AVCHD -- new HD format from Sony & Panasonic
 

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/News/Pr...11E/index.html

The AVCHD format allows for recording and playback high-resolution, digital HD images using 8cm DVD media.The "AVCHD" is an HD digital video camera format for recording 1080i*1 and 720p*2 signals onto 8cm DVD media by using highly efficient codec technologies. The format employs MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 codec for video compression, and Dolby Digital (AC-3) or Linear PCM for audio codec. This makes it possible to develop HD video camera recorders which achieve compact size as well as high-quality video and audio.

Wow, now that is news! Looks like this could be a tapeless alternative to HDV. Thanks Robert,

Wow.. thaz what the FX1 and Z1 replacement will be on I think.. prob going to coincide with Vegas 7 release!

Not so sure FX1 and Z1 replacement will be using it - bitrate is quoted as being up to 18Mbps, so that's a little low really for cams of the FX1/Z1 nature i'd have thought. Plus i'm not too certain that Sony will ditch tape-based recording yet for cams like that - but of course i could be completely wrong!

interesting stuff though for sure - 1080/24p is amongst the specs..

Another link about the AVCHD announcement (thanks Sina):

http://www.webwereld.nl/articles/411...amcorders.html

I see this format co-existing with tape-based HDV for a little while. Just like we now have consumer based DV tape camcorders and DVD disc camcorders, so too will we have HDV and AVCHD camcorders. Frankly I don't see any issue with 18mbps. Remember bit rate is not an arbiter of image quality. The 8mbps H.264 codec proves that. At less than one-third the bit rate of HDV, H.264 looks great when projected on a large screen (I know because I've seen it!)

Good point about the bit-rate Chris. H.264 is really very clever codec so i think you're right - just going on what we know, at 18Mbps it really should look very good.
Panasonic have announced on their site that they're going to use the new codec/standard to write HD data to SD memory cards, so my guess is that Sony will 'go it alone' (initially?) as far as releasing a disk-based AVCHD camcorder, and Panasonic will release sometime a Hi-Def AVC-standard camcorder writing to SD card or similar.
http://www.panasonic.co.jp/corp/news...n060511-6.html

Also i think AVCHD will probably stand for "Advanced Video Codec High Definition", judging from this link:
http://www.macworld.com/news/2004/11/09/avc/index.php

Here are a couple of press releases from Panasonic:

"Panasonic Begins Development of Technology for Recording HD Images onto SD Memory Cards Based on the AVCHD Standard for Digital Video Cameras"

and

"Panasonic and Sony Jointly Developed New HD Digital Video Camera Recorder Format for Recording on Disc -- Basic Specifications Announced Today"

And here's the format table (click image to see full size):

Can anyone explain what it means that the compression format is H.264, but the "system" is MPEG2-TS? What kind of headache will that be to edit?!

Transport Tream is HOW the AVC is sent via cable or broadcast or recorded to any media.

It is MPEG-2 Transport Stream because that what's used for cable and broadcast. And, that's critical because it allows MPEG-2 to be replaced by H.264. DirectTV is already going this route. So is USBTV.

Won't be any different than HDV.

++++++++++

This is NOT the same Profile@Level of H.264 that will be used on P2. This is High 10 profile (Hi10P) Level 4.0 which has a maximum of 20Mbps.

High 4:2:2 profile (H422P) Level 4.1 has a maximum of 50Mbps.

That sort of makes sense to me but not really. Can video have an MPEG2 wrapper but also have MPEG4 compression of the data stream? That sounds very different to me from HDV, which is just MPEG2 data. When you import AVCHD video into an editing system, will it show up as MPEG2 or MPEG4?

it's going to blow the doors off of hdv, which is exactly why they are doing it.

kudos to panasonic for working on a better standard... sony holds patents for both h.264 and mpeg2, but what will happen to hdv? i guess that it'll still exist at the consumer level, because it's tape size is so well entrenched.

we already know that panasonic will be using this new h.264 format on some of their 2/3" hd cameras, but what will sony use this format on?

