Being a lossless codec, Lagarith will preserve exactly what you feed to it,
including the range below 16 and above 235.

The fact that, by default, Vegas requests 16-235 be expanded to 0-255, is not a fault with the codec.
You can of course do the conversion from YUV to RGB yourself, and give Vegas exactly the range you want.

Cheers,
David.

Unfortunately subjective comments such as “the look or by eye” of something will always lead to heated debate. Cineform is a great product and one of the things I like about it is the quantitive analysis David does on his blog….give me hard data every time.

That said when you present to a client or audience they don’t give a toss about the data, it all comes down to the look of the image :^)

I had to laugh especially as there is an article on criticism of films on the Freshdv site, might apply to articles as well ;^)

http://www.freshdv.com/2007/10/how-to-handle-criticism-of-your-film.html

Nope Didnt gloss it over ….It was said…and thanks for saying it again

CF is more than a codec…Does more things for you than you can see

Eugenia’s hard work is invaluable. I haven’t found as thorough and clear a tutorial than she offers on her site. And she’s entitled to say which LOOK she likes better. :-)

To be honest, most HV20 consumers will never see the difference between the two. Heck, some of them export in .m2t after pulldown and as an archival format after editing, and re-encoding a second pass in .m2t is a magnitude of times worse between the quality differences of Lagarith and Cineform.

Look, the whole article is positive for Cineform. Except the quality sentence, where I clearly state that this is my opinion, and that someone else might interpret the results differently (as they did). But instead of actually view the article as a whole, you nitpick in one sentence and you make a mountain out of a molehill. And on top of that, you call the WHOLE article “slanted”.

If Cineform doesn’t find that sentence fair, they had this comment section to get the record straight (and they did so, in a RESPECTABLE way, in contrast to the way *you* entered the discussion). I am always trying to be very fair and objective to the reviews I write (otherwise it’s clearly stated to not be so in cases where things are simply not very clear cut), and this article was not any different.

I am done replying to you.

I fail to see where the “slanting” is. I personally, much prefer the Lagarith look. At first look, the Lagarith image looks cleaner — and I know a few people who would prefer it this way. Also, this is why in the sentence you are quoting, there in an “opinion” word.

If you don’t know what “slanting” is, then don’t use that word, because it’s a heavy word. A review is meant to be as objective as possible (and it is), and when an opinion is given, it should be clearly stated as such (and it was).

If you like 8×8 blocks from HDV.
This is a slanted Article…

-Matt Jeppsen

Using the same image example that you site, here is more data from your images demonstrating my point in this picture : http://www.miscdata.com/downloads/freshdv-rebuttal.png

If you wanted the CineForm to look like the Lagarith image, a blur filter when be close, yet it achieve that look without without the MPEG ringing. I did try this, and a Gaussian blur of about 3 pixels gets you close (using GIMP.) Basically the CineForm result is more high def, and isn’t hugh definition the whole point of these cameras. :)

David.

Regarding dynamic range I don’t disagree with you. Although capturing in Canon’s HV20 CINEMODE, already provides enough of it.

CineForm worked directly with the Sony Vegas team to provide the studio RGB support, Vegas actually requests the low contrast, full latitude image from our decoder. Other codecs typically incorrectly assume Vegas wants computer graphics RGB, and introduce clipping. So for a true comparison of the two workflows, you need to place a Computer Graphics RGB to Studio RGB conversion filter on the free workflows output, however doing so will not restore that detailed information. Or, if you want the contrasty look, place the Studio RGB to Computer Graphics RGB on the CineForm clip.

Once you normalize the two clips for contrast. You will see that even the low bit-rate CineForm file contains more detail and texture. Now technically the lossless Lagarith codec should not be reducing image detail, yet the entire workflow must include the decompression for the source MPEG2 data within the M2T files. It seems that the free MPEG2 decoder used is doing a poor job, as the Lagarith image is showing clear MPEG macro blocking artifacts (8×8 squares) and well as muddying the image texture.

Quality is high on CineForm’s design goals, so all elements in the conversion chain need to be working at there best. For the best image quality CineForm also allows you to bypass the MPEG compression stages of the Canon HV20 using a Black Magic Intensity card capturing to CineForm live of the HMDI port. That way there are no MPEG artifacts limiting the image quality.

David Newman
CTO, CineForm