Cineform 4K solution?

[Gordon Prince]

Granted that Cineform is the best known provider probably among the future Red users, I'm wondering what will it be the Cineform offer over the 4K realm?

 

[Gunleik Groven]

Are they?

The best known provider of what exactly?

Gunleik

 

[laguun]

Are they?

The best known provider of what exactly?

Gunleik

I think he is talking about 4K realtime-editing on a regular notebook/desktop PC with Adobe Premiere pro.

 

[David Newman]

We intend to offer Red support within our Prospect 2K product, and introduce Prospect 4K for those who need. All our products have an unrestricted decode resolution, so Prospect 2K will happy decode 4K+ images but deliver to 2K CineForm targets --you can still conform to 4K using DPX, TIFF, etc. Prospect 4K adds 4K CineForm 444 exports and mastering, we have to wait and see how much demand there is for that -- the software is built and ready to go. Other details remain fluzzy until the camera is more widely available.

 

[Joe Carney]

David it would be cool if you could work with Red to transfer Meta Data as well. Maybe not easy, but hopefully doable. I'm only suggesting this because Cineform has a directshow 32bit per channel version that works great with premier and AE.

The only negative is the cost per seat.

 

[David Newman]

Cost per seat -- RT decktop DI -- there nothing equivelent for performance and quality, we are priced as low as we are as we target independent filmmakers, a customer who typically doesn't have any money.

Regarding metadata, yes we would like to support all the source metadata, but that is up to Red to make that information publically usable.

 

[Joe Carney]

David I don't mean any disrespect, but Redcode is free. Kind of hard to beat that.
But if Red doesn't mind handing off DirectShow/Adobe compatability development to Cineform, then yes, your cost per seat is reasonable compared to the alternative (transcoding to a less efficient format).

And you can call it "CineRed" hehehe.

 

[David Newman]

One can't compare with something that doesn't exist in the market yet. Free decoding is one thing, but that is only a minor part of the workflow -- we are assuming there is a free decoder as that will be necessary for you to see your data -- most decoders are free and doesn't impact our business. But are you going to get a free real-time 4:4:4 encoder (or 4:4:4:4 for that matter), and are you going to get the performance of CineForm. I can only can speculate today, but speculation will not be forever. It has taken CineForm 6 years to get to this level of performance, I expect Red's own post production efforts to trail us for the years to come, after all we are only focused on compression for post/arcquisition, we aren't trying to build cameras at the same time.

 

[Steve Freebairn]

I just hope that you guys get a better looking GUI and some training for your Sales people at NAB. When I mentioned RED at NAB I was laughed at by one of your booth people. The GUI that Adobe was showing for some of the Cineform products was like an ugly scar on their interface. I would rather move from Premiere to FCP just to avoid paying for Cineform.

 

[David Newman]

Thanks for the feedback, yes that GUI is going, it was only an engineering place holder for the features to come (customers wanted something working before it could be made pretty.) As for the sales staff we only have one official sales person, Mary Reeves and she wouldn't behaved that way (she is very nice,) the rest were either engineering people for third party reps (many I don't know.) I'm sorry you experienced that, there was plenty of more useful information that could have been sent your way.

 

[Steve Freebairn]

That is all very good to know. I figured the guy was pretty clueless when he scoffed at Red If you could offer the realtime handling of redcode files without having to make new files or transcode, it'd be great. I for one would love you and Red to both compete to make the best workflow possible since the competition will only benefit the consumer.

 

[David Newman]

While we might have different post solutions, we don't need to be in competition with Red, nor do we think ourselves as competitors. When we support the Red camera, that only helps Red and it users. Different needs in post will need range of vendors to support them, we just will do our best to be strong player.

 

[Lauri Kettunen]

David, thanks for the information you've given here.

I also feel there is no need for competition between Cineform and RED. Or is it that RED is planning to get involved in optimizing software to get the most out of CPUs or in updating software every time Adobe comes up with a new versio etc.?

Personally I don't find it a problem to convert to Cineform files, for the workflow thereafter is just great. In my mind the only remaining question is, how a Red raw file can be converted to a CFHD -or should it be called CF4K/CF2K file? Hopefully there is no need to take an intermediate step there as that would make the transition rather clumsy.

