AVC-Ultra compression: A great news for the Panasonic GH3 and AG-AF100 successor?

April 12, 2012
news
39 Comments

Yesterdays announcement was focused on the new Panasonic AVC PRO technology more than on real products. The new camcorder announcements will probably follow soon.

Sources told me that the new AVC PRO compression scheme will be implemented in future business and consumer camcorders. AVC PRO will be available in early 2013. The new cameras that will be unveiled for the NABshow can be upgraded to AVC-Ultra in 2013. It has to be seen yet if the AG-AF100 successor and the GH3 will include the new compression technology. We will probably know more about the products on Tuesday April 17th when Panasonic will have the official press session at the NAB show (at 03:40 PM Las Vegas time).

Meantime here are some info about AVC-Ultra via Wikipedia (Click here):
“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 info about yesterdays Panasonic announcement at Tvtechnology (Click here).