Zaxel demonstrated 4K RGB H.264 and 4K RAW H.264 at NAB 2013

Santa Clara, CA (April 21, 2013) — Zaxel has developed 4K RGB H.264 and 4K RAW H.264 codecs and demonstrated at Zaxel's booth in NAB 2013.

Much more contents are available in RGB and RAW formats in 4K than HD or SD. This is because most high end 4K video cameras capture video as RAW formats or RGB 444 formats. All the 4K CG contents for animation and engineering use are also in RGB 444 formats.

Intra frame compression used in post production and digital cinema such as ProRes and JPEG 2000 can directly compress RGB 444. Therefore, huge video quality degradation associated with color space conversion and chroma subsampling to YUV 422 or YUV 420 can be avoided.

However, for distribution purposes we need higher compression ratio of inter frame compression, and the standard inter frame compression such as MPEG and H.264 can handle only YUV 422 or YUV 420. This introduces subsampling artifacts such as jaggy edges in addition to other compression artifacts.

Zaxel's 4K RGB H.264 directly compresses uncompressed RGB 444 video into H.264 formats, thus avoiding the subsampling artifacts such as jaggy edges.

RAW H.264 also directly compressed uncompressed RAW video into H.264 formats without color space conversion.

RGB H.264 and RAW H.264 are ideal formats for eCinema servers and home theater players, since projectors and displays are natively RGB 444 output devices and can eliminate another color space conversions.

Zaxel's 4K RGB H.264 and 4K RAW H.264 decompression runs in real time on PC without hardware accelerator.