Cineform NeoScene Version 5

Cineform NeoScene Version 5 is a software file-conversion program designed especially for the legions of professional and serious amateur videographers who've ever feared for how their HDV footage would hold up once effects were applied, or wondered whether an MTS or M2T file was ever going to play back in their NLE.

NeoScene transforms difficult-to-edit HDV, AVCHD, and Canon 5D/7D/T2i footage into the 10-bit CineForm intermediate codec, interpolating a 4:2:2 color space out of the recording format's 4:2:0 chroma. Depending on your OS, the software wraps these files as AVI or MOV, and it supports ProRes if you have Final Cut Pro installed. You can select from among three levels of encoder quality, to control how much hard drive space you want to commit to a specific project.

The software also can extract the cinematic 24p (for North America) or 25p (for Europe and Japan) frame rates from material that was shot as 60i/50i, an inverse telecine process that results in a look that's much closer to film than the initial interlaced format allows. This de-interlacing can also be applied to 60i video to produce 30p.