Vegas 10 not reading Neoscene Cineform files

[Bill Mash]

I think the underlying issue is simple… Sony quit licensing Neoscene and didn’t put resources on it as they otherwise would particularly final testing. They needed Cineform back in the 8.0 days for AVCHD workflow and they think they don’t anymore.

~Just because you can doesn’t mean you should~

[Dave Haynie]

I didn’t know Cineform of any kind was bundled with Vegas since… I had the original Cineform Connect bundled with Vegas 4. That was kind of needed for HDV editing back in those days, but eventually, PCs and Vegas got faster. Didn’t realize it was in later versions of Vegas, but I had the stand-alone version of NeoScene by then anyway, for better support of 24p-in-60i video that’s still not properly dealt with by Vegas for some odd reason.

Anyway.. my point it, it works just dandy without special application knowledge, just like any other VfW CODEC. Sure, you need a 64-bit version for 64-bit use, and it’s quite possible Sony’s licensed versions only worked in Vegas. But in general, when I install Cineform as a VfW/Directshow CODEC, I expect it work everywhere. It worked just dandy in Vegas 9, for example.

So I’m curious… Vegas 10 supporting their private API — something must be gained form that. Any ideas? And not allowing it shut off, that’s creating all kinds of needless trouble. For example, if I fire up Vegas 9, I can render via VfW to Cineform, call up the configuration menu for Cineform, and most important, not crash when I try to render 1080/20p. In Vegas 10, I’m crashing. So I’ve lost something important, and yeah, hopefully very temporarily. But I do wonder, given that the “Sony Does Nothing” Senario suits my needs and the “Sony messes with it” currently does not, just what we all get for this trouble, once it does work. As an engineer, I have a certain aversion to seeing perfectly good wheels re-invented, poorly.

Not intending to beat you up over this or anything, just figured, since you knew about the use of the private APIs, you might know more details.

-Dave

[Bill Mash]

Hi Dave, when version 8 came out I wanted a good intermediary format for storing intellectual property, aka clips. In version 6 I had used mpeg2 for various reasons and was determined to use a more lossless format. I also used the Cinefom codec to render chapters clips to be fully rendered to mpeg2 or wmv due to HW constraints of my system. I saw this dandy little Cineform Codec researched it some, loved it and was happy as a clam saving ~5X the disc space over windows AVI back in the V6 days. It also seemed like this was the DI strategy for Sony.

https://estore.cineform.com/technology/CineForm_Intermediate.htm

Since version 4.x I only upgrade on even releases. Low and behold I upgrade to 10.0 and boom, no integrated support for any of the content I had been creating with the license from version 8.x. Hell until then I hadn’t even loaded Cineform. Imagine my surprise to see nothing but Sony YUV in the HD templates in V10. Oh well time to quit ranting:-)

Cheers,

~Just because you can doesn’t mean you should~

[Daragh Owens]

Please tell me if I upgrade to last version of NeoScene will the avi’s already converted using older version work in Vegas 10. If not I am screwed as I did not keep the originals and have hundreds of NeoScene converted AVI’s.

Daragh

[Dave Haynie]

Older Cineform files work just fine in Vegas 10, once you update the Cineform CODEC. The file format hasn’t changed, and if anything (as is typical with these sort of things), newer versions may produce better results. But the datastream format is fixed (well, hopefully).

Vegas 10 added an interface to directly communicate with the Cineform private APIs, rather than use VfW/DirectShow as they had in the past. Presumably Vegas gains something from this. But unfortunately, they didn’t make this a clean upgrade — no falling back to the old APIs if the new ones aren’t there. Bad policy.

The other big peeve I had with Vegas 10 was that, even after I spent that extra $100 to upgrade Cineform, Vegas crashed on any HD Cineform render, every time, same place, regardless of the file format. Unacceptable. They fixed that one, at least, in 10d. It was Vegas’s problem; 9e or whatever I have here as Vegas 9 worked with both old and new versions of Cineform, read and write.

In general, software upgrades should follow the Hippocratic Corpus and “Primum non nocere”… first, do no harm. Vegas 10 failed on this with Cineform on several levels. But, as long as you can afford the upgrade, it seems to be fixed.

-Dave