New information regarding H.265 on the Panasonic GH5

[hmcindie]

I find it funny when people complain about All-i codecs being "inefficient". That's the whole point! Those "efficient" ipb codecs destroy motion. One of the best ways of getting around macroblocking from motion is to increase the bitrate and make the frames separately encoded. If that's inefficient then give me more of that.

[marcuswolschon]

8 minutes ago, hmcindie said:

I find it funny when people complain about All-i codecs being "inefficient". That's the whole point! Those "efficient" ipb codecs destroy motion. One of the best ways of getting around macroblocking from motion is to increase the bitrate and make the frames separately encoded. If that's inefficient then give me more of that.

Who says I'm complaining about it being inefficient?

I complain about it being either just 400Mbps or Panasonic for having chosen a 400Mbps All-I but no 300Mbps IPB along with it.

[Orangenz]

 

Quote

The GH5 enables recording from the full width (17.3mm) and height of the sensor (13mm) without cropping. That’s a larger anamorphic sensor area than the Sony F55 and puts it in-line with the Sony F65. 

Matt Frazer has said several times across several videos that this is not the case. It is around a 18.7 MP crop in 4:3 from the sensor. He said it is not going to be a 20MP 4:3 video stream. Even Griffin is misunderstanding this and repeats the "full sensor 4:3" mistake in his question to Matt. Matt corrects him eventually at 10:43

 

[theSUBVERSIVE]

@joema Yeah, after asking it I went and read a bit more about it. My doubt came up to be because Andrew had said that HEVC was by its nature Long GOP but I've read a comment by Vitaliy Kiselev saying that that's not correct and that not only it has All-I but it's significantly more efficient as an Intra codec than AVC was. So I take his word in that. I understand that it's not so simple, but I hope that Panasonic brings HEVC for other modes if they can, DJI already adopted it and they are offering all sorts of choices, from RAW, ProRes to H.264 and H.265, Panasonic could at least offer AVC and HEVC.

@marcuswolschon the word efficient was not used in the best way and that's why people looked at it as a complain. It's hard to use the word efficient comparing apples and oranges, maybe you should had talked about compression rate instead of efficiency.

Anyway, Black Magic Design is already using some UHS-II cards for their 4K recorder up to around 120MB/s, so indeed there are already cards that could sustain 400Mbps. Panasonic saying it's because there is no V60 cards is just BS, the truth is that THEY don't have the codec ready yet. And as I said, for some reason manufacturers haven't done the tests or I don't know why they don't label the V60 and V90 capable cards with it.

Just like HEVC, All-I is a great option to have and for those that can and will take advantage of it, having options is always good. The lack of support for All-I 10-bit 422 hardware acceleration is interesting and that explains why some people have complained that they didn't see any gain by using All-I AVC footage in terms of being less tasking. For most people, they will probably keep using IPB. An All-I HEVC would be very interesting too.

[marcuswolschon]

Comparing H.264 IPB (what people see every day) to H.264 All-I is hardly comparing apples to oranges.

[theSUBVERSIVE]

1 minute ago, marcuswolschon said:

Comparing H.264 IPB (what people see every day) to H.264 All-I is hardly comparing apples to oranges.

I'm not saying that, really. I said that using the word "efficiency" in that example is like comparing two different things.

If I was to use the word efficiency I would compare one codec to another or maybe All-I to All-I, IPB to IPB, because that's the adjective you use to measure quality, otherwise I would just talk about compression rate.

Saying efficiency like you did, it does sound like you are saying All-I is bad compared to IPB when they simply have different applications and as far as I understood, you simply wanted to say that All-I has a lower compression rate than IPB and not really saying one is better or worse than the other. But when you used the word "inefficient" that's what it sounded like.

Anyway, this is irrelevant, I was just explaining why people thought you were complaining about All-I.

[Jeroen de Cloe]

As far as I could understand the H.265 spec, it CAN be intraframe and it is not "long-GOP in nature". HEVC is significantly more efficient compared to H.264 as intra codec.

[markr041]

24 minutes ago, Jeroen de Cloe said:

As far as I could understand the H.265 spec, it CAN be intraframe and it is not "long-GOP in nature". HEVC is significantly more efficient compared to H.264 as intra codec.

You are correct; it has been said in this thread before. Yet it is not corrected by the original person who made that false claim. In fact, there are a lot of false claims about H265 in this thread (only better at low bitrates).

Panasonic has not been forthcoming either about why it chose to use only the old, inefficient H264 for intra or 4K long.

[sudopera]

On 1/13/2017 at 7:45 AM, theSUBVERSIVE said:

Anyway, Black Magic Design is already using some UHS-II cards for their 4K recorder up to around 120MB/s, so indeed there are already cards that could sustain 400Mbps. Panasonic saying it's because there is no V60 cards is just BS, the truth is that THEY don't have the codec ready yet. And as I said, for some reason manufacturers haven't done the tests or I don't know why they don't label the V60 and V90 capable cards with it.

You forget that Panny makes SD cards also, maybe they are waiting for the release of their new fast cards. I am not saying that this is the case but it is a possibility, especially if you look how they thrown their proprietary P2 cards into Varicam LT instead of widely accepted CFast 2.0.

