Panasonic AVCHD cam coming soon
 

Check it out, from Akihabara, at http://www.akihabaranews.com/news-12...camcorder.html

No model number or price, but will record HD at 6 or 9 mbps to an SD card. 3CCD it says.

Looking for an official press release from Panasonic...

Excellent find! Panasonic and Canon usually produce stellar products- I can't wait for more info!

The 6 and 9 figures is most likely for recordings in standard definition MPEG2.
The figure for AVCHD mode should be a lot higher.

Pretty sure those are HD bit rates... that's one of the best things about AVC and H.264 compression. At the Apple press event for NAB2004, I saw HD projected on a huge screen at 8mbps using H.264 and it looked great.

Darn, doesn't exactly look like the pocket cam I was hoping for. It even has a flip-out LCD screen.

Another concept picture of what it might look like is found.

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/do...4/ceat8_04.jpg

But that footage was probably created on powerful computers given plenty of time to render the output. For cameras it would be better to get something at least close to HDV bit rates and preferably higher: H.264 at 25-50 Mbps would be very interesting. Seems like Panasonic has been saying they're planning to do just that, so let's see if they come through.

Different format though. You're talking about AVC-Intra at 50 megabits, vs. AVC-HD at up to 18 megabits. AVC-HD is a long-GOP format, sort of a "super-HDV". AVC-Intra is a frame-discrete format, no GOP, 4:2:2 color and I think it's supposed to be 10-bit as well, so it's sort of a "super-DVCPRO-HD". Different formats for different markets.

Right. Point being that AVCHD at bit rates of 6-9 Mbps isn't all that interesting compared to HDV, but give us the same compression technology with some decent bandwidth and now we don't need DVCProHD or uber-expensive P2 memory cards. In other words, I don't want another "pretty good" HD format, I want awesome quality recorded on inexpensive off-the-shelf flash memory.

Video footage of the new pana avchd Camera
 

This looks like a product announcement video. Nice looking camera. I did not get any sound. If anyone gets sound and could translate, that would be awesome

http://gizmologia.com/2006/10/ceatec...d-de-panasonic

Found an english version of the Panasonic AVCD announcement video
 

Took place in japan at Ceatec Tech conventions

http://www.digitalworldtokyo.com/200...sdonly_hid.php

Sweet!

Thanks for posting that link.

I like the looks of that camcorder.

I hope Panasonic includes a microphone input.

I also hope they'll give us 720/60p as a recording option.

There's also a great article about AVCHD here:

http://governmentvideo.com/articles/...icle_982.shtml

Jerry Jones
http://www.jonesgroup.net

Canopus is now listed among the supporters of this format. This good news for Edius users.

I thought this was odd (from that nvvtd review): "...the idea is to allow consumers to burn their own AVCHD videos direct to Blu-ray discs... with HDV, on the other hand, there would need to be a transcoding step (MPEG-2 to H.264) ..."

That's not correct is it?? Blu-ray supports MPEG2....

There is also an option for a variable bit rate of 13MBPS on average so it can probably go up to 16MBPS in fast action shots.


http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,12...s/article.html

It is early in the game but so far people who have been burning home brew HD o n red dvd's have AFIK only been able to get them to play on HD DVD players and NOT Blu ray (samsung) players.


I would not put it past Sony to have worked out something to prevent this from happening. It is also likely that avchd will not be supported in the short term on HD DVD players


Sharyn

BD supports MPEG 2, MPEG 4/h.264Pt10/AVC (all the same) and VC1 in the standard. No transcoding necessary.

What possible reason could Sony have to prevent "home brew" HD from playing on a BD player of *any* kind? As long as it's legal, it's a profit to them no matter how you strike it. Blank BD disc...Sony BD player...Maybe authored on Sony BD authoring tools...
The bigger problem is that all the developers that jumped the gun and screamed "We offer BD support" essentially made up whatever they needed to make up in order to market their software last year. Notice that of *all* the software developers, Sony is the *only* company that didn't stand up and scream "Our authoring tools support BD."
Because Sony knew the spec had not yet been settled.
It is indeed, very early in the game. For those that weren't around during the transition from 1630 masters to CD, consider this a very fast game nowadays, and be glad that you even have access to it this fast. I don't mean this to be a "way back in the day" story, but the short version is...waiting even 2 years for desktop HD is nuthin' compared to desktop CD "back in the day."

It's ludicrous to assume that Sony would try to disallow one format or another. Read the spec. There are three supported formats. If someone doesn't conform to that format, it's not Sony's fault, or the fault of any member of the BD consortium. Just like the fact that you can't burn an MP4 to a standard DVD and expect it to play on every DVD player out there today.

