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HPX3000
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[engineben] “Apple has released an update to Final Cut Pro (version 6.0.1) that transcodes AVCHD video for use in FCP. The company
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AVC-HD is not AVC-Intra. One’s a slightly-improved HDV, offering more compression efficiency, long-GOP 4:2:0 and uncompressed audio. The other’s a near D5HD caliber codec with intraframe-only 10-bit 4:2:2 encoding and full raster 1920×1080.
Both are based on AVC, hence the confusion. The AVC-Intra codec card (by itself) costs more than any AVC-HD complete camcorder on the market.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
[Barry Green] “AVC-HD is not AVC-Intra. One’s a slightly-improved HDV, offering more compression efficiency, long-GOP 4:2:0 and uncompressed audio. The other’s a near D5HD caliber codec with intraframe-only 10-bit 4:2:2 encoding and full raster 1920×1080.
Both are based on AVC, hence the confusion. The AVC-Intra codec card (by itself) costs more than any AVC-HD complete camcorder on the market.”
Good to know – thank you, Barry. That begs the question – Is it an EDITING codec? Preferable to ProRes because of apparently smaller file sizes?
ProRes is a variable rate codec – I can’t see that as an improvement over D5 – unless it’s better to edit with for some reason. D5 to telecine seems to be the promise of this camera.
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Barry,
Please bribe Panny to change the name back to AVC-PRO or AVC-ULTRA, whatever they were thinking in the early days. I think this question is going to come up more than not – and soon enough people are going to think you’re bidding jobs with a consumer camera, rather than a $100k rig.
I plan on sticking the cards in on my 2000/HPM – As I understand it, you need a pretty beefy system to work with these files – lovely but ‘involved’ compression(?).
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[Barry Green] “AVC-HD is not AVC-Intra. One’s a slightly-improved HDV, offering more compression efficiency, long-GOP 4:2:0 and uncompressed audio. The other’s a near D5HD caliber codec with intraframe-only 10-bit 4:2:2 encoding and full raster 1920×1080.
Both are based on AVC, hence the confusion. The AVC-Intra codec card (by itself) costs more than any AVC-HD complete camcorder on the market.”
Barry,
Where can someone find info on the AVCHD format… codec, compression, data rates, etc?
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.comApple Certified Trainer: Final Cut Pro 5
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[Raymond Motion Pictures] “That begs the question – Is it an EDITING codec? Preferable to ProRes because of apparently smaller file sizes?”
It’ll be much smaller file sizes, and it’s intraframe only, and it’s 10-bit, and it holds up extraordinarily well to multiple generations of recompression.
But is it an editing codec? I guess it depends on hardware acceleration. It’s AVC-based, which does make it processor-intensive, but it doesn’t do the long-GOP structure that makes HDV and AVC-HD so painfully slow to work with.
Apple and Canopus both said that they’d have native AVC-Intra editing offered, so we’ll see. I think that if there’s fast-enough response, it’ll definitely make a great editing codec. But if it’s not fast enough to do multiple streams in realtime, you might still want to consider transcoding to an editing codec. It remains to be seen. But it’s possible that the AVC hardware acceleration on nVidia and ATI graphics cards might render this moot; if AVC-Intra can be coded to use hardware acceleration then it could be an awesome editing codec. (“could” being the operative word, because hey, there’s theory and there’s real-world, and the only thing that counts is real-world experience!)
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
[tarkken] “Please bribe Panny to change the name back to AVC-PRO or AVC-ULTRA, whatever they were thinking in the early days. I think this question is going to come up more than not – and soon enough people are going to think you’re bidding jobs with a consumer camera, rather than a $100k rig.”
I so agree. I think the name “AVCPRO” would have been perfect; it’s one letter different from their established DVCPRO, it gets across the AVC name, and it differentiates it very well from the lower-end AVC-HD. There’s definitely going to be confusion. Maybe we should start a grass-roots campaign to call it AVCPRO anyway, to see if it’ll “stick”? 😉
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
[Mitch Ives] “Where can someone find info on the AVCHD format… codec, compression, data rates, etc?”
