Terrific New Article About AVCHD High Definition AND "Pro" H.264

[Specialist]

Here's a terrific new article about AVCHD... the new consumer high definition camcorder video format.

In addition, the article explains Panasonic's move toward a "pro" H.264/MPEG-4 format:

http://tinyurl.com/zxu7z

"At NAB2006, Panasonic announced the AJ-HPC2000, a multiformat 2/3-inch P2 HD camcorder with high-definition DVCPRO HD capability that is also backwards compatible with existing SD DVCPRO50, DVCPRO and DV-based products and systems."

"Panasonic also said it will offer an optional plug-in professional H.264 compliant, "AVC-Intra" codec for the camcorder."

"This new AVC intraframe codec offers significantly better compression quality than older MPEG-2 codecs, providing DVCPRO HD 100 Mbps quality at half the bandwidth, or better quality at the same data rate."

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Specialist]

More on Panasonic's "AVC-Intra" pro H.264/MPEG-4 format:

http://tinyurl.com/qjtfg

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Specialist]

I think the really *key* sentences in the article...

http://tinyurl.com/zxu7z

...are these:

"While not singling out HDV in the release, the companies are saying that AVCHD is at least twice as efficient as HDV."

"At twice the efficiency, a simple math exercise would show that with its 18 Mbps encoding, AVCHD is 28 percent more efficient on the storage side, and that would still allow AVCHD to produce about a 70 percent increase in picture quality over HDV."

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

[BJ_M]

not that HDV is raving great - but no mater what -- for serious editing work, these formats are just too compressed ...

[Specialist]

not that HDV is raving great - but no mater what -- for serious editing work, these formats are just too compressed ...

The recently adopted FRExt extension to the H.264/MPEG-4 specification allows for "lossless" encoding and 4:4:4 color space.

Moreover, Panasonic's "AVC-Intra" is a professional, *intraframe* format "without the compromises of long GOP compression."

In other words, it's nothing like AVCHD or HDV.

More info here:

http://tinyurl.com/jtcxd

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

[BJ_M]

yes -- good point , panasonic's "AVC-Intra" looks very good ..

i wonder how long HDV will be around ?

[edDV]

Panasonic is on the right track. There is a need for an intermediate production format to handle editing and decompression for serious work. Similar to the relationship of D1 or DV to MPeg2.

Storage size isn't as important on the production side as maintaining some sort of editable archive master.