CineForm announces NEO HD/2K products
updated 01:55 pm EDT, Thu April 12, 2007
CineForm NEO HD/2K for Mac
CineForm today announced a new product family called NEO that supports high-resolution HD and 2K media source acquisition and online editing for both Windows and Macintosh platforms. NEO uses the Visually Perfect CineForm Intermediate format to enable an online compressed Digital Intermediate workflow. The NEO family includes NEO HDV, NEO HD, and NEO 2K -- each of which address specific feature and pricing needs within the high-resolution post-production market. CineForm is also announcing that new versions of its existing products -- Aspect HD v5, Prospect HD v3, and Prospect 2K v3 -- will all gain new features, including expanded support for HD-SDI acquisition and expanded support for cross-platform QuickTime features. CineForm also announced new lower pricing for its Prospect HD and Prospect 2K family of products.
The NEO Family supports applications including Adobe's Premiere Pro and After Effects, Apple's Final Cut Pro and Motion, Autodesk's Combustion, and Sony's Vegas.
NEO HDV targets users of HDV or DVCPRO HD camcorders, and includes support for special modes in Sony, Canon, JVC, and Panasonic camcorders such as inverse telecine, format conversion, spatial resampling, and others. NEO HD offers full-raster 10-bit precision for those demanding higher visual fidelity in their broadcast or film productions.
NEO 2K includes the new CineForm 444 12-bit RGB format for professional film, compositing, and keying workflows. To enable cross-platform file compatibility, all products offer users the choice to write CineForm files with either an .AVI or QuickTime wrapper, and will also include the ability to re-wrap existing .AVI files into QuickTime files (and vice versa).
Windows application get QuickTime support
In addition to on-going support for AJA's Xena family of HD-SDI cards, CineForm's existing (Windows) products --including Aspect HD, Prospect HD, and Prospect 2K -- now add support for direct-to-disk acquisition using Blackmagic Design products along with cross-platform support for either CineForm .AVI or QuickTime files. With CineForm's recent focus on supporting Macs, the company says that all of its products are gaining new features to ensure cross-platform (Windows and Mac OS X) file and workflow compatibility.
NEO HDV, NEO HD and NEO 2K will be priced at $250, $600 and $800, respectively. NEO for Windows will be available for purchase in early May, while the release date of of NEO for Mac OS X will be announced later, the company said.
Prospect HD v3 will be priced at $1000, and will now include both the "Edit" and the "Ingest/Edit" capabilities that were previously provided in separate versions of Prospect HD. Prospect 2K-Edit, which now includes single-link HD-SDI ingest, will be priced at $2000. Both will be available for purchase in early May. As part of its new product rollout, CineForm is offering special pricing on most of its products through the month of April.
