Re: Panasonic and Sony jointly developed new HD video recording format announced. by kwshaw1 on May 11, 2006 at 4:06:05 pm
That's potentially big news, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out in practical terms. Anyone care to try to explain why the compression is listed as H.264, but the "system" is listed as MPEG-TS? How will that work?
Re: Panasonic and Sony jointly developed new HD video recording format announced. by Ken Hodson on May 11, 2006 at 7:21:53 pm
Good question. It clearly states the compression is H.264, and says the discs will play in the new BD players as it uses the same compression. So I don't know why they say "system - mpeg2-ts" makes no sense to me either.
Regardless this marks the begining of the end for HDV. Supper cheap DVD disks, with an awsome compression codec. Fantastic. An amazing low cost compromise between P2 and miniDV. Awsome.
Re: Panasonic and Sony jointly developed new HD video recording format announced. by Tim Kolb on May 11, 2006 at 8:37:40 pm
[Ken Hodson]"Regardless this marks the begining of the end for HDV. Supper cheap DVD disks, with an awsome compression codec. Fantastic. An amazing low cost compromise between P2 and miniDV. Awsome."
I'm not sure I understand this statement. It's 4:2:0 chroma sampling and the bitrate is actually lower than HDV. MPEG4 is great, but this compression codec is certainly not all that "awesome."
HDCAM SR is MPEG4 as well, but at huge bitrates...
Re: Panasonic and Sony jointly developed new HD video recording format announced. by Ken Hodson on May 11, 2006 at 9:00:08 pm
Bit-rate has no barring on image quality. It is simply the bitrate of that codec. The MPEG-4/H.264 codec is over two times more efficient than MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 codec technologies. As stated in the press release. And 2X is being conservative. Yes it's 4:2:0, same as HDV, whats your point? This is a step up from HDV not direct competition to HDCAM.
Re: Panasonic and Sony jointly developed new HD video recording format announced. by Tim Kolb on May 11, 2006 at 10:01:52 pm
[Ken Hodson]"Bit-rate has no barring on image quality. It is simply the bitrate of that codec. The MPEG-4/H.264 codec is over two times more efficient than MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 codec technologies. As stated in the press release. And 2X is being conservative. Yes it's 4:2:0, same as HDV, whats your point? This is a step up from HDV not direct competition to HDCAM."
Well...bitrate does have some bearing on quality or why would XDCAM have a 35 Mbit/sec mode? Why not stay with 25 Mbits like standard HDV?
H264 is a nice codec, but 18 Mbits/sec is a pretty low bitrate, even for MPEG4. It will be interesting to see what it looks like, but with 4:2:0 chroma subsampling I wouldn't think it would be any better for compositing than HDV...and I guess that seems to be the next desired jump for most...4:2:2.
We'll see I guess, but I would be surprised if this ended up being much of an image quality jump from HDV...though it will be a smaller filesize. Just releasing the format in camcorder configurations that are a bit more capable with larger sensors and traditional lenses would make a huge difference in the picture quality.
Re: Panasonic and Sony jointly developed new HD video recording format announced. by Ken Hodson on May 12, 2006 at 4:51:01 am
18 Mbits/sec is just slightly less then what the JVC cams use right now, and were talking a codec that will hold more than two times the data in that space than HDV does now. I don't see your logic as to why your down on the bitrate.
Why not make the bitrate higher? Well it isn't ment to be a "Pro" format, and it needs to fit a decent amount of storage on those increadably cheap DVD's it will record on. 30 cents for 1/2 a hour of video is awsome. Use DVD-RW's for a poor mans P2 replacement. Maybe it will use 9.5gig DVD's for a full hour.
Re: Panasonic and Sony jointly developed new HD video recording format announced. by Tim Kolb on May 13, 2006 at 7:24:15 am
[Ken Hodson]"18 Mbits/sec is just slightly less then what the JVC cams use right now, and were talking a codec that will hold more than two times the data in that space than HDV does now. I don't see your logic as to why your down on the bitrate."
The codec is more efficient, yes.
Your original remark inferred that it will be a large jump over HDV. I'm not down on the bitrate, I'm just not convinced at this point that it will be a large jump over HDV. The bitrate in itself is only one factor. 4:2:0 color is also a factor.
I'm not saying the format is awful...it's not even here yet. I'm just saying that I'd wait until I see what the images look like before I'd sign HDV's death certificate...
Re: Panasonic and Sony jointly developed new HD video recording format announced. by raukouy on May 14, 2006 at 8:02:01 am
Well, hold on that signature. While us "pros" may move on when this arrives, on the consumer level HDV is clearly going to replace DV like DV replaced C-VHS and 8mm video.
So I think HDV has a good 5-10 years more to live....at least.
Re: Panasonic and Sony jointly developed new HD video recording format announced. by Ken Hodson on May 17, 2006 at 6:15:20 am
For starters thumbs to you both.
