Harmonic Rhozet Carbon Coder to Support Panasonic AVC-Intra HD

The Rhozet Carbon Coder video transcoding solution from Harmonic will support Panasonic’s high-performance AVC-Intra HD compression technology by April 2008, according to Harmonic.

“The AVC-Intra format is fast gaining ground with broadcasters, offering significantly better compression efficiency than older codec families yet maintaining very high picture quality,” said David Trescot, vice president of the Rhozet business unit at Harmonic. “Support for AVC-Intra confirms our commitment to deliver the format support our customers require, for broadcast, broadband or mobile applications.”

The AVC-Intra compression scheme complies with the MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) open standard, and provides 10-bit 4:2:2 full-raster compression at the same bit-rate as DVCPRO HD. It achieves DVCPRO HD quality at half the bit-rate, effectively creating a new level of HD production while lowering storage and distribution costs. Unlike Long GOP approaches, AVC-Intra was explicitly designed and optimized for broadcast and production use rather than low-bandwidth distribution, Harmonic said.

Carbon Coder can run as a stand-alone application or as part of a multinode, fully automated rendering farm.