RedCam Central :: View topic - CineForm NEO 4K beta now available for trial

Site Admin

This message was recently released online by David Newman, CTO, CineForm:

"Since RedCine became available (48 hours ago) we have been tweaking the CineForm QuickTime engine so that we can offer CineForm NEO 4K. Fortunately Red's timing was good as we were about to release a new version of all our Products, and we had NEO 4K beta ready, just in case.

If you are new to CineForm (where have you been?) here what you need to know : CineForm offers a 4:2:2 and 4:4:4+ wavelet compressed digital intermediate format, that gives the visual quality of DPX files without the huge file sizes, and is pretty fast. We support either AVI and MOV wrapped media, on PCs and Intel Macs. Blah blah blah.

How does this impact RedCine? Almost all codecs offered by QuickTime panel in RedCine are 8-bit only, many are also chroma sub-sampled, so you are likely plannig to use QuickTime or generating proxies then switch to DPX down the road. Using the CineForm you can directly output high precision masters, in a lightly compressed format (between 5:1 to 10:1), at resolutions up to 4K (and beyond.) Very handy for effects work where proxies will not do, and too many 4K DPX files on disks are painful.

Now both NEO 4K and RedCine are in beta, so there be things that will come up. I have found one RedCine bug that prevents deep pixel codec like CineForm (and others) from producing a 4096 wide export, yet 4104 and 4088 works fine (CineForm codec wants width to be divisable by 8, that is why +/- 8 was used.) I have reported this to the Red team. If you export a 4096 project as 4088, it will scale, so create a project that is 4088x2048 to match you export (no scaling is good.) That is only .2% of frame smaller. I'm sure this will be fixed.

We have only tested with the two clips upload, as we sadly don't have a access to Red cameras. So I look forward to others with footage to help us refine our products.

On the PC we have the NEO 4K for PC, but not yet on the Mac. The Mac codec is licensed up to 2K 4:4:4 at the moment. Prospect 4K is also coming, but NEO is all you need to get started on some compressed 4K composites. Note: the CineForm 4K files will work in Prospect 2K under Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0/CS3."

Here are links to download the beta versions (15 day trial):

NEO 4K:
http://www.cineform.com/downloads/NE...42a-071116.zip

Prospect 2K:
http://www.cineform.com/downloads/Pr...42a-071116.zip

CineForm Mac Codec (2K):
http://www.cineform.com/downloads/CF....43-071116.zip