Converting Cineon to AVI?

[Andrew Shanks]

Hi Jack,
the world of 2K Cineon scans is certainly not the easiest thing to get a handle on, but I have been doing effects the past year and a half within after effects using cineon with no problems. Your workflow sounds correct (if a little painful), …I hope its not a big project! I think theres a new bluefish 4:4:4 card coming out later in the year which might allow you to use cineons directly from within Premiere, but yeah, at the moment you’ll have to down-convert to a more convenient offline format. The biggest thing with cineons is that they are in log colourspace, ..i.e. 10bit log, rather than 8bit linear that monitors and televisions can handle (when you do your conversions for offline, throw the cineon converter into the mix, setting it to log-linear mode and tweak settings to suit, just so you have a less milky more acurate image to cut using, …note this is fine for offlien, but you can’t be so casual when it comes to the grade). If you are going to colour correct your cineons yourself in AE, do as much research as you can to understand whats happening with the colourspace (search this forum for a thread I was asking about last year for example, ..in my case I ended up staying in cineons for some comps, and using some specific settings with the cineon converter, in a 16bit project, when I had to do anything that altered source pixel colour values), its painful, but important to get your head around it, as its so easy to degrade the image if you don’t treat the cineons with respect), i suggest you check out eLin on the Red Giant software site.
https://www.redgiantsoftware.com/elin1.html
Even if you don’t use it for your project, download the free (for no commercial purposes) version just in order to read the documentation, as it explains this subject very well. It will be very slow to work this way though, as an effects artist i find it not too bad (due to the chunks i work on being only a few seconds long) but if you have quite a lot of images to grade, I’d suggest the typical route which is no scanning to cineons, just get a telecine, edit an offline (we use avids but any NLE should do if it can handle outputing neg cutlists or at least clean 24fps edls), get a neg cutter to piece the film together from that, and get either an optical (cheaper option but not as much control) or a digital grade (pricey, as they do scan to cineons first, but you get to grade in realtime on a 10bit HD monitor, and have all the tweakability you’d have using colour finess within After effects, but with none of the slow response) done after that.
Just my 2 cents.

goodluck!

andrew

🙂

[Jack Kelly]

Hi Andrew,

Thank you very much for your very detailed reply – that’s brilliant.

One quick question – can I use AE to convert my Cineon files to an HD AVI format?

The end result of the project I’m working on will be a “dual mode” DVD – there’ll be a standard def version of the 5 minute film in the DVD-Video partition of the DVD and an HD version of the film in the DVD-Data partition for playback on user’s computers. But it’s also an exploratory project for me – I’m very keen to learn how to grade data scans.

Many thanks,
Jack