, now working with 4K RedCine exports.

[David Newman]

Yesterday I posted an upgrade to NEO 4K that will allow 4095 wide images to be exported out of RedCine. A small RedCine bug prevents 4096 today, but at 4095 you won't miss much. Today there is an update to Prospect 2K that works with these 4K image with Real-time playback on a fast-ish PC.

Prospect 2K download http://www.cineform.com/downloads/Prospect2Kv320b143-071119.zip

NEO 4K download http://www.cineform.com/downloads/NEO4Kv320b143-071119.zip

Currently NEO 4K has the full resoution 444 encoding license, and Prospect 2K has all the editing features for Premiere Pro 2.0 or CS3, these will be soon merged into one product, Prospect 4K. So if you just experimenting with the CineForm codec and using tools like After Effects and Combustion, you only need NEO. Premiere users should use both tools, however we don't recommend installing them at the same time. Install NEO 4K for encoding out of RedCine at 4K (set the project and export res to 4095 for now), then uninstall NEO and install Prospect 2K (this is fast.)

There are presets for 2048 resolutions at 23.976, 24.0 and 25.0 fps, but none with the needed resolution of 2048x1024 (half 4096x2048.) When Premiere starts select "New Project" and then select a preset that is close to your target resolution and frame rate (like 2048x1152 24p.) Click on the "Custom Settings" settings tab to set the vertical resolution to 1024. You can save this as a custom preset. Then set your project name as normal.

Before importing you 4K clips, go to the Edit menu, and open Preferences->General.... In this window make sure "Default scsle to frame size" is active (i.e. checked) as this will fit your 4K source into a 2K timeline. Now you edit as you would HD, except you can zoom into the 4K data as you have a lot of resolution to spare.

An alternative is to export from RedCine a 2048x1024, which produces smaller files and a little faster export from RedCine. For this workflow on Prospect 2K needs to be installed.

Please offer an feedback you can. While both trials we run for 15-days, all CineForm encoded media will continue to work after the trial ends.

[Vinit Borrison]

Has anyone had a chance to play with this? Also what MAC options will be avail in the future....

[Obin Olson]

Has anyone had luck exporting any redcode from redcine into cineform? I have not. corrupt and black frames is all I got...P:(

[David Newman]

Of course we are doing all the time. So you setting you are trying will be useful to know. All try other codecs (16-bit codec preferred) to test you settings.

[Christopher Grant Harvey]

I want to know if I own Prospect 2K and I import 4K files and downscale them to 2K in a 2K Prospect project, I will be limited to outputting 2K right?

I do not need 4K or 2K I'm an only delivering SD and HD masters.

[Edgar Pitts]

The different Prospect flavors only limit output resolution. You can bring 4K material into Prospect HD and export as 1080.

[Christopher Grant Harvey]

Thought so.

Bit depth is up to 12 bits with Prospect2K... I'm upgrading from Aspect to P2K.

[David Wilson]

I just did that myself. Prospect2K seems great. I know I won't be able to hold myself back and move on to P4K soon enough.

[Christopher Grant Harvey]

I want Prospect 4K!! :biggrin:

Cineform for me is a great product, and it's a pity people do not see the benefits of using it. I'll die for it.

[tj williams]

Hi David I went on your website and still have a couple of questions.

1. On your pc (please describe, processor,graphicscard,ram, etc) how long per minute does it take to export the Red 4K files out to prospect 4K?

2. When you are finished with a project how does the speed of the render out to 4K 2K and 1080 compare with rendering out from Red Cine to the same formats?

[Christopher Grant Harvey]

Good question TJ.

[David Wilson]

If David N. doesn't respond here you can often find him over at dvinfo.net http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/forumdisplay.php?f=76

CineForm has been an excellent product for me as well.

[David Newman]

Hi TJ,

1) On our internal tools, we convert 1 minutes of 4K Red footage into CineForm in 2.5 minutes on a HP xw8600 (8 core 3.16Ghz, XP64, 4GB RAM, GPU no needed.) We understand this might change through the Red SDK, fingers crossed we can support the same speeds.

2) Well that HP box is fast, it can decode 4K CineForm RAW and demosaic at 27 fps (that surprized us too.) However, Premiere or AE are not that fast, exporting with color correction and other filters will likely be only a few frames per second with render grade demosaics and 3D LUTs. Under PPro we use 32-bit float, RGBA is 128bit, so the 4K frames are 128MB each, heavy work for any PC. I haven't timed that recently, I could do a test at the office later today. 2K and 1080 exports would be a bit faster, yet we still do a 128bit per pixel 4K decode, demosaic and 3DLUT processing for all outputs.

[Emanuel A.]

Hi TJ,

1) On our internal tools, we convert 1 minutes of 4K Red footage into CineForm in 2.5 minutes on a HP xw8600 (8 core 3.16Ghz, XP64, 4GB RAM, GPU no needed.) We understand this might change through the Red SDK, fingers crossed we can support the same speeds.

2) Well that HP box is fast, it can decode 4K CineForm RAW and demosaic at 27 fps (that surprized us too.) However, Premiere or AE are not that fast, exporting with color correction and other filters will likely be only a few frames per second with render grade demosaics and 3D LUTs. Under PPro we use 32-bit float, RGBA is 128bit, so the 4K frames are 128MB each, heavy work for any PC. I haven't timed that recently, I could do a test at the office later today. 2K and 1080 exports would be a bit faster, yet we still do a 128bit per pixel 4K decode, demosaic and 3DLUT processing for all outputs.It would be quite useful, David. So, I'll check it here later today. Thanks!

E. :-)

[tj williams]

David thanks for the reply.
Much of my work is doco. with a lot of footage shot. Just returned from Alaska shooting re-inactment footage for a doco. about 15 hours of raw footage. Clearly since my output will be HD, it will be better for me to shoot this type of show in 2K with my HD lens up front.

I'm very interested also in finding out from your quick test at the office what the time will be to transfer Red Raw 2K to Cineform raw and to output render.

I'm trying to see if the proxy way of editing offline will be better or worse for a lot of my work than your work flow. based on the need for a fast PC (yours cost over 5K) and tieing it up for weeks of rendering.... It looks like I can come back from the field with proxies as it doesn't take much rendering time even with a mac. book pro?
Will my final render which as you say will be a few frames a second be faster direct from red raw or from cineform raw?

[David Newman]

Exports from Premiere are lighter slower than I thought. Using 4K NAB project, with color correction and titling on all elements, exported to 2K 4:4:4 at 4 fps, and 4K export was 1fps. The reason is primarily is Premiere is still a 32-bit application, limiting it to 2GB for addressable memory, a 4K render requires threading to be disabled, whereas at 2K export theading can be on.

[David Newman]

TJ,

We posted at the same time, RED 2K to CineForm RAW converts at 37fps. Exports will be similarly 3-4 times faster.