ZDF Commits To Panasonic AVC-Intra For HD Production

Panasonic PBITS Professional & Broadcast Systems has announced that Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), Germany's national public television broadcaster, has committed to AVC-Intra for future HD installations across the entire company.
The Mainz-based broadcaster is upgrading all of its facilities to be HDTV-capable and will introduce AVC-Intra technology as part of its HD roadmap.
Dr Andreas Bereczky, Production Director, ZDF, said: "ZDF sees the advantages of staying with intraframe-based coding in HD. AVC-Intra offers the best balance between picture quality and bandwidth, proven in the tests conducted by the EBU. As Panasonic works with third-party manufacturers developing AVC-Intra equipment, we will see an entirely new wave of products emerging rapidly to support the format."
With its I-Only compression, AVC-Intra produces remarkably stable images that are unaffected by adjacent frames and meets professional needs in virtually all situations and workflows. By selecting the most effective compression techniques from among those in compliance with the H.264 standard, AVC-Intra has doubled the compression ratio of MPEG-2, even with I-only compression. Its intraframe predictive and context-adaptive entropy coding are particularly effective methods for boosting compression efficiency.
Jaume Rey, Director of Panasonic's Professional & Broadcast IT Systems Business Unit, said: "ZDF's choice of AVC-Intra reflects the widespread recognition of its benefits, and the strategic advances of basing its future facilities on it."
Uwe Rohr, General Manager Central and East Europe Sales, Panasonic Professional & Broadcast IT Systems Business Unit.
Further information is available: www.panasonic-broadcast.com.
(KMcA)