Advanced Video Compression - Part
1
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1) | MJPEG - Motion Joint-Picture-Experts-Group
Compression
Origins: All of you know what JPEG is, I'm sure. If you've surfed the web, then you've seen a JPEG image. JPEG was a compression scheme developed by the Joint Picture Experts Group for the compression of images. Now imagine instead of compressing single images as JPEGs, compressing 24 to 30 images a second and storing them in sequence. That's essentially what MJPEG is - it's the JPEG compression algorithm applied to frames of video. How it Works: MJPEG is a lossy codec. JPEG uses what's called a psycho-optical algorithm, or a visual-perception algorithm. Basically, what this means is that JPEG exploits flaws and short comings in the human perceptual system. The human eye has a much harder time differentiating between slight differences in color than differences in brightness. Also, JPEG plays other various tricks, but what you wind up with is an image which looks about the same to the human eye. Benefits: There's already lots of MJPEG hardware already out there, including very cheap pieces of hardware like the Pinnacle DC10, the Matrox Marvel series, and lots and LOTS of other pieces of hardware (scaling into the tens of thousands of dollars for the old high-end Matrox DigiSuite hardware). MJPEG can achieve decent compression rates and good image quality for most natural images like live video. Disadvantages: Here's where MJPEG starts looking much
less attractive. First off, JPEG does not compress anime well.
Due to the way that JPEG works, abrupt changes in color and brightness
(for instance, thin black lines in between different blocks of
color) are not handled well by JPEG, which means MJPEG suffers
from the same problem. JPEG has a problem with sharp edges which
is unavoidable, partly because the standard was meant to compress
natural images like scanned photographs. Recommendations: MJPEG is an old standard. JPEG itself
is very outdated - newer image compression formats are vastly
superior (like PNG or the upcoming JPEG2000 standard which uses
wavelet compression). There are much more refined and better Discrete
Cosine Transform-based compression algorithms out there (like
DV) that I would recommend over MJPEG. If you've got hardware
that supports MJPEG and that's all, then by all means use it,
but if you haven't bought hardware yet, I recommend going with
DV equipment. The only time you should use MJPEG otherwise is
for fast-editing temporary files, but DON'T use them as your final
source. |
2) |
DV - The Best Consumer Digital Format Available Today Origins: In 1997 and 1998, a consortium of 10 electronics
companies (Matsushita Electric Industrial Corp (Panasonic), Sony,
Victor Corporation of Japan (JVC), Philips Electronics, N.V.,
Sanyo Electric, Hitachi, Sharp, Thompson Multimedia (RCA), Mitsubishi
Electric Corporation, and Toshiba) came together to form a standard
for use in both consumer and professional digital video compression.
DV was finalized in 1998, and first appeared in camcorders in
1999. How it Works: DV is a lossy codec. I've heard lots and lots of misinformation floating around about how "DV is lossless," which it definitely is not. DV is a different approach towards a Discrete Cosine Transform algorithm than what was taken with MJPEG, partly because DV is a newer standard. I won't bore you with all the gory details, but lets just say that in every respect except one, the codec is technically superior. That one issue is that DV is fixed to 720x480 in 29.97 FPS (or 720x576 in 25 FPS) at 25MBit/second. That means very little flexibility if you want to do low-quality previews of your video or you're pressed for disk space (25MBit/second is 3.4MB/sec, or roughly 5 minutes per GigaByte!). Like MJPEG, DV is a good editing codec because it doesn't use any inter-frame compression, thus every frame is a "keyframe." Benefits: DV looks very good. VERY good. Better than MJPEG
in every respect. DV is good enough that it's used by both consumers
and many professionals as a compression standard. Variants of
the algorithm exist such as DVCAM and DVCPRO, which are essentially
slight modifications that make them more durable when stored on
tape, but the actual compression algorithm is identical. The only
reason more pros don't use it is because it stores color in 4:1:1
sample rate (meaning there's 1/4 the chrominance samples as there
are luminance samples). To make up for this, formats like Digital-S
from JVC and DVCPRO50 from Panasonic use 2 DV codecs in parallel
at 50MBit/second to store 4:2:2 color data. But none of that will
really matter to you very much if only do a recompression once
or twice. Disadvantages: As stated above, it's rather restrictive in terms of framerate, resolution, and datarate. There are also issues editing DV in Adobe Premiere 5.1 - due to the way DV data is stored, depending on whether your FireWire device captures DV in "Type 1" or "Type 2" AVI files, you may be unable to open them in Premiere. Premiere 6.0 doesn't have this issue, and if you have a card like the DV500 which is meant to work with Premiere, its files will work fine. Recommendations: Unless you have the disk space/enormous
processing power/hard drive throughput to edit in Uncompressed
or Huffyuv, this is the way to go |
3) |
Huffyuv - Lossless Video Compression, for a price. Origins: A guy named Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote this wonderful little codec, located here, which is a lossless compression codec for both YUV and RGB video data. How it Works: Huffyuv is a lossless codec. The name stands for Huffman-compressed YUV. Huffman was a guy who came up with something called "Huffman entropy encoding" which is basically what all lossless compression is originally based off of (Huffman coding is used in things like ZIP, RAR, etc). So you could say that basically Huffyuv simply ZIPs every frame for its compression. Benefits: Obviously, the biggest benefit is that you have a perfect recreation of the original video data (unless you do colorspace conversions). That means no matter how many times you recompress the video in Huffyuv, you'll still have the same video data that you had in the beginning. This is a very nice thing. Disadvantages: Unfortunately, while compressing video in Huffyuv is pretty fast, decompressing it is not. Also, due to the very large space requirements (Huffyuv takes a LOT of disk space, sometimes 4x more than even DV), disk throughput becomes a very large factor. Playback at full resolution and full framerate is a daunting task for even the fastest computers. Recommendations: I only use Huffyuv when I want to store something, only to open it in another application like VirtualDub so I can do some filtering/etc on it. If you have a capture card that allows you to choose your codec while capturing and Huffyuv is an option, by all means use it. But it does take quite a lot of disk space and processing power. |