AVCHD is better then mpeg2...at low bitrates. At high bitrates (hdv-high) the biggest difference is that avchd needs a lot more processing power and it doesn't look much better at all.

Hey SPOT
I think you misread my post, I am talking about HD on a standard Red Laser Dvd blank, not user created BD's.

I think it is very much in Sony's interest to try to control the use of HD redlaser dvd's in it BD players to AVCHD.

Sure on BD they will let you do anything that is legal.

We will see,

Sharyn

You're right, Sharyn, i misunderstood your original point. That said, BD is supposed to be backwards compatible. Therefore, if you have a red-laser/standard DVD with HD content that will play on a standard, non BD-DVD player, it should play on a BD player. Again, it's not in anyone's best interests to do otherwise. Aside from that, Sony doesn't control the market in that regard. If they make a deck that won't play, Samsung, Hitachi, Panasonic, Teac, or one of them surely will do so.
The only issue at question in my mind, is licensing. Microsoft (Bill Gates personally) told Sony that they will be very specific as to how they license VC decoders. That could be a major issue for some folks depending on how that goes.

AVCHD is better than HDV at any bit-rate
 

I want to see substantiation for your claim of "doesn't look much better at all". What were your comparison parameters? As for the processing power - we're getting it, no worries.

To me it is harder to produce decent-looking video at lower bit-rates. And if more bandwidth is available - so much the better, even more information can be squeezed in - up to the limit of the imager. Please understand that in fact you're arguing not with me but with the math (and it is a lot less forgiving :-).

Mikko doesn't need comparisons; it's fairly well known, easily demonstrable that AVC is only better in lower bitrates. As bitrate goes up, efficiency goes down.
If low bitrates are your target, then these might just be the camcorder for you. However, as the marketing engines crank up, simply accepting that "AVCHD is twice as efficient as HDV" is foolish and could lead to some bad choices, depending on your goal. If low bitrate vid is your goal, then AVCHD may well be in your best interests.
As far as horsepower....we're a long, long way from being there. However, intermediary codecs make a huge difference, and that'll be the best workflow in the short-mid term.

Well the math is pretty simple. Once you start going closer and closer to intraframe codec bitrates (like dv) then you lose AVCHD's abilities to track pixels and smooth artifacts. Because once a bitrate is high enough you don't need them. This is about where HDV and AVCHD stand. HDV is 25mbps, AVCHD cameras are about 15 max. This is not good enough.

What happens if dv-files would be encoded with AVCHD instead of dv (just like mjpeg)? Would it look better? No way. It would look worse, because the bitrate is so high the mjpeg does a better job. Granted mpeg2 isn't intraframe either, but the bitrate is still quite high so the gop can be kept at 12/15. If the gop was about 30-300 then AVCHD would get more advantage as it could use it's superior tracking to track pixels.

I've watched AVCHD clips and haven't been that pleased. Firstly my machine doesn't run the file nearly as well as HDV. Secondly the image quality isn't better at all, it's actually a bit worse in terms of noise as the AVCHD codec seems to add it to enhance texture. Mpeg2 doesn't but it can create blocks more easily.

Now if you start increasing AVCHD's bitrate to about 25 then yeah, it can look a bit better as there's still headroom to go. But it's not like "omg AVCHD IS 2x BETTER!" especially considering the power requirements.

The same happens when you compare high-bitrate mpeg1 to high bitrate divx or xvid. Mpeg1 will look better. But divx and xvid are way better in lower bitrates.

Given that DV is less than ideal for recording SD resolution at 25 Mbps, why shouldn't we expect that a more modern codec would be appropriate for recording HD resolution at the same bit rate? Heck, even at 50 Mbps HD would still be heavily compressed, so why wouldn't AVCHD work well under those conditions? Seems to me that either MPEG2 or AVC at around 50 Mbps would be a fine compromise for recording HD, and the sooner someone makes a camera based on that at a reasonable price the better.

And it makes no sense to say that any codec looks better at a low bit rate than at a higher one; just that the differences between codecs are less obvious as bit rate increases.

Please provide a link to a reputable source to support this statement.

Thanks.

- Jerry Jones

Agree.

- Jerry Jones

>>>And it makes no sense to say that any codec looks better at a low bit rate than at a higher one

That's not what he means. He's saying that divx and xvid encoded at a low bitrate will look BETTER THAN MPEG1 encoded at the same low bitrate ..... whereas xvid and divx encoded at high bitrates will NOT look better than MPEG1 encoded at that same high bitrate.

