As all CineForm customers using Adobe CS4 are aware, our full support for CS4 is well behind our expectations.  This has been frustrating to our customers, and to us as well.  In this post we want to give you a final update about our intended support.

BACKGROUND: Adobe was very late releasing its 3rd-party SDK to integrators for CS4, so it put CineForm and our peers behind schedule from the beginning.  In fact the CS4 SDK today still contains bugs that make CineForm’s integration into CS4 difficult.  Given the relatively short period of time remaining before the release of CS5, we have consulted with Adobe on the best strategy – do we continue full-speed ahead working on CS4 or should we move to CS5?  Adobe informed us they will not fix any bugs in the CS4 SDK, and unfortunately one of the bugs we face is critical to the CineForm workflow. So our next step was to test whether that bug was fixed in CS5; we have confirmed that the bug is fixed in CS5.

PLAN: Given that information, and given that Adobe has already released the SDK for CS5, we have decided that our customers will benefit more in the long run by CineForm being out in front of the CS5 development effort rather than continuing to push on CS4 – which would in turn make us late to the party for CS5.  Therefore, our plan is to:

1.  Immediately begin work on CS5 – in fact, we have already begun. 
2.  We will add one more key feature to our existing support for CS4 which is to add project management support – the ability to properly trim projects.
3.  Our intention is to ship Version 5 CineForm products for CS5 at the time Adobe ships CS5. CineForm v5 products, including new features we will offer in HD Link and First Light, will continue to support CS3 and CS4 for those customers who do not upgrade to CS5.

WHAT ABOUT EXISTING CUSTOMERS? All CineForm Prospect HD/4K v4 customers will receive a no-charge CineForm upgrade to the full version of our Version 5 product for compatibility with CS5.  Anybody that purchases Prospect HD/4K v4 from now on will also get this free upgrade.  To make you are aware, there will be additional features that will be part of our v5 release although we’re still working on details so we don’t want to pre-announce anything yet.

We apologize one more time for the difficulty we’ve encountered in our CS4 integration, but the silver lining is that CS5 looks to be a step-up for all.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 5:53 pm and is filed under FAQ: Products : prospect4k, FAQ: Products : prospecthd, News : Products : prospect4k, News : Products : prospecthd. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.