[Andreas Wittenstein]

Over a single FireWire 800 “line”, not “drive”. A single drive wouldn’t be fast enough.

[Andreas Wittenstein]

David,

A couple of days ago we released a new version (v2.4.0) of SheerVideo that may fix the color-shift problem you discovered.

SheerVideo had only been specifying the QuickTime color parameters essential to Synchromy, in the assumption that the remaining parameters would be filled in as appropriate by QuickTime and the application. This assumption was sometimes unwarranted, resulting in color shifts due to incorrect parameter settings. Thus SheerVideo now specifies all the color parameters itself.

In order to do so, SheerVideo needs the user to provide enough information to determine all these parameters. Happily, the familiar standards NTSC, PAL, HD, and HD 1035 cover all the necessary parameters, so the Sheer Options settings now use these terms in place of the previous obscure ITU and SMPTE standards.

Nevertheless, QuickTime Player somehow still manages to use the wrong color standard when converting ‘v210’ (Y’CbCr 10bv 4:2:2) output from the Sheer Y’CbCr 10bv decoders to ‘2vuy’ (Y’CbCr 8bv 4:2:2) for display, again resulting in a color shift. Fortunately, there is a simple workaround, which is to let SheerVideo output ‘2vuy’ directly, which is typically much faster anyway. To do this, you need to turn off High Quality in the Sheer video track before displaying it. (Turning High Quality on directs SheerVideo to accept only pixel formats to which it can decode without information loss, but displaying 10-bit data on an 8-bit display necessarily involves information loss.) For instructions, see

https://www.bitjazz.com/sheervideo/support/manual/quicktime_player/playback.shtml

Note: BitJazz Inc. has a policy of rewarding those who help us improve our products. The users who reported these problems and gave us enough information to isolate and fix the bugs received complimentary SheerVideo Pro licenses in return.

[Andreas Wittenstein]

In software, the entire SheerVideo package currently takes up several megabytes, and rising. But this is only because there are so many different pathways, differing among parameters such as {RGB, Y’CbCr}, {no Alpha, Alpha}, {10b, 8b}, {4:4:4, 4:2:2}, {p, i}, {encode, decode, transcode}, {scalar, vector}, {many pixel formats}.

SheerVideo was designed to be featherweight for hardware or firmware implementation. In software, each pathway takes only a few KB each for code, data, and image buffer. The code uses only operations which are easily implemented in firmware. And it operates not just in real time, but with ultra-low latency.

As RT Extreme and the Kona2 demonstrate, there are definite advantages to having certain graphics operations done in a graphics or video card. SheerVideo may run ever so fast in the host CPU, but at HD data rates, merely accessing the data strains the limits of today’s CPUs.

[Andreas Wittenstein]

David,

Thanks for reporting these test results.

SheerVideo really is perfectly lossless, so if you’re seeing any differences, something else must be going on. It sounds typical of color-standard or gamma misspecification, but it could also be RGB->Y’CbCr color conversion or 4:4:4->4:2:2 chroma subsampling. I’d love to help you figure out what it is, but I for that need more information:

[Andreas Wittenstein]

Yes, SheerVideo should let your Xserve RAID serve around twice as many uncompressed-quality video streams.
And yes, unfortunately you lose real-time effects in FCP – but Apple has said that if enough customers complain, they will fix that.

[Andreas Wittenstein]

Thanks for the good word, David. However, SheerVideo is definitely a capture codec, and is being used in many studios for real-time HD acquisition, including a live show on a major broadcast network.

The demo period is actually 20 days (not necessarily consecutive), and the price is $149 for one key, $99 each for two or more.

[Andreas Wittenstein]

AJA and BitJazz work together to make sure SheerVideo works properly with the Kona2, but SheerVideo doesn’t currently run in the Kona2 firmware.
Yes, you can use SheerVideo as a substitute for the Apple/AJA codecs for real-time SD and HD editing and compositing with about half the storage requirements.
There are a couple caveats: One is that Final Cut Pro doesn’t support RT Extreme for SheerVideo yet, so if you do anything other than cuts, you still need to render. The other is that SheerVideo’s native support for AJA’s new RGB 10b pixel formats isn’t yet real-time, but that should be fixed in a week or two.

[Andreas Wittenstein]

Actually, SheerVideo is designed to be an editing codec, so it doesn’t do any interframe compression. This means it does just as well on fast motion as on talking heads.

[Andreas Wittenstein]

Animation uses run-length encoding, so it’s excellent for constant-shaded 2-D animation and anything else with large areas of constant color. But for high-detail footage where neighboring pixels are unlikely to be exactly the same color, Animation only shrinks the file by around 5%, while SheerVideo still cuts the file size in half.

[Andreas Wittenstein]

Was the spot done at 8 bits per channel or 16?
Animation is only lossless up to 8b. PhotoJPEG is never lossless. SheerVideo is lossless up to 10b, Microcosm up to 16b, but is nowhere near real-time.
Also note that SheerVideo uses Synchromy to losslessly convert to high-precision YUV in Final Cut Pro, which no other codec can do.