Fair enough, but do we have any real indication yet how AVCHD recorded at 25+ Mbps might look compared to HDV? I've been skeptical about AVCHD from the start, but it seems plausible it could offer advantages for representing an HD image at such a bit rate. Or if someone like Panasonic gives AVCHD more bandwidth than HDV, then what?

On a related note, how might AVCHD-intra at 50 Mbps compare to DVCPro HD at 100 Mbps?

Actually, there is no "AVCHD-Intra."

Instead, it should be written as "AVC-Intra."

AVC-Intra = I-Frame.

AVCHD = Long GOP.

Both AVC-Intra and AVCHD are H.264-compliant.

H.264 is the future.

- Jerry Jones

Rather than looking for a "reputable source" to support this (since apparently the MPEG isn't reputable), you might spend a few minutes encoding test patterns in various codecs at various bitrates. You'll find very quickly that comparatives do indeed demonstrate what MPEG says, what Sony has demonstrated, and what others on websites such as Doom, etc have had to say.
With some codecs, as the efficiency goes down with corresponding rising bitrates, artifacts or other issues begin to appear. Other codecs are weakest at low bitrates, while others appear with a good image but the bitrate is so high that it's an inefficient choice for the desired payload/quality.
Read my comment again; AVCHD is only "better" (better implying high quality image for low bitrate, ie; more efficient) at low bitrates as compared to higher bitrates in other formats. The blanket statement of "AVCHD is twice as efficient as MPEG2" doesn't work, because the efficiency isn't linear.
And AVC-I...we'll just have to see how that works, won't we? Using I-frames only, completely negates the entire value of how AVC operates in the first place, so it'll be very interesting to see how that pans out. 992Mbps down to 50Mbps with no loss....That'll be some interesting discussion when there are actual images to compare.

I see lots of interesting theories being tossed around, but it sounds like we won't really know how AVC recorded at 19-25+ Mbps looks compared to HDV until someone offers that in a professional quality camera. Meanwhile, HDV works reasonably well today, so it's "a bird in the hand" until something better is available and supported in shipping products.

You've confirmed my point.

You apparently can't provide a single link to a scholarly paper or journal article that can confirm your suggestion.

I, on the other hand, can provide links to articles that contradict the point of view that you expressed earlier.

For example, the research paper at the following link:

http://tinyurl.com/fxpur

Here are some key quotations:

"Unlike the MPEG-2 video coding standard, AVC/H.264 targets a wider range of video applications, ranging from video at mobile devices and bit rates as low as below 30Kbit/s to HDTV and bit rates of 20Mbit/s and above."

"Our tests showed a noticeable superiority of AVC/H.264 compared to state of the art MPEG-2 video encoders in almost all test cases."

"The AVC/H.264 encoders, which were at a very early stage of optimization, competed with MPEG-2 encoders that have been optimized for nearly a decade."

"Even at a very early stage of optimization AVC/H.264 has shown a remarkable superiority in coding efficiency compared to current MPEG-2 encoding technology."

In addition, I can point to a key white paper on the topic of H.264 and high bitrates.

Here's the link:

http://tinyurl.com/mzo89

The report concludes:

"The new video standard known as H.264/AVC presents a rich collection of state-of-the-art video coding capabilities that can provide interoperable video broadcast or communication with degrees of capability that far surpass those of prior standards."

"With the new FRExt amendment, and especially the new High Profile, H.264/AVC further bolsters its position as the premier design for standardized video compression."

"We believe these technologies provide a hitherto unavailable set of cost/performance points that will have a powerful impact on both consumer and professional video applications in the years to come."

By the way, the FRExt amendment defines four new profiles:

♦ High (HP)
♦ High 10 (Hi10P)
♦ High 4:2:2 (Hi422P)
♦ High 4:4:4 (Hi444P)

All four of these profiles build further upon the design of the prior Main profile, and they all include three enhancements of coding efficiency performance:

♦ Adaptive macroblock-level switching between 8x8 and 4x4 transform block size
♦ Encoder-specified perceptual-based quantization scaling matrices
♦ Encoder-specified separate control of the quantization parameter for each chroma component

The High 4:4:4 profile additionally supports the residual color transform and predictive lossless coding features not found in any other profiles.

H.264 is the future.

- Jerry Jones

The concept of AVC-HD only being better at "lower bit rates" may be technically true, but certainly obfuscates the concept of whether the footage will look better at the proposed bitrates.

I mean, let's be serious: ALL CODECS are designed to function with lower bitrates. Isn't that the very definition of a successful codec? How much it can compress?