I never referenced anything in relation to this new format as "Pro" work. Or reflected that somehow HDV would instantly dry up and die. Fact is, for every measurable extreem it is the HDV format all over again. It has now been released from the bounds of tape and contains double the data stored compared to HDV. How could this not be better? This kind of reminds me of the early days of HDV, where everyone was quite protectionist to the DV format. At this point we are just looking at numbers as obviously no cams have been made, and when they do, they might just be crap consummer based units and never show the potential. Who knows? But just going strictly from the numbers, if one can't realize that on paper there is ample room for two times or more compression from this new codec, and at comparable bit rate, what kind of quality boost this should provide?
Re: Panasonic and Sony jointly developed new HD video recording format announced. by Tim Kolb on May 17, 2006 at 2:44:05 pm
[Ken Hodson]"For starters thumbs to you both.
I never referenced anything in relation to this new format as "Pro" work. Or reflected that somehow HDV would instantly dry up and die. Fact is, for every measurable extreem it is the HDV format all over again. It has now been released from the bounds of tape and contains double the data stored compared to HDV."
He, he...sorry Ken. I guess I completely misinterpreted
"Regardless this marks the begining of the end for HDV."
in that original message...
Look, I don't think there's all that much to get fired up about either way... I've used H264 at some pretty decent bitrates in QT and it's fine...I just don't think it's amazing enough to be the "end" of anything. It will be something to look at once it's here, but until we get a reasonable 4:2:2 format in the price range of HDV, I suspect anything that's 4:2:0 is going to be roughly equivalent, visually. XDcam's highest datarate is a little bit of an improvement, but mostly from a luma detail perspective, and they got it by adding 40% to the datarate of HDV2 and making it VBR.
The manufacturer can claim whatever they want. Sony introduced HDCAM as a 1920x1080 4:2:2 format...we all know better. Panasonic usually presents one of the principle reasons why DVC Pro HD is better that HDV is that it's 4x the data rate at 100 Mb/s...but since the 100 Mb/s data rate is based on the actual 60p stream, anyone using 24p is actually only utilizing 40% of the actual frame data on the tape...thus the actual utilized data rate at 24p really nets out around 40 Mb/s.
Cheap is great for consumers...but most here use this stuff to make a living and I guess I'm just responding from that perspective. None of this was meant to be a personal challenge and I apologize if you took it that way.
Re: Panasonic and Sony jointly developed new HD video recording format announced. by kwshaw1 on May 11, 2006 at 11:50:25 pm
When people refer to the efficiency of H.264 they're generally talking about post-encoded content, which doesn't tell us how well *cameras* will perform when encoding to H.264 in real time. Hopefully these cameras will improve on HDV, but until we see actual results and find out how well we can edit the footage, it's not clear this really improves on HDV much. Current articles say the discs will only hold about 20 minutes of footage, so unless they switch to Blu-ray technology for the cameras that's a big limiting factor. Plus I can walk into just about any supermarket or drugstore and buy a couple hours worth of miniDV tapes for ~$10-15; it's going to take a while to match that level of convenience with AVCHD.
I'm all in favor of this new format if it can be demonstrated to work effectively, but I'm guessing it will take a while for all the pieces to fall into place. I'm more interested in Panasonic's professional version at a bit rate of ~50 Mbps, especially if the camera based on that uses standard flash memory cards instead of overpriced P2. By the time the new Panasonic camera ships it should be possible to buy two 16GB CompactFlash cards holding almost 90 minutes of 50 Mbps HD for ~$500-1000, which sounds like a fair deal.
Re: Panasonic and Sony jointly developed new HD video recording format announced. by fortythree on May 12, 2006 at 12:07:45 am
I would much rather see this compression scheme going onto miniDV tapes instead of DVD's. I've heard bad things about the DVD camcorders that are out now, sometimes they don't finish finalizing and you lose everything you just recorded. To me this seems like is should be targeted to consumers and not the prosumer and pro market. Also, how well would they handle any kind of sudden motion if you shooting something run and gun?
Re: Panasonic and Sony jointly developed new HD video recording format announced. by John Mitchell on May 24, 2006 at 2:17:45 pm
Although some discs fail to finalise in DVD camcorders the data is still there. In fact there are programs around (cost between $US50 - $US100) that will retrieve this info to your hard drive as .vob files.
H264 formats may not have to finalise - they won't be forced to finalise to a stock standard DVD video format. They may still have to finalise to an AVCHD video playback format though... to be honest I see more promise in hard disk recorders - they just have to get the reliability up.
Regardless i don't think H264 will spell the end of HDV .. MPEG4 does not carry "twice as much data" (which is in fact an irrelevent term 18Mb/s is 18Mb/s sec of data whether it is MPEG2 or MPEG4:) - it can only be twice as efficient. In fact it is quite good at low bit rates (eg web), but the differential to MPEG2 becomes far less noticeable as you throw more bits at your encoder. Yes it will be an improvement over MPEG2 - but twice as efficient @18Mb/s?
