Cineform and Decklink

[Luke Maslen]

Hi John,

The short answer is “no”. We looked at adding specific Cineform support to DeckLink cards but decided against the idea and instead have provided a free full-resolution real-time Motion JPEG codec which you can use instead in both HD and SD.

The Cineform guys have added specific support for the Intensity card to this software but not for the other Blackmagic cards.

The Motion JPEG codec we have provided can be used by anyone regardless of whether or not they have Blackmagic hardware. That’s a real advantage if you need to share your movie clips with other people as they don’t have to buy anything extra to use them. The Motion JPEG quality is set to 95% so the quality is always excellent and yet the file sizes are small and you can capture full-resolution 1920×1080 video to a single hard disk.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Baz Leffler]

The Motion JPEG codec is really a great device. I also have cineform but don’t use it much as it has operation deficiencies that cause me to cuss a lot. I mainly use Motion JPEG when off line editing HDCAM originated material.

But with HDV originated material I have found that using the Motion JPEG codec really taxes Premiere Pro 2 as compared to native HDV and selecting the BMD device as the external monitor. With my MBE the advantage of editing with Motion JPEG is that you get the HD on the HDMI and a downconverted analog out for my SD component grade 1 monitor (good for colourgrading) but using native HDV as described above you can not have both. So the HDMI can only be SD and displays on the SD monitor as per normal OR set the MBE to 1920×1080 and get HD out the HDMI and the inability to see a pic on the SD monitor.

So our technique for editing HDV for mastering out to HDCAM is to ‘off line’ in Adobe native HDV with the HDMI set to HD and turn off the SD monitor. Then once complete we open a new 1920×1080 uncompressed BMD project and import the HDV project. It all plays realtime and then we have the use of both HD outputs AND SD outputs allowing us to do our accurate colourgrades. Then it is just a matter of exporting out to HDCAM. This means that the HDV has only ever been “mpeg’d” once which makes for a far better quality.

So as you can see from the above there really is no need for the cineform codec although their intermediate files will play in a BMD project, just not realtime.

Baz

[David Newman]

CineForm DOES support all the DeckLink cards for ingest in all our new product (from Neo HDV, Aspect HD, Prospect HD, etc.) I’m supprised anyone at BlackMagic would want to suppress this information (maybe you’re not keeping up with all the press releases.) The CineForm codec is signicantly higher quality then any motion JPEG implementation (well any DCT compression), that’s way we can are do charge for the encoding, but decoding is free, so content sharing is no issue. Here is my blog entry on the codec comparison with MJPEG : https://cineform.blogspot.com/2007/03/mjpeg-vs-cineform.html All the products are rev’d May 1.

– David Newman
– CTO, CineForm
– web: http://www.cineform.com
– blog: cineform.blogspot.com

[Luke Maslen]

Hi David,

[David Newman] “I’m supprised anyone at BlackMagic would want to suppress this information (maybe you’re not keeping up with all the press releases.)”

This comes as news to me as I’m not aware of any Cineform announcement regarding support for DeckLink cards and there’s no conspiracy of suppression – I just can’t find this informaton on your web site. I’ve just reviewed the press releases on the Cineform web site and can’t find mention of this anywhere. The only one I could find was in relation to Intensity. Can you please post the link to the relevant press release as this would be good info to have.

Every compressed codec has its pros and cons so it’s good that customers can choose to use Cineform if you’re now supporting DeckLink cards and presumably this also means you are now supporting Multibridge hardware too as they are essentially external DeckLink cards?

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[David Newman]

Here is the press release that adds DeckLink support across all our products : https://www.cineform.com/press/rel070412-NEO.htm As it was just before NAB a lot of information can be missed. The website is still mainly discussing Intensity but that will be updated when we return from NAB. We haven’t tested Multibridge but that will likely work also.

– David Newman
– CTO, CineForm
– web: http://www.cineform.com
– blog: cineform.blogspot.com

[John Mcglothlin]

So you can capture with Decklink but do you get video preview and realtime output from the cards with Cineform.

[David Newman]

We are selling capture and convertion utilities under the Neo HDV/HD/2K product name, these all support the Decklink line up. Currently these tools do not output to any HDSDI cards, but we will be adding that shortly. As for editing tools like Prospect HD/2K, they include the Neo functionality (so Decklink capture), but editing is still AJA only until we can get the Blackmagic driver to hold an output frame while we switch from scubbing to playback (which handled by different processes in Prospect HD — causing the issue), currently the Blackmagic drivers have no simple way to support this feature, so we can’t yet seamlessly edit with the decklink cards (you get a black flash as the playback starts.) All the code to support decklink editing it place for nearly two years, just need a small change to the decklink driver to make all CineForm products support Decklink — OR — a month of free time to workaround the issue (but we never found that time in the last two years.) So if Blackmagic engineering it is feeling up to a small add on, full CineForm support is just around the corner (I tried to find someone to nag about this again at your booth.)

– David Newman
– CTO, CineForm
– web: http://www.cineform.com
– blog: cineform.blogspot.com

[David Newman]

Sorry I got technical then, I thought I was still replying to Luke.

– David Newman
– CTO, CineForm
– web: http://www.cineform.com
– blog: cineform.blogspot.com

[Jaromir Pesr]

Hello David,
I don’t mind the black flash when switching between scrub and play. I’ll be happy when simple realtime preview of cineform files through Decklink hardware will be available. It’ll be extremely cool feature at all. With black flash or not. We often need to just sit and watch whole tapes of raw footage captured to cineform on HD projector to evaluate them closely. I vote for this feature with both hands right now.
Cheers
Jaromir Pesr
i/o post
Prague

[Luke Maslen]

Hi David,

Thanks for the link and I missed the new information as it was buried in the detail of the press release itself and not on the main press releases page.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design