[theSUBVERSIVE]

8 hours ago, sudopera said:

You forget that Panny makes SD cards also, maybe they are waiting for the release of their new fast cards. I am not saying that this is the case but it is a possibility, especially if you look how they thrown their proprietary P2 cards into Varicam LT instead of widely accepted CFast 2.0.

No, I didn't forget and at the same time it's not like Panasonic rely on that for their income, even if their were late to fast SD Cards that's still not something that would take so long to solve or anything that would prevent them from adopting the 400Mbps codec, most certainly it's because they haven't finalized the codec yet.

More importantly, it was said in a couple of GH5 interviews that Panasonic has announced V60 and V90 cards at CES 2017 already.

[Don Kotlos]

33 minutes ago, theSUBVERSIVE said:

No, I didn't forget and at the same time it's not like Panasonic rely on that for their income, even if their were late to fast SD Cards that's still not something that would take so long to solve or anything that would prevent them from adopting the 400Mbps codec, most certainly it's because they haven't finalized the codec yet.

Since it appears they are going to use the H264 for the 400 option, then the codec is already developed :

http://pro-av.panasonic.net/en/sales_o/p2/AVC-ULTRAoverview.pdf

But if it needs some modification for GH5, I am not sure how you are so confident that it is the case, or they need 4 extra months to do so. 

Quote

More importantly, it was said in a couple of GH5 interviews that Panasonic has announced V60 and V90 cards at CES 2017 already.

Yes, but had they released the 400 option along with the GH5 without any V60 cards actually available, then people would try to find which cards work which don't and that would just create a very bad experience. Look at what happened with E-M1ii and the card incompatibility. 

Panasonic has not been forthcoming either about why it chose to use only the old, inefficient H264 for intra or 4K long.

My guess is H265 still somewhat troublesome to edit with the majority of systems, and it might be the case they will release an AVC-ULTRA v2 based on H265 sometime in the future which can come as a firmware update. 

[sudopera]

6 hours ago, theSUBVERSIVE said:

No, I didn't forget and at the same time it's not like Panasonic rely on that for their income, even if their were late to fast SD Cards that's still not something that would take so long to solve or anything that would prevent them from adopting the 400Mbps codec, most certainly it's because they haven't finalized the codec yet.

More importantly, it was said in a couple of GH5 interviews that Panasonic has announced V60 and V90 cards at CES 2017 already.

I just think that this is a possibility because if I remember correctly, when GH4 came out they advertised beside it their new released SD cards as capable to capture 4K video, but they couldn't guarantee for other manufacturers cards, which happened to be a load of bullshit.

[theSUBVERSIVE]

6 hours ago, Don Kotlos said:

Since it appears they are going to use the H264 for the 400 option, then the codec is already developed :

http://pro-av.panasonic.net/en/sales_o/p2/AVC-ULTRAoverview.pdf

But if it needs some modification for GH5, I am not sure how you are so confident that it is the case, or they need 4 extra months to do so. 

Yes, but had they released the 400 option along with the GH5 without any V60 cards actually available, then people would try to find which cards work which don't and that would just create a very bad experience. Look at what happened with E-M1ii and the card incompatibility. 

My guess is H265 still somewhat troublesome to edit with the majority of systems, and it might be the case they will release an AVC-ULTRA v2 based on H265 sometime in the future which can come as a firmware update. 

I don't quite understand why did you conclude that I'm oh so confident it's going to be this or that. I'm not betting, I'm just speculating. If AVC Ultra also has 400Mbps and HEVC would take less than half of that bitrate, to conclude it has more chances of being based on AVC Ultra is not a matter of confidence, just logic. It might be HEVC, but it doesn't look like that since both are 400Mbps. Also you can't base on AVC Ultra to make a HEVC codec, to begin with it would be AVC, since that means H.264 and how H.265 works is very different, it can't be based on a different codec, it would simply be a new codec. Maybe HEVC Ultra? hahahaha...

That's BS already. The GH5 is in development for how long? Didn't they know that it would need V60 cards for 400Mbps codec? Sure they did. I'll quote what I already wrote.

"Anyway, Black Magic Design is already using some UHS-II cards for their 4K recorder up to around 120MB/s, so indeed there are already cards that could sustain 400Mbps. Panasonic saying it's because there is no V60 cards is just BS, the truth is that THEY don't have the codec ready yet. And as I said, for some reason manufacturers haven't done the tests or I don't know why they don't label the V60 and V90 capable cards with it."

If Panasonic had the codec ready and they needed manufacturers to put V60 label on cards, it would be a simply matter of letting manufacturers know and since they already have cards that can sustain more tha V90 for minimum sequential writing speed, it would be just a mater of testing it and putting the label on it. It would certainly take less than 6-months to do so. So obviously it's not the cards that are not ready, but that's what the marketing is going to say, of course.

But I see no problem in delivering it via FW, it's better than having to wait longer for the camera.

