Introduction
Panasonic has introduced AVC-I to the professional and broadcast industry with the view to offering producers more choice and a new, more powerful and efficient workflow for our complex and changing industry. Due to the rapidly emerging use of IT based systems for content creation and the need for a general production platform that meets the requirements of such systems, Panasonic’s AVC-I, a specialised H.264 codec scheme is now offered alongside the already widely adopted DV based compressions. Derived for high-end broadcast production AVC-I offers significantly better compression efficiency than older codec schemes such as MPEG-2 and a considerable superiority in terms of bandwidth, multi-generation and colour correction headroom.

The outline of MPEG-4 Part 10 H.264/AVC-I
AVC (Advanced Video Codec) owns it origin to the Joint Video Team (JVT) part of ISO (International Standards Organisation) who held a series of meetings during 2000-2003. Their purpose was to develop a superior video codec that achieves a similar picture quality as existing codec’s but with far less bandwidth. By using newly developed technologies which were not applicable to codec’s like MPEG-2 or the existing MPEG-4 systems at that time the new codec was standardised by the ISO and given the name H.264 As a standardisation organisation the ISO are not in a position to handle all the business related issues which are raised throughout the process of commercialising H.264, so between 2003 and 2005, the MPEG consortium introduced the new codec into the MPEG-4 family as MPEG-4 Part 10 H.264. At the same time Panasonic investigated what kind of modifications or constraints had to be introduced to H.264 in order to satisfy the broadcaster’s needs for a general production platform.