Quantify the difference between DVCProHD and H.264

[Toke]

AVC-I-frame-only has about same efficiency than mpeg2-I-frame only and dv-codec.
So the datarate reduction is made by sacrifing piqture quality.
Unless Panny is making a whole new codec.
If its targeted to mainly eng then it might be good enough for them.

Somewhere around 2009 when Panny and Apple will both have support for this AVC-I also with European framerates (25/50fps) everybody else will be using wavelet codecs, which offer way much better quality…

[Steve Mahrer]

For those folks not able to attend the NAB and see the H.264 Intra demos at the Panasonic Tech suites, here’s a few facts:

The Panasonic implementation of H.264 is INTRA frame, ie. a GOP of 1. We use the Hi-10 profile,
so that’s HD at 10 bits, not 8. The quality of the 50Mbs H.264 Intra is subjectively the same as
that of DVCPRO HD at 100Mb/s. The 10 bit implementation of the CODEC provides very clean grey scale tonal values. The efficiency of 50Mb/s H.264 Intra provides markedly superior picture quality to that of long GOP MPEG-2 at bit rates of up to 50 Mb/s. Also there are no GOP quality “variablities”, no frame / GOP content interaction, and no issues or worries of concatenation with other long GOP CODECs, e.g. ATSC.

This implementation of H.264 provides stunning picture quality and is optimized for field capture / editing purposes, the INTRA frame structure makes software encoding / decoding many times simpler as compared to long GOP systems as each frame is intra-frame encoded.

Long GOP H.264 is ideal for use in applications like content steaming or packaged media as it’s more efficient, e/g Blu-Ray / HD-DVD, satellite etc. An example can be seen where we are showing Blu-Ray playing stunning quality HD using H.264 at a mere 16Mb/s. Viewed on a 65″ 1920 x 1080 plasma you are seeing critical focus errors from 35mm transfers of major movies….

I hope this helps clear up the confusion / speculation around our implemtation of the new H.264 codec.

Cheers!

Steve Mahrer (Panasonic Broadcast)

[Toke]

Thanks for the info, Steve!

Here we have existing AVC profiles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC

In ISO standard, “High 10” is 4:2:0 only. Are you finally changing to lower chroma resolution?
Where do you basis the efficiency of “High 10” i-frame only (other than being 4:2:0 compared to dvcprohd’s 4:2:2)?
Isn’t High10’s i-frame almost identical to mpeg2 i-frame?
Adaptive macroblocking doesn’t make very big difference in i-frames, does it?

Why didn’t you choose any modern wavelet based codec for your new format?