H.264 vs HDV compression and NLE ramifications
 

H.264 at 20mbit max...which is in the ballpark of HD-DVD and Blu Ray transfer rates. Again, another format where the acquisition format is using the same technology as the delivery format, which is not optimal. But H.264 should be more efficient than HDV - at a blunt guess, I'd think that 20 mbit H.264 could be a cleaner signal than 25mbit HDV for 1080i.

But H.264 is a HEAVY codec for decode/encode - you think you're conform times are long for HDV? Eeeyowza, just wait for a long GOP H.264 conform or encode! Thus you'll need a faster machine to play back, edit, do RT, etc. as compared to HDV...assuming it gets native support in the NLEs.

-mike

h.264 already has nvidia purevideo hardware acceleration support in premiere 2.0 and ae7.

18mbps h.264 is a high-quality picture... as chris already pointed out, this isn't an issue where you can use bitrate to make comparisons to mpeg2.

Looks to me like Panasonic is going to develop a higher-bandwidth version for their professional cameras, while AVCHD is intended primarily as a consumer solution. As such it holds interesting potential to make home video work more like digital photography, but unless/until the discs become pervasive it would arguably be better to use flash memory storage. Here we go again with Sony and Panasonic trying to make money on non-standard media, which could significantly hamper the effectiveness of the format.

It'll be interesting to see if Sony puts this into something like a successor to the FX1, but I wouldn't be too quick to bet on that, "blowing the doors off HDV." HDV works fine for what it is and has an established workflow using widely available and inexpensive media. Plus if H.264 is even harder to edit than HDV it's hard to see how that would be useful in a professional context with today's computers, unless you plan to convert all your footage to some intermediate codec. If they can make AVCHD work well and it does transcend HDV that's great, but I'd guess at least 2-3 years before we can get to that point.

So how effectively does that work in practice, and what are the prospects for other editing programs supporting this solution? Can we expect most major editing applications to offer H.264 and purevideo support in a timely manner, and will we be able to edit multiple layers of video and effects without pre-rendering the timeline? It's taken about three years to get widespread support for HDV; do you think the ramp-up will be any quicker for AVCHD?

It is not a wonder, if you look at the announcement of Samsung last year, to introduce a H264 HD camera that does around 18Mb/s, then you know something might be up. At last, are we finally to bury the HDV 1 hatchet? Unless this is some mean trick, like when they used Mpeg2 coding in a Mpeg4 content. What does this H264 in a Mpeg2-T stream really mean, real full H264 with some Mpeg2 like transport headers, or Mpeg2 coding with some h264 benefits (like what happens in those Mpeg4 systems I mention above.

This is exactly what I though Panasonic was planning to pull for its SD range of cameras this year.

Where does this leave JVC, or is the HD-200, to be shipping with h264 in Mpeg2 transport wrapper. Will HDTV be going for H264 in a Mpeg2T wrapper, now that would be a revolutionary benefit.

www.ambarella.com is an potential leading hardware solution for h264.

I read the official maximum bit rate of Bluray content is 48Mb/s, so Panasonic is not too far off on the upper end. This is what I was saying the companies needed to do to take advantage of the format. Which means that a 100Mb/s format of equal codec is probably the high grade for acquisition to Bluray (extra bandwidth to have something to play around with, and for the broadcaster encoders to choose from).

You don't know how joyed I am to see this (well, mildly joyed at least with me) this si what I have been pushing, advocating, hoping for. While this is not the 25Mb/s that I hoped for, and I would prefer to work in h264 at 50Mb/s, 18Mb/s is a good start as a future alternative to HDV for prosumers. Because a lot of compression codecs have a narrow range of compression for max quality (1:1-5:1, MOSTLY 1:1-2.X:1) the only way to virtually guarantee, in my opinion only, that H264 will get better high motion footage and low light+high noise footage, is for it to have the same data rate as the one it is replacing. But with all other footage there should be advantage. The industry is finally maturing.


Mike,

For hardware assistance on encode/decode, apart from those I usually mention, wait until the need of the year, maybe upto Nab 2007.

