Sony Expands XAVC format to accelerate 4k development

[Chris Medico]

https://blog.sony.com/press/sony-exp...nsumer-market/

[Jack Zhang]

Ah, an XDCAM EX replacement has finally arrived. 4:2:2 HD in a MP4 container sounds very good! Here's hoping the HD implementations have 1080/50p and 1080/60p (and 50Mbps or higher)

This may also be the HDV of the 4K era. (in 4K resolutions)

[David Heath]

I think the best part of that news is:

XAVC is introduced as an open format, to serve as a driver to promote and establish 4K content production infrastructure. A license program is proposed not only for editing software manufacturers but also for hardware manufacturers. Currently, over 60 manufacturers have filed a request to become a licensee, and 31 manufacturers’ products plan on their support for Sony XAVC format and workflow.

In other words, "adopt it as a format with confidence"!

I think we can expect to see quite a lot of products based on XAVC in the next year!

As a word of caution, long-GOP XAVC is likely to need quite a lot of processing power to edit natively compared to some current formats. Don't expect 1080 XDCAM to go away anytime soon. For many purposes it will be good enough quality wise, and far easier to work with than XAVC.

[Steve Connor]

Well my 2008 MacPro with ati4870 card handles 4K XAVC pretty well, it's not a great deal slower than 1080 XDCAM in edit operation at least

[David Heath]

Originally Posted by Steve Connor

Well my 2008 MacPro with ati4870 card handles 4K XAVC pretty well, it's not a great deal slower than 1080 XDCAM in edit operation at least

It can be difficult to generalise, but it's reasonable to expect long-GOP XAVC to require more power than I-frame only, and it is likely to depend not only on the power of the computer, but what the edit is consisting of.

Straightforward cut editing may be one thing, but need the computer to play back more than one stream at a time, and that may show up such differences between codecs.

But computers tend to get more powerful all the time. I remember when simple SD MPEG2 was a problem compared to DV...... :-)

[Jack Zhang]

Originally Posted by David Heath

In other words, "adopt it as a format with confidence"!

...after you've bought the license from Sony...

In my words, truly open is open source like x264 or ffmpeg.

[David Heath]

Originally Posted by Jack Zhang

...after you've bought the license from Sony...

In my words, truly open is open source like x264 or ffmpeg.

Fair point, but I think what is being said is probably the best anyone can realistically expect, and similar to comparable situations in the past.

My understanding is that end users won't have to pay any licence - it's the manufacturers of equipment or software that want to use XAVC? So the same as buying such as a VHS machine in the past - the manufacturer may have had to pay a licence fee to JVC, but it would be transparent to the customer.

What I really meant is a user can have more confidence than if Sony were intending to keep it as closed, proprietary technology, only able to be used within Sony products.