sanveer Posted March 6, 2015 Share Posted March 6, 2015 Watching all the new launches of New Cameras, and the issue with video, and understanding the whole thing from the perspective of RAW on the Canon Cameras (ala MagicLantern), I realise, that the main issue with vieo in cameras, is1. The Codec; and 2. Features in cameras (a lot of cameras disable 24p or 60p or something else). This is my suggestion:1. Codecs should be available to be bought and installed (or installed by retailers), over the shelf. 2. Sony has a superb new codec, the XAVC, wherein they have a 4-2-2- codec at 50Mbps. Maybe they should allow anyone and everyone to install it on their cameras. I am guessing that most new cameras would have the processing power to run the codec. 3. Democracy should be the new feature. While it is superb to have a hundred new cameras every year, the Manufacturers actually completely miss Introducing new cameras, from the Perspective of the Needs of a Customer. Like the Sony A5100 has a touch screen, but most features on the screen except focus have been Disabled. Apart from the fact that the menu is pretty lousy, too, and the Picture Profile is Not FLAT. 4. The whole External Recorder bit is also bullshit IMHO. When the SanDisk Extreme PRO Card can do 280 MBps, I am quite certain that most cameras can record the video internal AND keep the quality as good as an external recorder (especially when the Canon's do 14 Bit Raw with MagicLantern). What do you guys think? Should there be democratisation of Codecs (and features)? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jcs Posted March 6, 2015 Share Posted March 6, 2015 422 XAVC and 420 XAVC-S are marketing names from Sony for H.264 with specific settings. So any camera which currently supports H.264 should be able to support these formats. It's not likely there are additional patent costs. Typically higher-end features of the H.264 spec are reserved for the pro cameras for business reasons.If we lived in a world without patents and all the cameras were open source, democratization of codecs could be possible. But we don't, so it's not going to happen any time soon (open source cameras are coming and someday H.264's patents will expire). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sanveer Posted March 6, 2015 Author Share Posted March 6, 2015 Oh ok. I did some reading up on codecs after you posted your reply. And, I realised, that the end user doesn't specifically pay for them, and that is the reason that the codec market isn't growing as big as it should, and why the profit margins can be more democratic. I am sure for a few dollars (well under $10), consortiums who own these codecs could sell them to consumers, and make a reasonable amount of profits, on them. Not to mention, make consumers move to higher bit rates, selling accessories to be able to edit, grade, and view the same.Also, if they were more easily available, people could test all sorts of codecs to see, which they are most comfortable with, rather than just live with the ones that come on their cameras.There are open source codecs, but they aren't free. They mostly have 1-time payments. Also, some of them are in dispute with the more popular ones. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jimmy Posted March 6, 2015 Share Posted March 6, 2015 What saddens me a little is GoPro bought the Cineform raw codec and has yet to do anything with it, bar the Kine cams (and no major manufacturers seem interested in licensing it).It could be such a great solution for low filesize raw. No, it is not as perfect as cDNG and REDraw, but it is still exceptional. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jcs Posted March 7, 2015 Share Posted March 7, 2015 None of the 'free' codecs (e.g. WebM/VP9, Theora) are as good as H.264 let alone H.265. If any of them ever became popular, and were included in all NLEs like H.264 so they'd be practical and useful, 'submarine' patents would pop up to stop them. The way the patent system is set up, it's pretty much impossible to create a competing codec without stepping on an existing patent.The Cineform codecs are cool in terms of quality (I purchased them from time to time over the years), however they just couldn't make them very reliable. Wavelet compression is useful for light compression only, as DCT-based methods (such as ProRes, DNxHD, H.264/265, pretty much everything else), are much better for high compression ratios for efficiency ('long GOP', e.g. interframe (IPB) vs. intraframe-only (I-Only)). For light compression and high bitrates, ProRes is the leader. When efficiency is important, H.264 (and soon H.265) is the leader. Even 'ancient' 50Mbps 422 MPEG2 (long GOP) is still very popular for broadcast- it was recently added to ARRI's cameras. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andrgl Posted March 8, 2015 Share Posted March 8, 2015 If we lived in a world without patents and all the cameras were open source, democratization of codecs could be possible. But we don't, so it's not going to happen any time soon (open source cameras are coming and someday H.264's patents will expire).How are most cameras doing their encoding: FPGA or ASIC? That's something to consider. I'd wager most cameras use ASIC chips, though I could be wrong. Plus reprogramming an FPGA would probably be too risky for a manufacturer to consider. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ryan Monster Posted March 14, 2015 Share Posted March 14, 2015 I agree that'd be a great idea Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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