This is why I have been watching the news Post NAB, to get all the prosumer/consumer announcements.

http://www.macworld.com/news/2004/11/09/avc/index.php

Notice, that they are still talking about the US Digital Broadcasting adopting for the use of bandwidth saving and program flexibility. It is NTSC/PAL, all over again. No, what is important is transmitted picture quality, not more channels. More channels means less viewers per channel, less quality per channel, ultimately, less advertising profit per channel. I want our American brothers (and us Mpeg2 19Mb/s max Aussies here) to enjoy what we have enjoyed here for many PAL years, prime picture quality.

-----------------

Guys, set your Digital TV recorders on stun, looks like there will be so many channels we will need triple tuner recorders, and have to pick and kick which programs to record in advance (the last thing a network needs to hear).

When we had two TV stations here, the commercial station used to be packed with the best programming from across the networks. Sure, we missed half the good commercial shows, but that could have been filled by one more channel. Once all the networks were here, now five plus extra DB channels, I just watched less TV. A lesson in too many channels, like the old saying, two's company, three's a crowd.

purevideo acceleration is being used right now, and AVCHD hasn't even been released yet... vegas 6.0d also has h.264 hd support to some degree, so the trends are there already... i don't think that it'll be a similar situation to hdv editing delays.

you are probably right about that higher bitrate on the 2/3" camera, even tho panasonic hasn't stated what bitrate it'll record at.

those who aren't familiar with h.264 may want to read this xlnt article at ee times, it details a whole bunch of codecs, with test results, here on page 3: http://www.eet.com/news/latest/showA...4417335&pgno=3

What is the capacity of an 8cm disk?

Maybe about 2GB. A 1 hour MiniDV tape is 11GB.

2GB at 18Mbits/sec is enough for about 15 minutes. Not too much.

Dan: do you think we'll get most of the quality benefit of H.264 from the real-time encoders used in the cameras, or will there be some compromise as we've seen from low-cost MPEG2 encoders? I guess we'll find out when the cameras start shipping, but what's your take on that? Also, do early results for purevideo suggest effective real-time editing at HD resolution? Thanks for keeping us all informed on this.

The 20 minute recoding time mentioned in:
http://www.webwereld.nl/articles/411...amcorders.html

Is that single layer, or dual layer? I opt for a hard disk version.

I thought I read that it was 50Mb/s in one of the panasonic threads.

10-bit gamma, 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 at 25Mb/s would be great. Sony, Pana please.

Notice that it finally has 1920*1080 HD!
Whoo hoo, whoo hoo, whoo hoo!, as Oprah would say ;)

Mike Curtis over at HF For Indies posts his comments about AVCHD:

http://www.hdforindies.com/2006/05/p...developed.html

Didn't Panasonic say something about h.264 for the HVX200? Might this be what they were talking about? I hope an HVX200A isn't too close around the corner since I plan on getting one at the end of summer. =(

I would love to see an AVCHD Blu-ray/"Professional Disc" camera that can record 1080p60.

No, completely different things.

This H.264 system (AVC-HD) is a long-GOP, low-bandwidth, 4:2:0 consumer format.

The H.264 Panasonic was talking about in their professional lineup would be a high-bandwidth, 10-bit, 4:2:2, intra-frame-only implementation.

And it wouldn't be applied to the HVX, they're talking about having an H.264 option card for their HPC2000 camera.

The EBU have published some papers on AVC/H.264.
Technical Review #302, published April 2005 and found here provides a summary of its various flavours.
http://www.ebu.ch/en/technical/trev/trev_home.html
Select Digital Compression and scroll down to the article.

The Sony/Panasonic announcement appears to cover the High Profile version (8 bit 4:2:0). It also seems that Panasonic intends to develop this for use with SD cards.

The article makes the point that decoder complexity is 2.5x to 4x that of mpeg-2. That will be a serious challenge for nles.

They had better have sorted out the issue of spinning DVD's and gyroscopic distortion. Any dropouts could be very lengthy. Doubt DVD's will be robust enough for pro work. Very interesting development though.

According to my own math, an 8cm DVD with AVCHD would give just 12 min. recording time at the highest quality setting (who'd want to use anything less?). Thanks, but I'll wait for the Blu-ray version, as I predict almost everyone else will do. However, unless Blu-ray blank disk prices come down, 8cm DVDs at current prices would give you about twice as much HD recording space for the money. Of course, future advances in blue-laser disk capacity might level this cost difference.

