Contribution Standards

"The September/October 2007 edition of Cable and Satellite International has an interesting article titled "Will the real contribution standard please stand up?"

It discusses the potential for JPEG2000 winning over MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 in the broadcast contribution area (i.e. dealing with content creation and acquisition rather than distribution and consumption).

As it is an upstream process, video codecs used for contribution need to focus on quality, integrity and ease of editing. JPEG2000 has some key differentiators which make it highly suitable in this arena:

Near-lossless and lossless encoding: this is important for archiving of source material and also means that multiple encode/decode steps in the contribution chain will result in minimal quality loss.

Intra-frame only compression: as there is no inter-frame compression, accurate frame based edits can be done easily and quickly.

Symmetrical encode/decode complexity: the low complexity of encode together with intra-frame only compression ensures low latency encoding which is ideal for live events.

You can download the article in PDF format here."

By Nick Ryan, Nativ - Future Video