The following is taken from a post to the Telecine Internet Group:

Wanting around at IBC this year, one thing stuck me more than anything else. There are now more proprietary capture formats than ever before.

This isn’t anything new, after all video has a long and unsavoury history of competing formats, much to the chagrin of everyone who backed HD-DVD for instance. But with digital formats becoming dominant, this has reached fever pitch. And I would argue, it’s completely unnecessary at best, and at worst it’s completely detrimental to the industry.

RED gives no impression that their business model is anything other than packaging for a proprietary format. But they give you tools to work with it, that are for the most part pretty good, but also available for free. You can gain access to the SDK, but only if you are willing to sign an NDA. incredibly, this is the most accessible of all the formats. Silicon imaging want to charge you $1000+ just to decode footage shot on their cameras. And the new champion of digital camera formats, ArriRaw, is completely unsupported for the most part. I spoke to someone about the long awaited SDK, only to be told that it is actually available, but only to select Arri partners. Whatever the hell that means. And it goes on and on with the likes of Sony, Panasonic ad naseum.

Granted, this is nothing new. But what I don’t understand is why we as professionals dealing with the ramifications of all of this continue to do so with smiles on our faces. Everyone is excited at the Arri stand this year. The footage looks great. That is more important than the ability to post the footage, as perhaps it should be. But given the footage from the camera is so good, why limit the ability to properly work with it? Why shouldn’t I be able to take my ArriRaw files into any post-house, regardless of the grading system or infrastructure used. Surely this would be best for Arri et al?

And worst of all, why do we, as the hapless victims of this situation, continue to allow it to happen? Why do we continue to evangelise a technology that is ultimately detrimental to our day to day lives? The visual effects industry managed to find a common ground with OpenEXR, I can only hope we might one day do the same.

I’ve been hearing a lot about Panasonic’s new AVC-intra codec lately. It promises to deliver pro-quality HD at smaller file sizes, and uses intra-frame compression (as opposed to inter-frame compression formats such as MPEG-4).
Here are my thoughts on the subject. The intra-frame compression is a definite plus. Whilst working with MPEG-4 compressed footage on The Toilet Guy…, within about 6 months, the files (stored on removable hard disks) had suffered severe corruption. It wasn’t just one or two frames that were affected, it was several seconds. And in some cases the problems weren’t immediately visible, there were sync problems and dropped frames, spurious freeze frames and so on. Not good at all. But even in those cases, there was always the original camera tape to fall back on (way more robust in the long-term). Now Panasonic has been pushing for a tapeless workflow for a long time, but this format is the first instance where they seem to be thinking seriously about the challenges involved in doing so.

There are still other issues to address, such as image quality. I’ve heard that some test footage shot with the HPX3000 camera is looking pretty good. It’s still shy of the Viper camera though, there is no talk about log colour space for example, and it’s got 4:2:2 compression in addition to the H.264 compression as part of the format. The AVC-intra 100 format will also record the full 1920×1080 progressive frame, so you would expect that the resolution is good. All in all, the format has a data-rate of 1GB/min (or 60GB/hour if you prefer).

That’s very reasonable, until you realise you have to store it all on Panasonic’s crappy P2 cards (at least for the duration of the recording).  When I say “crappy”, I mean expensive and small. A single 16GB card will set you back $1000. Yes they are solid state, and they are reusable, but there is no way you will be using them like camera mags, shooting and shelving them, unless you’ve really got a disposable budget* (think about it, that’s $60 per minute of rushes), and even then, there are better ways to protect your data.

You can daisy-chain up to 5 of them together, which will give you up to 80 minutes of sustained shooting. But at some point you’ll have to give them to someone to plug into a laptop and copy onto long-term storage. So in reality, the 10 or so P2 cards you buy are just glorified buffers between the camera and the hard disk.

So the question for me is, if you’re copying them to hard disk (or data tape) anyway, why not uncompress it to a frame-based format such as DPX or Tiff, given that you’re probably going to have to do this at some point to do a DI or online? As of yet, there is no professional grading system that will conform from AVC-intra files as far as I’m aware, and certainly no reliable way to batch convert select frames from movie files by EDL. And if you’re converting to a frame-based format, then ultimately what advantage does AVC-intra offer over any other compression format?

Now I realised I’ve presented a somewhat twisted argument here. Ideally what I’d like to know is how robust the format is if you keep it in its native format for as long as possible. There would be definite advantages to doing so, not least the savings in storage and bandwidth, but would there ultimately be more headaches in the long-run? After all the DPX/Viper workflow of having uncompressed, single-frame files, though not perfect, is a proven one. Can the same be said for AVC-intra?

*Having said that, I have heard of some productions who are doing just that, rationalizing that the cost is comparable to film stock+processing.