@notrons I have read and reread what you wrote, and it seems like what you are saying the post prep utility does makes a lot of sense as far as work flow.

Check me if I am right here. To put it simply you will take your original footage and convert it into two types of footage with the exact same name and file type.
1. will be a medium quality footage with 422 color space so that your color corrections look accurate. 2. will be a uncompressed (maximum quality) up sampled 422 color space footage with the same exact name as the footage from number one.

When you get done editing your project, you will simply overwrite the lower quality footage from number one with the very high quality footage from number two. At that point, your editor will simply apply the same edits to the super high quality footage which will in turn slow your editor down. But this is unimportant because the only time you use this very high quality footage is when you are exporting?

The next question would be ... is the post prep utility able to process the files as well or better than neoscene or the other cineform versions? Because if I am correct, you could accomplish a very similar thing to what you are doing with those programs. You would just have to process the files twice instead of automatically having the program do both files for you.

On a side note. I have expertise regarding RAID. In both of your posts you mention RAID, but you mention two different array types. Personally for critical data storage, I prefer RAID 6 because it allows any two hard drives to go down at the same time. This actually occurs more frequently than you would think because hard drives that come from the same batches tend to fail at the same time. RAID 6 also integrates striping but with parity. THis gives you good speed with great backup capabilities. Of course it does require a 5 or 6 or more disc array, and many RAID controllers don't support it. But it is awesome.

GH2+cuda=best quality. Plus real time playback of multiple effects for CC. No need for Cineform.

@tderuiter Also, the "FirstLight" color correction in Cineform is very cool, but Magic Bullet Looks (and other specialized color correction tools) offer features that it does not. For instance Looks offers additional modules (diffusion filter, two kinds of bleach bypass, telecine net, etc.) that may make it useful even if you use Cineform for FirstLight.

Also note that even with acceleration, Magic Bullet is typically slower than Cineform. But the GPU accelerated native CC in the newest Vegas Pro (and I've heard in Premiere Pro) are much faster than Magic Bullet Looks.

@DrDave No disrespect intended, but I bought a $90 card and returned it when it didnt work, despite being an NVidia CUDA card. It did however do just fine in every other application I threw at it, from 3D animation to Magic Bullet Looks. Im sure it works on a very wide range of cards, but its not universal and it pays to check the specific card first. Thats all I was saying. Also, Adobe did (at least last year) maintain a list of cards that work and there was a hack to get around it. That may have changed more recently.

Either way, I didn`t get to test that aspect yet, but look forward to it in the future.

As to the rescaling, I look forward to it. It`s utterly ridiculous the extent to which NLEs have continued to rely on Bicubic rescaling when something as simple as Lanczos3 is far superior (let alone the proprietary algorithims used in some of the other still image programs like Blow-Up, Perfect Reize, PhotoZoomBrowser, etc.)

Do you know which algorithim it uses? I would be curious to see some comparisons since its an area Im always looking to improve.

@DrDave I went to read up on it. Adobe info via Todd Kopriva seemed to indicate I would need a GPU with at least 1.5GB RAM to support the frame sizes of the stills I use but that the algo. was Lanczos 2 with lowpass-filtered bicubic. Intriguing. For static rescaling I typically used VirtualDub with a Lanczos3 but I look forward to this dynamic implementation.

One nice thing about looks is that you can apply multiple modules into a single render pass so that you can avoid clipping highlights in one module if a later module brings them back. (There's also auto-shoulder which I put at the end of almost every render chain.) You can even use multiple Colorista II modules in one chain. (For example, I sometimes apply Colorista II to correct skin tones so that I apply Cosmo as a sort of secondary CC and then do my main color correction pass in a later Colorista II module. About the only think I wish Looks would do that it doesn't is power windows. I don't know why it can't implement these, since the tools are all there. Maybe Looks 3.

@DrDave Where can one find this "hidden feature, the superscalar resizing".

Are you saying that enabling MPE hardware mode changes the premiere resize tool to use this better algorhitm? Or does one need to do something else to enable it as per the "hidden" in the name?

You need to check a couple of boxes like maximum render and maximim bit depth. I can't recall which one turns it on, since I always use both. There used to be a bug in Cineform with scaling. I tested it myself, and found that unless you rendered out the video, THEN applied scaling, motion,etc, there was a big drop off in quality. Don't know if that fixed that, since I use the CUDA now. Just drop it on the timeline and play.

I have a fairly new PC (GTX580 card and 6-core 3930K CPU), and tried out Cineform Neoscene last night. In Vegas pro 11 with a test clip (shot on Cake 2.0) using curves, MB looks and Neat NR, it took about 3 times as long to render the Cineform clip than working with the native GH2 file. So for me, Cineform wasn't very useful.

I did try some extreme grading to see if Cineform looked better. Colour seemed less blocky but everything looked much softer. It's possible I'm doing something wrong, but I don't think Cineform is for me.

If you have to have a format that works between say Vegas and AE, why not windows .avi? Apart from the humungous file sizes of course... but that's the only format that seems to play happily between these two applications, and Vegas really flies if I use .avi files rather than native mts. I'm not an expert on colour spaces etc, so this is probably a really stupid question, but

1) Is windows .avi a good choice for intermediate rendering / going between Vegas and AE and
2) In Vegas, why is windows .avi much quicker to edit than Cineform?!

@MrEdd

For me, I installed it and they show up as available options in AME. One for Cineform AVI, and one for Cineform MOV. Strange thing is the Cineform AVI option has more "options" (codec configurable settings) than the Cineform MOV option.

@dbp I would not assume that the codec itself is in any way inferior until someone shows otherwise. So far I have not noticed a difference between the files saved with one vs the other and I go back and forth on different systems all the time. I was not looking for differences, though.

@Macalincag ty, wandering if AME 64x is the cause of the problem. Ill try to install GoPro once again

Ian, the early release (very first one) of GoPro cineform Studio had a codec version or constraint that limited the export bitrate to 3x the original file. Somewhere on David Newman's cineform blog (old one) or one of his many forum posts there is information explaining they had issues with that and decided to introduce the unrestrained codec in the post versions of GoPro Studio, which was also very buggy in the first release. So yes, now you have a free cineform codec which others have paid $129 for in Neoscene + a recent extra $49 upgrade. The only benefit of that is the ability to convert using only i frames.Thank you David, hope you enjoyed the "Gopro cash buyout and shares" i guess there will be no refunds forthcoming to the Neoscene purchasers.