If you give any codec enough bandwidth it should look fantastic. Give MJPG a gigabit per second and I bet it'll turn out results that look like uncompressed HD (er, yeah, but uncompressed HD takes up a gigabit per second, so what's the point?) I bet Cinepak would look pretty darn good at a gigabit per second too.

So then it comes back to the real crux of the issue, which is: is MPEG-2 at 25 megabits "good enough"? Or do we need better, and will AVC-HD at 18 megabits outperform HDV at 25 megabits? It should be accepted as a no-brainer that AVC-HD 720p at 18 megabits will be noticeably superior to HDV 720p at 19 megabits...

At equivalent bitrates AVC will outperform MPEG-2 every single time, up until you get to sufficiently high bitrates where there just isn't that much difference anymore. There comes a level at which both codecs have enough bandwidth that they're both producing high-enough-quality results (the point of diminishing returns, if you will.) But is that level 25 megabits for MPEG-2 1080? Some here would say yes, and there are plenty of us who say "no way." It becomes a subjective call, whether it's good enough "for you."

The notion that "its advantage only holds at lower bitrates" is a red herring. It's one of those statements that is technically true, but completely irrelevant to the discussion. If the bandwidth is sufficiently high, what do we need codecs at all for? The whole point of a codec is: better efficiency and better quality at a chosen bitrate. And H.264 has it all over MPEG-2 at the same bitrate, at least at the bitrates that are low enough to be involved in this discussion. I guess another way to put it would be: will H.264 at 18 megabits have enough bandwidth to show noticeable improvement over MPEG-2 at 25 megabits?

As pointed out earlier, there is no AVCHD-intra; there are two different formats being introduced, either long-gop AVC-HD, or the new AVC-Intra.

According to Panasonic's Phil Livingston, 50-mbps AVC-Intra delivers equivalent picture quality to 100mbps DVCPRO-HD.

Any next future progressive small camcorder offer on this new AVC-Intra?

AVC-Intra has only been discussed as part of Panasonic's HPX2100 ($20,000 2/3" camera).

Excellent.

Agree 100%.

However, I would offer the following additional observations:

FACT: Matsushita apparently decided not to market HDV MPEG-2 camcorders through its Panasonic brand, but instead through its JVC brand.

FACT: Sony decided to market HDV MPEG-2 camcorders.

FACT: Canon decided to market HDV MPEG-2 camcorders.

FACT: Sony and Canon and JVC hope to sell as many HDV MPEG-2 camcorders as possible to recover research and development costs and earn a profit.

FACT: It took several months following the introduction of the first JVC consumer HDV camcorders for other manufacturers to offer more "professional" models.

OPINION: I believe Matsushita seems to be in a position to market H.264 camcorders more aggressively than the other manufacturers because that company's Panasonic brand has no HDV camcorder line to protect. Therefore, I believe the Panasonic brand is the brand to watch where H.264 development is concerned. These first-generation Sony AVCHD models seem to be designed to protect Sony's HDV camcorder lines from serious competition.

- Jerry Jones

Barry,

Question for you.

Two AVCHD news articles that I have read recently mention two different maximum data rates for that format.

Craig Johnston's TV TECHNOLOGY article:

LINK: http://tinyurl.com/zxu7z

QUOTATION: "HDV compresses to and records at 25 Mbps. AVCHD compresses to and records at 18 Mbps."

The official AVCHD Web site lists the maximum data rate at 18 Mbps.

LINK: http://tinyurl.com/y8xnwx

Wayne Cole's recent GOVERNMENT VIDEO article compares AVCHD to HDV this way:

"AVCHD uses an almost identical data rate (24 Mbps) -- in an MPEG-2 transport stream wrapper."

LINK: http://tinyurl.com/nvvtd

Is it 24 Mbps? Or is it 18 Mbps?

- Jerry Jones

P.S. Johnston writes that the manufacturers themselves are declaring AVCHD to be twice as efficient as HDV.

In Johnston's words:

"At twice the efficiency, a simple math exercise would show that with its 18 Mbps encoding, AVCHD is 28 percent more efficient on the storage side, and that would still allow AVCHD to produce about a 70 percent increase in picture quality over HDV."

Never mind, Barry.

I just found the answer to my own question on the official AVCHD Web site.

That group agreed to revise the maximum data rate upward to 24 Mbps as indicated by the revised chart on the following AVCHD Web page:

http://tinyurl.com/ylc2za

Apparently, this maximum data rate change was approved as the new standard for AVCHD earlier this year.

- Jerry Jones

Merci for the quick and comprehensive reply.

MK