Question re: bitrate for Nikon DSLRs
- Thread starter rc444
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Blackpeppers
Member
Hi,
It's about 20 Mbps in VBR.
It's about 20 Mbps in VBR.
King-Pin Lei
Member
Hi,
I just noticed your post. The datarates on the newer cameras are a bit complicated. I actually looked into the datarates for the D7000 and wrote about it in an article about the D7000. Hopefully it clears up this nonsense that because the D7000's datarate is not as high as Canon's datarates, it is no good. Basically, Nikon uses much smarter encoding algorithms for it's H264 encoding. Here's the bit on datarates from my article:
"4) Decent datarates – this is where it gets a little tricky on the D7000. Early on, I noticed on the online forums that people were becoming disappointed when they found out that the HD video data rate was more than half that of Canon’s. While technically this is true, the D7000 does use a tighter compression in its movie recordings. It basically allows for low quality 11 Mbps and a high quality mode with a 20 Mbps datarate. This seems to be a far cry from the datarate of roughly 45 Mbps on Canon’s 60D & T2i. Normally more compression is a bad thing because it means quite a bit of information is removed. Digging deeper, I found this to be not entirely true for the D7000. When analyzing sample HD video frames by zooming in and pixel peeping, I did not see any mud or heavy artifacting normally associated with such a heavy compression.
A good example of this is with the Panasonic GH1 (no firmware hack) with it’s 17 Mbps compression. When Panasonic’s GH1 compresses its video, if subjects have motion in them, the heavy compression muddied and softened the video quality a lot. Nikon, on the other hand, seemed to have employed a very smart H.264 compression scheme. Looking for an official answer about the compression codec, I e-mailed Jim Eyre, the Nikon representative here in Toronto Canada and asked him about it. He revealed that Nikon uses B-Frame-based H.264 compression in the D7000. Now that explains it. B-frame compression is a smarter compression that analyzes and processes both the previous frame and the forward frame (the “B” in B-Frames stands for Bi-directional) in each block of a video stream. This way, more detail is preserved even when encoded in a low data rate. This explains why the Nikon D7000 video quality still looks good, even at more than half the data rate of Canon’s encoded video."
If you're interested in checking out my whole article, here's the link:
http://www.rgbfilter.com/?p=13939
Hope this helps.
I just noticed your post. The datarates on the newer cameras are a bit complicated. I actually looked into the datarates for the D7000 and wrote about it in an article about the D7000. Hopefully it clears up this nonsense that because the D7000's datarate is not as high as Canon's datarates, it is no good. Basically, Nikon uses much smarter encoding algorithms for it's H264 encoding. Here's the bit on datarates from my article:
"4) Decent datarates – this is where it gets a little tricky on the D7000. Early on, I noticed on the online forums that people were becoming disappointed when they found out that the HD video data rate was more than half that of Canon’s. While technically this is true, the D7000 does use a tighter compression in its movie recordings. It basically allows for low quality 11 Mbps and a high quality mode with a 20 Mbps datarate. This seems to be a far cry from the datarate of roughly 45 Mbps on Canon’s 60D & T2i. Normally more compression is a bad thing because it means quite a bit of information is removed. Digging deeper, I found this to be not entirely true for the D7000. When analyzing sample HD video frames by zooming in and pixel peeping, I did not see any mud or heavy artifacting normally associated with such a heavy compression.
A good example of this is with the Panasonic GH1 (no firmware hack) with it’s 17 Mbps compression. When Panasonic’s GH1 compresses its video, if subjects have motion in them, the heavy compression muddied and softened the video quality a lot. Nikon, on the other hand, seemed to have employed a very smart H.264 compression scheme. Looking for an official answer about the compression codec, I e-mailed Jim Eyre, the Nikon representative here in Toronto Canada and asked him about it. He revealed that Nikon uses B-Frame-based H.264 compression in the D7000. Now that explains it. B-frame compression is a smarter compression that analyzes and processes both the previous frame and the forward frame (the “B” in B-Frames stands for Bi-directional) in each block of a video stream. This way, more detail is preserved even when encoded in a low data rate. This explains why the Nikon D7000 video quality still looks good, even at more than half the data rate of Canon’s encoded video."
If you're interested in checking out my whole article, here's the link:
http://www.rgbfilter.com/?p=13939
Hope this helps.
Last edited:
Nikon's 20Mbps B-frame-enabled H.264 encoder produces 1080p video files that are comparable in image quality and data rate to the 24p AVCHD files recorded by an unhacked Panasonic GH2. In extremely detailed shots at 4X magnification, I have seen traces of macroblock artifacts in both cameras, but this would only rarely be visible in well-exposed video files.