AVC-Intra

AVC-Intra is a type of video coding developed by Panasonic, and then supported in products made by other companies.
AVC-Intra is available in Panasonic's high definition broadcast products, such as, for example, their P2 card equipped broadcast cameras.

Technical details

Panasonic announced AVC-Intra codec support in April 2007. The use of AVC-Intra provides production quality HD video at bit rates more normally associated with electronic news gathering applications, permitting full resolution, 10-bit field capture of high quality HD imagery in one piece camera-recorders.

AVC-Intra is compliant with the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard
and Panasonic claims to follow the SMPTE RP 2027–2007 recommended practice specification. Analysis by the x264 project has shown that Panasonic does not comply with this specification

AVC-Intra was intended for video professionals who have to store HD digital video for editing and archiving. It defines 10-bit intra-frame only compression, which is easy for editing and preserves maximum video quality. The technology significantly outperforms the older HDV (MPEG2 based) and DVCPRO HD ( DV based) formats, allowing the codec in certain conditions to maintain better quality in half the storage space of DVCPRO HD.

AVC-Intra defines two classes:
* AVC-Intra 50:
** nominally 50 Mbit/s, size of each frame is fixed
** CABAC entropy coding only.
** 1920 × 1080 formats are High 10 Intra Profile, Level 4
** 1280 × 720 formats are High 10 Intra Profile, Level 3.2
** 4:2:0 chrominance sampling
** frames are horizontally scaled by 3/4 (1920x1080 is scaled to 1440x1080. 1280 × 720 is scaled to 960x720)
* AVC-Intra 100:
** nominally 100 Mbit/s, size of each frame is fixed
** CAVLC entropy coding only.
** All formats are High 4:2:2 Intra Profile, Level 4.1
** 4:2:2 chrominance sampling
** frames are not scaled

Common to both classes;
* Frame rates: 1920 × 1080 (23.98p / 25p / 29.97p / 50i / 59.94i), 1280 × 720 (23.98p / 25p / 29.97p / 50p / 59.94p)
* 10 bit luma and chroma

Panasonic's implementation of AVC-Intra codec has following limitations: 8 × 8 transform only, 8 × 8 intra prediction only, 10 slices per picture, MBAFF for interlace material, custom quantization matrices for each class and each resolution.

AVC-Ultra

The Panasonic AVC-Ultra family defines an additional three new encoding parameters within the MPEG-4 Part 10 standard, utilizing up to the 4:4:4 Intra Predictive Profile, as well as an additional low bitrate proxy recording mode.

The most efficient new parameter within AVC-Ultra is by Panasonic called, AVC-LongG. AVC-LongG enables compression of video resolutions up to 1920 × 1080 @ 23.97, 25 and 29.97p, with 10 bits of pixel depth at 4:2:2 color sampling, at data rates as low as 25 Mbit / sec.

More over, the AVC-Intra Class 50/100 is now extended to Class 200 and Class 4:4:4. The Class 200 mode extends the bitrate to 226 Mbit / sec for 1080/23,97p, while the Class 4:4:4 extends the possible resolution from 720p to 4K with pixel depths at 10 and 12 bits.

The bitrate settings for Class 4:4:4 varies between 200 and 440 Mbit / sec depending on the resolution, frame rate and bit depth. Both the Class 200 and the Class 4:4:4 are Intra-only coding modes.

The AVC-Proxy mode enables extremely fast ENG content delivery and offline edits of 720p and 1080p video at bitrates varying between 800 Kbit to 3.5 Mbit / sec at 8 bits of pixel depth.

More recent information about AVC-Ultra (including the new 10-bit and 12-bit Class4:4:4, Class2K4:2:2, Class2K4:4:4, Class4K4:2:2, and Class4K4:4:4) is available o
Panasonic's AVC-Ultra Page

Third-party support

* Avid's Media Composer since v 3.5.0 provides support via Avid Media Access (AMA), a new plug-in architecture
* Apple's Final Cut Pro 7 provides native AVC-Intra decoding within a ProRes 422 timeline.
* Apple's Final Cut Pro X provides native editing of AVC-Intra, including AVC-Intra 100 and AVC-Intra 50, as well as AVC-LongG, with support for import and playback without transcoding within a ProRes 422 timeline.
* MXF4mac offers an AVC-Intra codec for QuickTime that allows to export AVC-Intra and to set up native AVC-Intra timelines in Final Cut Pro.
* EVS Broadcast Equipment has announced AVC-Intra 100 support for their XT , XT and XS server family
* MainConcept offer an AVC-Intra encoder and decoder as part of their Codec SDK
* Harris Corporation announced AVC-Intra support for the NEXIO AMP line of video servers at NAB 2008
* Omneon announced AVC-Intra support for their Spectrum and MediaDeck products in 2007.
* Quantel demonstrated AVC-Intra workflow at NAB 2007, and released to customers in 2008 with their V4 software.
* Grass Valley has announced native support for AVC-Intra in Edius 4.5
* Adobe's After Effects CS5 provides native AVC-Intra decoding.
* Vanguard Software Solutions provides an H.264/AVC PC SDK capable of encoding at 100 Mbit/s in real-time
* FFmpeg and Libav support decoding of both forms of AVC-Intra
* ATEME AVC-I Contribution Encoders
* x264 can encode AVC-Intra
* Broadcast products based on SHINE Media Platform of GammaRED Engineering

Several companies introduced AVC Intra codec semiconductor intellectual property cores.
* CoreEL Technologies (http://www.coreel.com) provides AVC-Intra Class 50 and AVC-Intra Class 100 IP cores.
* Tata Elxsi (http://www.tataelxsi.com) provides AVC-Intra & AVC-Ultra fully optimizable class 50 and 100 IP.
* Vanguard Software Solutions provides AVC-Intra 50 and 100 encoder IP (up to AVC-Ultra: 1080p60 at 300 Mbit/s).
* Nethra Imaging provides AVC-Intra 50 and 100 encoder IP.

References

{{Video storage formats

Panasonic
High-definition television
MPEG-4
Video codecs
Video compression