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Premiere Pro CS5 and Cineform
New to this and need help. I have PP CS5 and have the following equipment: Intel I7 930 quad core with 16 GB of ram with GTX285 Nvidia graphics card running the Mercury Playback Engine, Shooting with Panasonic GH2 cameras, recording with the 1080i at 60 FPS format. I’ve been told that I will have to use the Cineform HD Link in order to transcode from HD to DVD. Is this statement accurate, or will P.P. effectively do this for me with good results without the intermediate codec? Thank you.
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9 Replies
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Assuming that your final output is a DVD compatible file, I’m not sure why Cineform would be needed. Cineform is normally used to transcode raw camera files into a more edit-friendly format, which may or may not be required with CS5. Your specs look as if your system should be able to handle the AVCHD footage from your camera. We have nearly the same specs except for the graphics card, and AVCHD files play realtime very easily.
Transcoding from Premiere to MPEG2 may be another issue, as I’ve read countless reports that Adobe Media Encoder doesn’t produce good quality files for this use.
Keep in mind that you will be going from seriously high quality HD files to incredibly lower quality SD files for DVD, so it’s hard to consider quality in this scenario.
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
Thanks for the quick response Steve. If P.P. Encoder does not live up to my expectations, what would be next alternative?
p.s. Have you heard of the Furmi graphic cards or know of anyone
using them and if they will work with the Mercury Engine? Thanks again -
Two big players in the Pro MPEG2 encoding field are Sorenson Squeeze and Telestream’s Episode. Neither is cheap. However, many swear by TMPGEnc, which IS cheap.
As far as Fermi cards, we use the Quadro 4000 which is Fermi based and is on the list of Mercury capable cards.
Here’s the list…
https://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/performance/
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
The hardware assist (Cuda) in the Mercury playback engine should give excellent results with scaling the video down to SD.
https://blogs.adobe.com/premiereprotraining/2010/10/scaling-in-premiere-pro-cs5.html
I have no idea how good the MPEG2 encoding is compared to other encoders. But on a recent project it seemed to do fine with material encoded at 7Mbs – some of which originated as 720p footage from a GH1.
I’d be a little curious about how well PPro handles the fields going from 1080i to interlaced on the DVD.
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I’ve been using TMPGenc for some time now to get HDV to DVD.
For the intermediate file that i need i use NeoScene.
And i am very happy with the workflow. TMPGenc makes realy good mpeg2-dvd, i import them into Encore make menu and burn with Nero. -
I used TMPGenc a long time ago when it was still more or less shareware. Might have to give it another look.
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
Thank you Ann–I’ll give that a try.
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Thanks Steve, that will probally be my next choice when I upgrade my system down the road. As for rigtht now, the GTX 285 is working well until I have 4 or more videos on the TL
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Hi Jay, Sorry it took so long to reply. We shot a function recently in 1080i and the footage looked great using Cineform.However, we had a problem with the footage coming into Cineform with the high bitrate of the hacked GH1. Cineform didn’t want to work with the high bitrate
(35 mbs) Still working on a solution.
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