AVC-Intra

AVC-Intra is a type of video coding developed by Panasonic, and then supported in products made by other companies. AVC-Intra is available in Panasonic's high definition broadcast products, such as, for example, their P2 card equipped broadcast cameras.

Panasonic announced AVC-Intra codec support in April 2007. The use of AVC-Intra provides production quality HD video at bit rates more normally associated with electronic news gathering applications, permitting full resolution, 10-bit field capture of high quality HD imagery in one piece camera-recorders.

AVC-Intra is compliant with the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard and Panasonic claims to follow the SMPTE RP 2027–2007 recommended practice specification. Analysis by the x264 project has shown that Panasonic does not comply with this specification

AVC-Intra was intended for video professionals who have to store HD digital video for editing and archiving. It defines 10-bit intra-frame only compression, which is easy for editing and preserves maximum video quality. The technology significantly outperforms the older HDV (MPEG2 based) and DVCPRO HD (DV based) formats, allowing the codec in certain conditions to maintain better quality in half the storage space of DVCPRO HD.

AVC-Intra defines two classes:

Common to both classes;

Panasonic's implementation of AVC-Intra codec has following limitations: 8 × 8 transform only, 8 × 8 intra prediction only, 10 slices per picture, MBAFF for interlace material, custom quantization matrices for each class and each resolution.

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.

...
Wikipedia