AVC-Intra

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Categories: Files, Formats, Standards

A family of two HD codecs from Panasonic that were designed to be compliant with H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, and use only intra-frame coding (GOP of 1), making the coded material easily editable at every frame. AVC-Intra was aimed at professional users and was adopted by Panasonic for its P2 cameras (AVC-Intra P2), offering considerably more efficient compression than the original DVCPRO HD codec – maybe by as much as 2:1. This was at a time when long GOP coding was being used in products including HDV and XDCAM HD. With increased coding efficiency some believed the use of long GOP coding in professional recorders would fade.

There are two classes: AVC-Intra 50 and AVC-100. The former produces a nominal 50 Mb/s for 1920 x1080 and 1280×720 formats using 4:2:0 10-bit sampling, with the frames horizontally reduced to 0.75 of the original line length. AVC-100 produces up to 100 Mb/s with 4:2:2 sampling for the same two frame formats, but without any size reduction. Both codecs offer a range of popular frame rates.

Both these codecs are now included in Panasonic’s AVC-Ultra range.