AVC-Intra

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Although it goes by its own name, this is just one variation of H.264 as implemented by Panasonic for professional video recording. It uses intra-frame (spatial) compression, so there is no temporal compression artifacts. It produces high quality images at very low bit rates. This format is one of two compression formats available on some Panasonic HD cameras using P2 cards for video recording (the other format being DVCPRO HD). There are substantial benefits to recording in AVC-Intra over DVCPRO HD. Both formats can record at 100Mbit/sec, yet the AVC-Intra codec can record higher quality, full raster (full frame) sizes and 10-bit for the same storage and bit rate as DVCPRO HD. AVC-Intra has two recording modes: 50Mbit/sec and 100Mbit/sec. The 50Mbit/sec version uses anamorphic HD frame sizes (1440x1080), and 4:2:0 color sampling, where the 100Mbit/sec version uses full size HD frame sizes (1920x1080 and 1280x720) and 4:2:2 color sampling. Panasonic claims the quality of the 100Mbit/sec version is comparable to recording to a HD-D5 tape deck.