cyvideo
Veteran
Oh it's well alive!
Those who know Cineform seem to keep coming back to it or never leave it. It is my favorite codec for sure. I think it's just that Cineform was not a product of Apple or Avid so therefore never had the locked in following of editors who had ProRes and DNX as part of their NLE tool sets. Cineform is based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and uses scalar quantization and has many parallels with JPEG 2000 from an efficiency point of view. It is for this reason that the bulk of major film production studios, Hollywood et al, use JPEG 2000 from master to archive. DWT for them has proven to be the best combination of coding efficiency, size, scalability and quality.
The Cineform codec has been officially standardized by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) as the SMPTE ST 2073 VC-5 video compression standard which is the new open codec standard for video acquisition and post-production. In other words, this means that now the codec can be easily adopted and implemented by more camera manufacturers and software companies, hence becoming even more accessible and suitable for a wider range of applications. For movie studios and now the broadcast industry DWT is becoming the favored flavor over DCT based compression. Compared to JPEG2000, CineForm has a slightly higher data rate at similar PSNRs (peak signal to noise ratios) with the benefit of being up to 7 times faster to encode/decode on the same hardware. I find a few people ask "What bit rate is that?" for the different levels. Below is a bit rate comparison chart.
https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/jpeg-2000-from-master-to-archive
Chris Young
