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Edit Review: CineForm Aspect HD

Feb 2, 2007 12:00 PM, Reviewer: Franklin McMahon

Adobe Premiere Pro software plug-in increases realtime performance.

CineForm has created a software plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro that increases the power of Premiere Pro. Aspect HD allows you to edit multiple (two to six) realtime streams of HD. Sound too good to be true? I have to admit I was a bit skeptical myself. How can a software plug-in offer capability that traditionally requires an advancement in hardware and processing power? To find out, I loaded Aspect HD and extensively tested it on several HD projects. The results may surprise you.

The installation was initially painless. The software generates a key that you have to send to CineForm; the company then sends back another key that allows you to activate and use the software. However, when I first sent in my key and got one back, it did not work. I tried this repeatedly, to no avail. After much troubleshooting, I took a screenshot of the software key and serial number, and sent it to CineForm. CineForm replied that the key was incorrect. When I was finally able to activate the software, I already had a chip on my shoulder: This software better blow me away after all this trouble.

Fortunately, Aspect HD produced some pretty amazing results. The software is comprised of a plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro and a separate HD capture program. The HD capture program is very bare bones, and thankfully you can fully use Aspect HD's features and power right from within Premiere's capture.

Abobe specs Premiere as allowing one 1080-line HD stream on a fairly modern but basic Pentium (3.4GHz). The minimum is always a base, of course, and speedier hardware may get you an additional stream. Aspect HD basically uses its own project presets, capture codec, and effect/transition settings within Premiere to quadruple your performance. If you can do one HD stream without Aspect HD, with the plug-in you can do three or four simultaneous HD streams. If you double up with dual-core or dual processors, the plug-in will let you do up to six realtime HD streams.

When you first dive in, you'll realize that you have to start with capture. I mistakenly tried to edit existing footage I had already captured, and there was no performance boost. You can either capture using the CineForm codec and/or presets, or you can use the included HDLink software to convert your file to a CineForm-optimized movie. Basically, this conversion places the file in a CineForm AVI wrapper. This is handy because it allows the final file to be brought into any AVI-compatible Windows program, such as Adobe After Effects.

During the week of my CineForm Aspect HD review, my test footage came primarily from my video podcasts, shot with JVC's GY-HD100U and Sony's HDR-HC1. I like the JVC for its various cinema modes such as 24p, and the Sony is great because it captures beautiful HDV in a very compact form factor. The edit system I used was a dual-core 3.2GHz P4 workstation with 3GB of RAM.

I started with footage shot with the Sony that had already been captured at 1080i60, and I used the HDLink program to convert it to AVI. The footage had been captured within Premiere in the native MPEG format, and the first clip I chose ran about six minutes. Bringing it into HDLink and converting to the CineForm AVI format took roughly five minutes. Premiere loaded the newly formatted clip fine, and the conforming process took approximately the same amount of time as bringing in an MPEG clip natively captured in Premiere (usually about 15 seconds).

It's important to note that converting existing files is not that much quicker than actually recapturing the footage again using the CineForm presets. If you have a log of batch-captured in and out points, it may be worth it just to recapture. There does not seem to be any quality trade-off. All captured clips and all converted clips looked visually identical. CineForm captures to and converts to an intermediate format called Visually Perfect, which the company claims eliminates MPEG image degradation that often can result from repeated compression stages. The claims seem true to my eyes — I could not see a difference between the intermediate format and the original.

One difference worth mentioning is file size. The file size of the six-minute clip in standard Premiere MPEG format was a spry 1.07GB; the resulting AVI after converting was a heftier 3.44GB. Although the CineForm format does take up more room captured and converted, you do get the benefits of the increased options for editing multiple HD streams as well as the option to move the file into just about any program that supports AVI. Premiere's MPEG format is a little less flexible in this regard.

I captured video podcast footage using the CineForm presets within Premiere with the JVC and Sony units, and both worked flawlessly. At 24p and also at 60i in Premiere, I would always get at least four streams of HD as long as I used the footage captured using the CineForm codec. When I first started with basic effects on a track or two, I found that the built-in Premiere realtime effects and the Aspect HD realtime effects performed about the same. However, when I started intermixing two, three, and then four video tracks, the Premiere effects stuttered and paused. Meanwhile, the Aspect HD effects churned like butter, not dropping any frames.

Aspect HD does not use any GPU horsepower from your video card, so in this regard, whether you have an advanced Nvidia card shouldn't make too much difference. The bang for the buck comes into play on the processor side. Higher clock speeds and multicore processors provide Aspect HD with more streaming power. Of course RAM always helps as well, but the processor is the key with this software.

More than 40 CineForm effects are available. All include parameter control. You can use key frames to do dissolves and color correction, and to control motion, opacity, panning, scanning, zooming, and rotating. For one client project, I used Aspect HD to create multiple dissolves on three streams of HD footage. I kept waiting for frames to drop, but it never happened. I decided to push my luck and apply color correction to all three streams, and again, it worked perfectly.

It's quite amazing to have much of the same ability to layer effects and transitions as you would with a dedicated piece of video hardware. Initially, I thought the price for this plug-in was a bit high, but now that I've seen the results, it's a bargain compared to what you typically would spend on a hardware solution to get the same results. Plus, it scales with you. When you upgrade to a beefier machine with faster dual processors, chances are you'll be able to get an additional stream or two of effects out of the software.

I do wish Aspect HD had a custom option to create a preset that is not listed. The software has all the usual HD presets, every standard resolution at 24p, 30p, 50i, 60i, 60p, and 50p. However, targeting online playback and download as I do with my podcast production, I often need to use presets that are compatible with various flavors of web video and personal media player displays. A prime example is that even though a video iPod can play back a widescreen video file, not all users have the widescreen feature toggled on.

For this reason, I will create a Premiere preset of 640×480 and matte (shrink down) 1080-line footage onto it for some shows. The result is a widescreen image on a 640×480 video frame size (with black bars at the top and bottom) that will play back correctly on a 4:3 iPod regardless of the widescreen setting. Future sizes will appear when HD becomes an option for downloadable content (and then migrates to the living room via set-top units such as AppleTV), so it would be nice to be able to whip up dedicated sizes in Aspect HD.

Nevertheless, the software does exactly what it says it does. It dramatically bumps up the number of realtime HD streams you can work with in Premiere and supplies a wide variety of effects and transitions. As long as you use the CineForm presets and capture methods, the program will have you spending way less time rendering and much more time actually creating in realtime.

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bottomline

Company: CineForm
Solana Beach, Calif.; (858) 345-2645
www.cineform.com

Product: Aspect HD

Assets: Allows editing of multiple realtime HD streams in Adobe Premiere Pro, supplies a wide variety of effects and transitions.

Caveats: Trouble with initial software activation, no ability to create custom presets.

Demographic: HDV videographers interested in working with multiple realtime streams.

PRICE: $499

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.