I also think there's a good chance that many (or all) AVCHD camcorders they might announce to use the standard 8cm DVDs, may end up being cancelled before they are ever delivered. This announcement about the format has obviously created quite a stir amongst video people and generated great anticipation about it. This may have been the purpose for the announcement, to set things up for the main event, when the Blu-ray models come out. The anticipation may serve them in the intervening period, to hold off some of the interest that the competitive HD-DVD format might be gaining by an earlier introduction for camcorders.

Can somebody show to me an actual DVD camcorder giving the same (or even quite the same) quality than a commercial DVD?
There's none...

Even in an HQ profile, the real time encoders of theses camcorders cannot produce a high quality SD picture: so, don't dream for a real HD quality with a real-time Mpeg-4 encoder on a consumer/prosumer camera!

Maybe we will see this type of HQ-HD MPEG-4 encoder on the professionnal cameras, but not before middle/end 2007.
When we will see this kind of encoder on the consumer camera (at a consumer price), the HD-DVD and/or the Blue-ray will be there... and we will see HDD in 2.5" of 300GB or even more (160GB actually, 200GB at end of 2006). SD cards or similar will hold 10 or 20GB (10 times more than a 8cm/4" DVD...)

Conclusion, IMHO, this format will have a short life on the DVD as a standard support... The only thing sure, it that the MPEG-4 AVC/10 will be the future standard of all the HD consumer/prosumers/professional cameras (whatever is the support of the data)... but not before 3 or 4 years!

Can somebody show to me an actual VHS camcorder giving the same (or even quite the same) quality than a commercial VHS tape? There's none! We're talking about the consumer realm, where the key factor is not quality but convenience and ease of use. The quality will be "just good enough" like it always has been with consumer level gear.

Sorry, but many commercial VHS were worse than some good VHS camcorders...

I think you confuse the quality of the source (pellicular film) with the electronics quality. My point stays only at the quality of the compression: it's clear than no MPEG-2 real-time encoder will perform as well as a multipass software used for the authoring of the commercial DVD.
With the time, we will found more and more better real-time encoders, but not on cheap DVD consumer cameras.
The MPEG-2 HDV real-time encoders are currently the 'state of the art' on the prosumers/Indies markets. That's not the market of the DVD camcorders.

So why are you talking about HD for this population?

HDV has shown that the consumers are ready to spend their money on the HD stuffs. The bottom of the consumer market wants DVD? and wants HD? Now they have this new AVCHD format to answer their 'needs'.

But don't expect to do a better HD video with this format on a DVD camcorder (even if the figures show 1920x1080=full HD) than with, for example, a HDV (in 1440x1080).
IMHO, I think that this new format (on standard 8cm/4" DVD support) will have a shorter life than the actual HDV on DV support.

The 'real' full HD on consumers/prosumers cameras (with MPEG-4 or not and whatever is the media support) will not come before 2008/2009...

will MPEG4 finally replace MPEG2 for DV tapes? that's all i need to know =). solid state just isn't there yet.

i don't have any experience with purevideo, but here are some relevant links to the technology... one thing to note is that the matrox purevideo is apparently not the same thing as nvidia purevideo, but there are still editing benefits to be gained from using the matrox solution... gary bettan will know more about this stuff, but i think that nividia purevideo works for mpeg2, wmv hd, and aspect hd... if premiere is your gig, think future-proofing.

press release:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_28867.html
"Do not confuse the GPU effects with the new features that are enhanced by a fast GPU.
It is not just a few transitions. Rendering and exporting are both faster when they use the GPU."
http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.3bbfac2c/0
also see:
http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@@.3bbecd0b/6

your point there is that the larger frame size would offset the inferiority of hdv mpeg2 on a smaller picture frame, given similar bitrates... seems valid to me to some degree.

i hate the thought of dvd acquisition, but hopefully it'll be a re-useable disc, which would be a lot more reliable than re-using tapes, so it's actually an advantage to some degree... there will probably be some type of fs-4 hdd recording solution available for this new format, so the little discs won't be a decisive factor for me.

