H.264 compression is a gift that just keeps on giving, and now that it has become the basis of the new AVC-Intra format developed by Sony and Panasonic, both shooters and editors are going to reap the benefits.

Dave Emmerling is the co-owner/producer and editor at Midnight Media Group, Inc. in Millburn, NJ, a boutique production company focusing on broadcast commercials and high-end corporate productions. When shooting “running footage” (B-roll for multiple ads) for his client, the automaker Subaru, he jumped at the chance to be one of the first to test out Panasonic’s AJ-HPX2000 P2 HD camcorder with the AVC-Intra codec option board (AJ-YBX200G).

“The images using AVC-Intra are truer than other compressed formats, even HDCAM,” Dave recalls, “and the fact it is a more efficient compression process means we can store more footage in less space.”
But what about editing it? After all, AVC-Intra is a very new intra-frame video codec with bit rates of 50 and 100Mb/s, utilizing the High 10 Intra and High 422 Intra profiles of H.264 respectively. Dave edited it with Apple’s Final Cut Pro 6.02 on both a MacBook Pro laptop with a 2.16 GHz processor and on an 8-core Intel-based desktop Mac Pro system.

“I moved the AVC-Intra from the P2 cards onto our studio’s fiber channel SAN storage and transferred it directly into Final Cut Pro,” Dave said. “The system presents you with thumbnails of all the shots so I can select just the ones I want. During the process, the AVC-Intra is converted into Apple’s ProRes 422 HQ format at the 220 Mbps quality level and once that is accomplished you are ready to edit.”

Despite the new AVC-Intra acquisition format, once Dave got the HD footage into Final Cut Pro, editing proceeded as it would with any of the other, less efficient production formats. He then turned the edited timeline into a QuickTime file and output it in various different formats for WMV, Flash, or DVD delivery.

“I always shoot in HD, even if the client wants an SD master, because it gives us more flexibility during post,” Dave said. “We are going to standardize on AVC-Intra in the future for acquisition because it is a more robust format. I can see details in it that are missing with some of the older codecs, and I really like the fact AVC-Intra can shoot in native 24P for even greater storage efficiency.”

Does the postproduction world need yet another format? With the compression advantages of AVC-Intra, chances are that people are going to adopt it as soon as their edit systems can handle it. It is good to see that, in addition to Apple’s FCP, others’ NLEs like Grass Valley’s EDIUS, Sony Creative Software’s Vegas, and Quantel’s eQ have already stepped up to the bat.

“We are certainly very pleased with the look of AVC-Intra,” Dave sums up. “Since our clients demand the best HD images we can provide, this may become our major production format for the future.”