How does H265 work when it comes to post production?Īt the moment, this is still a little tricky, just as it was for the early days of H264. If we considered a vehicle moving from left to right within a frame, the H265 Codec will suspect that between two images that the car is moving forward, and predict the speed of movement of the pixels that make up the vehicle.
We would like to have a 10-bit colour sub-sampling for Colour Grading, and to support the introduction of new consumer displays that require BT.2020 colour space for HDR.Īll these new needs go far beyond the H264 standard, which does not support these features as they were very much in their infancy at the time of its standardisation.
So why should we retire the Codec? The main reason for this is that our needs are changing: So why the switch to H265?Īs we have seen, after being a standard for more than 15 years, H264 can be found everywhere. It is this reason alone that means many users continue to use proxies when shooting. The more efficient the Codec is, the more power is required for encoding and decoding during the edit. For example, if completing a static interview, the Codec will detect that the background does not change and therefore only deal with the interviewee.Īs we can see in this illustration, the Codec will only detect what changes from one image to another. The Codec will then only keep what has changed within the image. The camera will only record one image every X images (often that number is 12).In other words, if 50 pixels are identical, it will keep only one as it has calculated that the other 49 are the same. Without getting too technical(!), the Codec firstly analyses an image, and thanks to clever algorithms, it will cut the image into a grid and eliminate everythign that is redundant through prediction.The Codec (COmpression/DECompression) makes it possible to ensure that a video that requires a data rate of 800 Mbps only needs 50 at an equal level of visual quality. What is a Codec ?Ĭodecs are one of the fundamentals when it comes to in-camera design and content delivery.
H264 needed a refresh to support 4K production, hence why the standardisation of H265 has come at the right time. Now that we have seen an increase in image resolution to 4K and the use of 50p instead of 25p, this has multiplied everything even more.
Can you imagine sending files in ProRes HQ to mobile devices over 4G?! We didn’t think so, either. H264 was seen as a major reason for the explosion of platforms such as YouTube, as it solved the problem of reducing the file sizes of video content for streaming, which up until that point had been a major challenge for everyone. It allowed us to reduce the file sizes of our content in a revolutionary way when compared to MPEG-2 and other predecessors of video compression. H264 (or MPEG-4 AVC) has held its own for over 15 years, and for good reason. As a result, we wanted to provide an overview of the Codec and what it means for us. It is already found in cameras from Panasonic including the CX350, EVA1, GH5 and now the S1. Glossary H264 has been a staple of video production since its inception in 2003, and has now been updated thanks to the new H265/HEVC standard, which promises to be twice as efficient.