 

[Thor Wixom]

We intend to offer Red support within our Prospect 2K product, and introduce Prospect 4K for those who need. All our products have an unrestricted decode resolution, so Prospect 2K will happy decode 4K+ images but deliver to 2K CineForm targets --you can still conform to 4K using DPX, TIFF, etc. Prospect 4K adds 4K CineForm 444 exports and mastering, we have to wait and see how much demand there is for that -- the software is built and ready to go. Other details remain fluzzy until the camera is more widely available.

David,

This is very good news.

Being that both codecs are wavelet based, what are the odds of being able to place a Cineform "wrapper" around the data that is already contained in the Redcode file? If it worked similarly to the way RedQuick is supposed to work, it would be ideal.

Shoot, rewrap, edit.

By the way, I asked one of the guys at the SI booth at NAB about Cineform and Red. I think he was overwhelmed by the fact that so many people were coming to his booth to ask him work flow questions about your product and his competitor's product. I can totally understand why he may have been short with people. It must have felt very counterproductive for him.

At any rate, he was very polite and did a good job of answering my questions. He even played a 4k file for me, with a transition and a title and it was viewable as a real-time downconversion, much the way FCP is supposedly going to work with the native Redcode 4k files.

I was very impressed, and felt that it bode well for the prospect (pun intended) of a real-time editing solution for those of us planning to edit Red One footage in Adobe Premiere.

Thanks for taking the time to post on this board. I look forward to using your product.

-Thor Wixom

 

[Emanuel A.]

I look forward to using your product.

-Thor Wixom

I second that. Actually, 4K home online editing @Premiere would rock and it shall be, I'm sure going with Cineform, as well.

PC_side editors will appreciate. This is a milestone for the indy motion picture production.

 

[Joe Carney]

One can't compare with something that doesn't exist in the market yet. Free decoding is one thing, but that is only a minor part of the workflow -- we are assuming there is a free decoder as that will be necessary for you to see your data -- most decoders are free and doesn't impact our business. But are you going to get a free real-time 4:4:4 encoder (or 4:4:4:4 for that matter), and are you going to get the performance of CineForm. I can only can speculate today, but speculation will not be forever. It has taken CineForm 6 years to get to this level of performance, I expect Red's own post production efforts to trail us for the years to come, after all we are only focused on compression for post/arcquisition, we aren't trying to build cameras at the same time.

Which is precisely why I suggested Red hand off Directshow development to Cineform. No reason you could't sell it as a seperate product.

Have to be honest though, with all the negative issues surrounding vista, I'm not ruling out switching to a Mac based system.

 

[Jason Rodriguez]

Hi Kinobairn,

I do greatly apologize if the person that "laughed" at you was from SI. I sure hope it wasn't, but I want you to personally know I went out of my way to answer any questions asked, whether it was about RED and CineForm, or the integration with CineForm and SI camera.

I even went to the extent of showing one customer who had purchased a RED and was worried about real-time performance editing on the PC a 4K demo in Premiere Pro, with two streams of 4K running in realtime on an older 3.0Ghz Pentium D system (Pentium D's are older machines from the Netburst architecture days and all we had running in the booth . . . there were no 8-core Core-architecture firepower machines under the table).

 

[Mr. Paul White]

How much can a PC machine cost in order to handle 4K online editing? Is it available?

 

[Joe Carney]

Hi Kinobairn,

I do greatly apologize if the person that "laughed" at you was from SI. I sure hope it wasn't, but I want you to personally know I went out of my way to answer any questions asked, whether it was about RED and CineForm, or the integration with CineForm and SI camera.

I even went to the extent of showing one customer who had purchased a RED and was worried about real-time performance editing on the PC a 4K demo in Premiere Pro, with two streams of 4K running in realtime on an older 3.0Ghz Pentium D system (Pentium D's are older machines from the Netburst architecture days and all we had running in the booth . . . there were no 8-core Core-architecture firepower machines under the table).

So Jason, what would happen if you HAD 8 core monsters to run things on?
hehehe.

 

[Don King]

How much can a PC machine cost in order to handle 4K online editing? Is it available?

Here's the question!