» Posts Tagged ‘h264’
Sony’s tight cluster of NAB 2013 4K-centric announcements featured some of the most affordably priced UHD TVs yet seen all the way over to the external recorder-enabled 4K shooting capabilities of its FS700. The latter announcement also made it clear that Sony is looking to put a wide variety of encoding and format options into the hands of shooters — and beyond, potentially. Aside from external and third-party recording expansion, Sony is opening up its efficient 4K XAVC codec — native to the F5 family — to the consumer as well as the prosumer. Read on for some details regarding these new ‘lite’ encoding/wrapper options, dubbed XAVC S. More »
While H.265 has been approved as the next-gen lossy delivery codec, we’re still watching a vast amount of video in H.264. In fact, even when H.265 sooner or later takes its place, videomakers will still be dealing with many of the same basic compression principles at work. Knowing all the variables of a delivery encoding job can help optimize bit efficiency, ensure the highest possible quality of media, and reduce the visibility of artifacting such as banding. Read on for a look at what drives the quality-to-compression ratio of your lossy-encoded delivery video, and how you can even ‘trick’ it in some cases. More »
Technology’s progression sometimes moves with consistent momentum, and sometime comes in spurts. For instance, processors of mobile devices regularly decrease in size and price with relation to power — while, at the same time, the speed of your internet connection may not change much at all for several years, and make a great leap whenever it does. Both of these tendencies of advancement seem to inform High Efficiency Video Coding, A.K.A. H.265 — the successor to that other codec with which we’re all quite familiar (H.264). Improving efficiency by around double, H.265 aims to set the standard for the next decade in video streaming and encoding — and it’s going to ease mobile data congestion and likely make 4K a reality much sooner than many would have anticipated. More »
The advancements in lossy video encoding have been both consistent and amazing. H.264 (or AVC), that much maligned DSLR de-facto codec, sought to yield improved quality over its predecessors such as MPEG-2, all the while using half the bitrate, or lower, than such earlier codecs. Now, High Efficiency Video Coding or HEVC — likely to earn the alternate title H.265 — seeks to do the same compared to H.264, once more halving the bit rates necessary for equivalent, or even higher, quality. As it turns out, the tech world is already saturated with devices set to support HEVC playback. More »
In Zacuto‘s most recent DSLR/film comparison, one of the commenters noted that upconverting to ProRes gave much better results (than editing native h.264 footage) in post. While ProRes is definitely a better codec (in terms of color space and compression), the clip showed as a reference seemed to exhibit a perpetually-annoying gamma shift bug that applies to a lot of DSLR shooters — more specifically, anyone editing h.264 video on a Mac. When I shot some stuff on my 5D for Focus Features, I noticed that the clips looked desaturated and flat in Quicktime 7, and supersaturated and contrasty in Quicktime X (Quicktime X ships with Snow Leopard, and Quicktime 7 is an optional install). Jerome Stern at MotionLife corroborates this experience, decrying the lack of consistency when it comes to viewing and editing h.264 footage on a Mac: More »
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Ben Howling: guys, this is awesome. i really appreciate it. Luke Neumann on Canon 5D Mark III RAW Video and a Comparison with the RED …
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Richard: What an amazing metaphor! How inspiring is that. 'Palindromes' DP Tom Richmond: 'The Grammar of Filmmaking is a Good Place …