AVC-HD is a different format, it’s being positioned as an alternative to, and replacement for, HDV. AVC-Intra is an alternative to HDCAM-SR and HD-D5, but AVC-HD is an alternative to HDV (and even XDCAM-HD).
I don’t know of any authoritative reference sources, other than the official site, avchd-info.org.
The differences of AVC-HD to HDV are fairly easy to illustrate. Both are long-GOP 4:2:0 systems that record 8-bit color depth. After that, it’s all in AVC-HD’s favor:
HDV is tape-based (and exclusive by manufacturer); AVC-HD is tapeless (approved media include hard disk, mini-DVD, SD card and Memory Stick, so far).
HDV uses compressed audio, 2 channels of MPEG-1 Layer II at 384 k-bit. AVC-HD has two audio schemes, one is AC-3 with 5.1 channel surround sound, the other is uncompressed PCM audio with 7.1 channels of surround sound.
HDV uses 1440×1080 to record 1080i; AVC-HD offers that and it also offers full-raster 1920×1080.
HDV has no real support for 24p; 24p has been kind of wedged-in using frame-repeat pulldown in a 60p data stream (in 720p) or Canon’s 24F mode. AVC-HD has true native 24P support for 1920×1080 @ 24p, 1440×1080 @ 24p, and 1280×720 @ 24p.
HDV is fixed bit-rate, AVC-HD is scalable. You can select your quality level, which means you can vary how much recording time you get on your media. AVC-HD goes from about 6 megabits on up to 24 megabits.
And finally, AVC (aka H.264) is a much superior codec to MPEG-2. Sony and Panasonic issued a joint press release where they said that AVC was about 2.5 times as efficient as MPEG-2 (meaning that to match AVC-HD’s quality, you’d need to use 2.5 times as much bandwidth with MPEG-2). To match 10 megabits of AVC-HD, you’d need 25 megabits of HDV. My speculation is that AVC-HD at its maximum (24 megabits) should match or exceed XDCAM-HD quality (all other things being equal, of course).
The two big problems with AVC-HD right now are: editing, and camera head selection. AVC (h.264) is notoriously processor-hungry, and it’s slow to edit (right now). The solution is the onboard H.264 decoding chips on nVidia and ATI graphics cards; when editing apps tie into those GPUs we’ll have realtime editing, but until then it can be very slow. And there are few editors that work with the format now; FCP 6 is one of them, but it does a transcode away from AVC and over to its ProRes codec. EDIUS can do the same thing, transcoding AVC files to CanopusHQ codec. Pinnacle Studio 11 does native AVC editing, and I believe it uses graphics card acceleration; I saw it running on a laptop and delivering something like 20 fps so… the future is bright, but the “now” is not as bright.
Of course, HDV has its share of editing hassles too, it’s a lousy editing codec, but it’s certainly easier to edit than AVC is today!
Second thing is camera heads: there are no “worthy” camera heads out there yet. Whereas HDV has things like the XLH1 and HD250, the best AVC-HD has (right now) is little tiny palmcorders. Imagine if Canon made an AVC-HD XLH1 (and put a lens with decent manual controls on it!) That would be a killer camera. The day someone produces a worthy camera head (like a high-def DVX or something comparable) I think people’s interest in AVC-HD will skyrocket. It’s unquestionably the format of the future and will totally replace HDV; that’s what the manufacturers intended when they designed it. And other manufacturers have joined; right now every camcorder manufacturer (except JVC) is a member of the AVC-HD group.
But we need a worthy camera head, and we need adequate bandwidth. The maximum bandwidth they’ve implemented on any AVC-HD camcorder is about 16 megabits, IIRC; the format is spec’d to go up to 24. I think AVC-HD at 24 megabits would be XDCAM-HD caliber or better.
So it’s not a perfect format, it’s still long-GOP and 4:2:0, but hey, people have been living with that for years on HDV and many seem satisfied. If someone’s happy with HDV, they should be thrilled with AVC-HD.
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Get the most from your DVX camera. The DVX Book and DVX DVD are now available on ebay and at Amazon (https://www.fiftv.com/db) -
Nice post Barry. I would definitely support AVCPRO as a name. I didn’t see you at SMPTE. Were you there?
Peter
Peter Corbett
Powerhouse Productions
http://www.php.com.au
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