Cineform NeoScene, Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, 5D mark II, and Timecode.cpp

Suppose you’ve recorded some video with your Canon 5D mark II. It is in a format that is annoying to edit using Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. Suppose further that you have purchased Cineform Neoscene to transcode that video into a nice-to-edit format.

Further suppose that this workflow was working fine on your old Vista 64-bit machine.

Now, you’ve installed CS4, Cineform, and transcoded some video. Then you import it into Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and prepare to edit!

And PPro crashes. With an error referring to Timecode.cpp. Around line 930.

You are sad. You scour the entire internet in tens of milliseconds and find several posts talking about crashes in that location, but they have nothing to do with importing files created by NeoScene.

You try to play the files in Windows Media Player and they do not crash but they also are not playing at the right speed. Ah ha! That does rather smell timecode related.

Cutting this story short, install Quicktime 7. This workflow requires Quicktime to be installed or crazy broken things will happen. The requirements page for NeoScene does not talk about needing Quicktime on Windows.

With Quicktime installed, you re-run NeoScene and birds burst into song. Or rather, the output files are right and can play back in Quicktime and WMP. They can also be imported into PPro without mysterious crashing.

The day is saved.