UHD Production Codecs - the agony of choice

Video production equipment uses different codecs and settings to balance competing requirements, such as trading off between bitrate and quality. The introduction of UHDTV and HDR adds to the number of codec implementations, making codec choices harder. To help their Members evaluate the visual quality of new video production codecs, the EBU and the IRT have organized expert viewings of the latest production codecs. Based on the plans revealed at IBC 2019, more than 200 possible codec configurations were identified. After a voting round by broadcasters, more than 40 of these configurations were selected for actual testing. The focus was on real-world products, not laboratory prototypes. Seven generations were encoded for each configuration. The PSNR of all sequences was calculated. Subsequently the 1^st, 4^th and 7^th generation of each sequence was scored by expert viewers. The results indicate that overall, the tested codec configurations perform well up to the 7^th generation. For some of the algorithms a small quality degradation was seen in noise behavior and spatial resolution but no difference in dynamic range was noticeable. There is a small discernible difference of the performance for the different transfer functions.

Published

2020-11

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

Production Codecs, 2160p, 1080p, HDR, SDR, ITU-R BT.2100, ITU-R BT.2020, ITU-R BT.709, HLG, PQ

DOI

10.5594/M001902