HDTV video compression for professional studio applications

This paper addresses the issue of video compression within professional studio environments. In particular, the study concerns the degradation of the video quality in the case of successive encoding/decoding operations in the presence of pixel shifting to reflect some processing that may occur during the production workflow. The three codecs currently discussed within the professional community have been considered, namely JPEG2000, L264/MPEG-4 AVC and DIRAC and applied to HDTV 4:2:2 10 bits contents. The main contribution of the proposed paper is to provide inputs for professional video studios to select appropriate technologies for their business. By stressing the different encoders, it also underlines the limitations or difficulties some schemes may have compared to the others. Finally, some interesting perspectives are proposed to improve the requirements for possible future encoding schemes.