commercial dvd's are typically sourced from film, then tweaked and encoded with the very best equipment that hollywood has to offer... using gear that costs hundreds of thousands of $$$... how could you ever expect a dvd camcorder to compare to that?

as for video camera encoders, the only reason that a delivery format like mpeg2 became viable in the first place was because of recent engineering improvements in the encoding arena, and how that was ported over to silicon.

this last nab had a number of h.264 products that had been put on silicon for the iptv industry, which has already spent millions of dollars on encoding and distribution gear... once a format hits silicon at that scale, it's momentum becomes overwhelming.

wrt h.264 power consumption... don't even try to judge that, until you have encoded h.264 with nero, and used it's media player to view the content... the speed and ease with which it works will astound you... and ateme has put that technology on silicon:
"Visitors to the ATEME booth (SU 256) will discover a very compact HD hardware encoder that fits in a 3-inch by 3-inch board. This broadcast quality encoder is 100% programmable and allows secure upgrade over time with the best-in-class picture quality and compression efficiency available."
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/...32&newsLang=en

that's just one example... what techniques might be available to reduce the power consumption of an h.264 encoder or decoder?:
"We have developed a novel Complexity Adaptive Motion Estimation and Mode Decision (CAMED) system to improve the selection of the motion vectors and motion compensation block modes in order to significantly reduce the computational cost while keeping the video quality virtually unchanged. Our current extensive tests show reduction of interpolation cost at the decoder by 30%-60% while keeping the quality loss within 0.3dB....Since the interpolation operation constitutes the largest computational cost component at the decoder, our results have great potential for reducing the power consumption in any practical video decoding systems using the latest video coding standard such as MPEG-4, H.264..."
http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~ywang/Research/camed.html

Interesting.

In the press releases they stated that they were waiting for Bluray to release h264 disk recorders on, but because Bluray is proving to be not cheap enough (apart from it's general delays) they are going with DVD instead. Probably means that it was due for earlier release then it is seeing.

From press releases, the ambarella pro video camera control and encoding chip consumes around 1 watt, the versions for small cameras are over a hundred to over a few hundred milliwatts.

The HDV encoder chips were possible because of advances long ago now. The ambarella uses other advances available at the time of the HDV introduction, that could have given a magnitude of extra performance at the time.

People call HDV 25mb/s, and HDV 2, but it is really HDV 1.?. HDV starts at around 19Mb/s. With 18Mb/s H264, we are, allegedly (from ambarella website) looking at performance 2 to 3 times as much (not that you will notice it visually that much). At those similar bit rates it certainly should be superior to HDV (as long as the H264 codec chip they use is a good one).

If they wanted something inferior for DVD at around 18Mb/s, why didn't they just stick with HDV. But I think the real purpose is that we will get 8-9Mb/s H264 as the normal mode, and 18Mb/s as the deluxe, spit your disk out quickly, mode, if it is not just reserved for expensive/hard drive version of the cameras.

Why am I so interested in it? I am more interested in better consistency in acceptable quality rather then big swings from acceptable to unacceptable quality. This represents an improvement over HDV for us.


Bruno

There may well turn out to be delays that might stall this for a year at least (though in reality it has been possible on consumer level before now, and on prosumer cameras probably a year or so ago, so delays are already in play in the announcement). When you can see a direct jump to consumer h264 at hundreds of milliwatts, you realise that it was possible 3 years before at 1-2 watts.

The reality is that DVD is not a good format for us, it should be directly suitable for hard disk, and SD is an viable option (there are consumer card to disk backup units out there). So when that time comes, it will probably represent what HDV could have been.

additional articles on AVCHD....
 

Sorry, Chris - not trying to take away from this site here - I thought since some reference has been made to various sites offering AVCHD "perspectives" incl. Mike's HDforIndies site, I'd offer that camcorderinfo.com seems to also be chiming in with their take on this... development!

That is amazing! I wonder how much it'll cost though...Panasonic already have their prosumer/professional model covered (HVX) for about 6grand. I'm thinking this might be around 3k. They might even pull off a ag-dvx100/ag-dvc30 kind of deal, with a lower and higher end AVC HD model.