Price on AVC Intra board?

[Jan Crittenden livingston]

Hi,

The AVC-Intra board will be about $3000 and will be available in August. FCP can support it today with the Pro-Res version. We were showing it in our booth at NAB.

Lastly, Sony and Panasonic jointly worked on the AVCHD codec, Sony is not a part of the AVC-Intra camp at this point in time. AVCHD and AVC-I are very different codecs, yet related. AVCHD is long GOP like HDV, just more efficient. AVC-I is intraframe dependent, each frame is independent and because there is intra-frame prediction(which is where the similarity is between the two codecs), the algorithm is able to produce DVCPRO HD quality with half of the bandwith, D5 HD quality with 100Mbs.

Hope that helps,

Jan

Jan Crittenden Livingston
Product Manager, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, AG-DVX100
Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems

[Timothyd]

Thanks Jan,

So is the FCP support you mention via HDMI input using a Blackmagic intensity or something to that effect? I should have been more specific, but I’m looking to find out when/if there will be support for AVC-I right from the P2 cards.

One other question… I’ve heard it rumored that Panasonic will make a P2 adapter for other flash media available at some point. Is there any truth to this? Not that there is anything wrong with P2, but I am looking to have options for non-proprietary media usage.

Thanks,

Tim

[Barry Green]

For clarification, there are two different AVC-based formats coming out.

1) AVC-HD, which was developed jointly by Panasonic and Sony, and is supported also by Canon, Sharp, Samsung, Sanyo, etc. It’s the new format that’s designed to replace HDV; it’s like a “super-HDV”. It has the same long-GOP type of structure as HDV, and the same 4:2:0 color sampling, but then it adds uncompressed audio in 7.1 channels or Dolby Digital AC-3 audio in 5.1 channels, full-raster 1920×1080 recording, support for 720 & 1080, true native 24p recording, and variable bitrates from as low as 6mbps up to as high as 24mbps. It’s a tapeless format; AVC-HD camcorders have been announced or introduced that record to SD memory cards, Memory Stick memory cards, mini-DVDs, and hard disks. Long-GOP AVC is about twice as efficient as MPEG-2, so at 12 megabits it should match HDV, at 24 megabits it should match XDCAM-HD as a recording format.

2) AVC-Intra. This is a Panasonic-only format, the next generation of DVCPRO-HD and D-5. It uses the same 4:2:2 color sampling and the same intraframe-only technology from D-5 and DVCPRO-HD, but uses the advanced compression technology of AVC to reduce the bandwidth requirements to about half of what those earlier formats require.

Totally opposite ends of the video spectrum. AVC-Intra is designed to match D-5 or HDCAM-SR; AVC-HD is designed to match or exceed HDV.

I’ve heard that at least one Panasonic rep wanted to call AVC-Intra “AVCPRO”. Man, that would have made it a lot less confusing, I think: DVCPRO->AVCPRO. But that’s not the way it turned out, so we just have to try to keep it straight: AVC-Intra is for the big cameras and is DVCPRO-HD or D-5 quality; AVC-HD is for the little cameras and is HDV- to- XDCAM-HD quality.

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[Timothyd]

Thanks so much for the feedback everyone.

I still am wondering what the time frame is on AVC-I support straight from the P2 cards in FCP though Jan?

Thanks so much,

Tim