[Ben Corwin]

I actually appreciate the softening nature of H.265. I think it would do the GH5 a service considering how sharp and noisy the image tends to be. Hopefully, they will extend the option of recording H.265 to the 150Mbps setting as well.

 

 

 

 

[theSUBVERSIVE]

Oh, there is another interesting bit regarding the GH5 and H.265.

The GH5 will support the HLG, which is a HDR standard, right? It has to be 10-bit 422 and that's something people already know and that's why the GH5 will support it but so far, H.264 doesn't support HLG and unless they add it or the GH5 starts to use VP9, the only other codec to support HLG is H.265. If so, this hints that either way, at least the HLG content will have to be output through HEVC.

[FannieJane]

Any computer can decode H.265 using software (in theory, at least). All that’s mandatory is software capable of handling H.265 and a file or stream encoded in it. The freeware VideoLAN player is currently your best bet, but support will be native to PCs with the release of Windows 10.

Software decoding isn’t the best option, however, because it’s not terribly efficient.

 

[Kisaha]

H265 is heavily supported from whatever hardware component is been produced since at least last year, be it mobile phone SOC, graphic card, cpu etc

Even my cheap Samsung TVs decode it natively.

It isn't anything questionable about it, it is just the present for most, and the future for all (together with the competitive codec).

It is made by the SAME consortium that did the H264 codec, to replace it, not compete against it, even the primitive H265 codec of NX cameras (2014) are producing some very nice (and small) files, especially with the up-ed hacked bitrate.

It is just the adoption level is slower, and the financial crisis had something to do with it, as companies lost a lot of money this last decade, so didn't have so much money to invest for specialized items (white appliances and home electronics are much more profitable and mass marketed and consumed than video cameras. 10 years ago everyone were made cheap digital video cameras and every family owned and used at least one, now only a few manufacturers, and a lot less famillies!). 

New techonologies (especially 4K mobile recording, VR and 360 video) will make the H265 a necessity, the tech market just slowed down quite a bit, but I see them going up again, especially with markets such China and India consume video as much as they can (90% of them still using their mobile phones, but even a small percentage of these countries is a market bigger than South America/Africa/Oceania/Middle east put together!).

[joema]

35 minutes ago, Kisaha said:

H265 is heavily supported from whatever hardware component is been produced since at least last year, be it mobile phone SOC, graphic card, cpu etc...It isn't anything questionable about it, it is just the present for most, and the future for all (together with the competitive codec)....the adoption level is slower, and the financial crisis had something to do with it...

As I previously described, deployment of H265/HEVC has been slowed for non-technical reasons. There have been major disputes over licensing, royalties and intellectual property. At one point the patent holders were demanding a % of gross revenue from individual end users who encode H265 content. That is one reason Google developed the open source VP9 codec. The patent holders have recently retreated from their more egregious demands, but that negatively tainted H265 and has delayed deployment. 

The licensing and royalty issue is why the evaluation version of Premiere Pro does not have H265.

VP9 is replacing H264 on Youtube, and they will transition to VP9's successor AV1 soon. AV1 is also open source, not patent-encumbered, and significantly better than H265/HEVC: http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/What-Is-.../What-is-AV1-111497.aspx

Skylake's Quick Sync has partial hardware support for VP9 and Kaby Lake has full hardware support, but I don't know about AV1.

[joema]

1 hour ago, Ken Ross said:

Does anyone know if there are any plans for FCP to adopt H265?

That is a good question, but I don't think anyone knows the answer. Currently there seems little need for this since few cameras use H265. There is much greater need for updated and new camera formats such as MXF. Apple supports these either in FCPX or the downloadable Pro Video Formats: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1898?locale=en_US

Like Adobe does with Premiere Pro, Apple has a trial version of FCPX. If Apple added H265 support to FCPX, the licensing issues might force them to make a special "eval" version without H265. This confuses customers since they expect to evaluate the product against all codecs and formats. In fact Adobe claims the trial version of Premiere CC is absolutely full-featured, but it does not have H265 support. There is little Adobe can do about that since the H265 patent holders probably demand royalties from every copy, which conflicts with a free trial version.

No software developer likes making special versions. Even though the source code change may be small, it still requires separate full-spectrum testing for function, performance, reliability and regressions. Adobe went ahead and did this for their trial version, but Apple may have decided it's not worth the expense and effort at this time.

Also H265 is extremely compute-intensive to edit -- much more than H264. Except on a limited set of machines 4k H265 would likely require transcoding to provide good editing performance. The few people who need to edit H265 can already transcode it externally. That is not as convenient but until recently every Premiere user on earth had to externally transcode if they wanted proxy capability. Apple may think the few who need H265 support in FCPX can transcode externally for now.

[Kisaha]

This isn't exactly "recently" in our world, it is old news actually, imagine people are already preparing to declare 10bit video recording the absolute minimum even for cheap cameras, because GH5 will be out in a few months, Premiere support of H265 is a reality for a long time now. I personally transcode only when I give footage to FC editors.

As I already said, all the hardware that is coming for the past year and onwards supports H265. Ofcourse Apple doesn't care, they are perfectly fine to sell to normal people, not a few specialized freaks that demand more and more, for less and less!