CIF (''Common Intermediate Format'' or ''Common Interchange Format''), also known as FCIF (''Full Common Intermediate Format''), is a standardized format for the
picture resolution,
frame rate
Frame rate (expressed in or FPS) is the frequency (rate) at which consecutive images ( frames) are captured or displayed. The term applies equally to film and video cameras, computer graphics, and motion capture systems. Frame rate may also ...
,
color space
A color space is a specific organization of colors. In combination with color profiling supported by various physical devices, it supports reproducible representations of colorwhether such representation entails an analog or a digital representa ...
, and
color subsampling
Chroma subsampling is the practice of encoding images by implementing less resolution for chroma information than for luma information, taking advantage of the human visual system's lower acuity for color differences than for luminance.
It is us ...
of
digital video sequences used in
video teleconferencing
Videotelephony, also known as videoconferencing and video teleconferencing, is the two-way or multipoint reception and transmission of audio and video signals by people in different locations for real time communication.McGraw-Hill Concise Encyc ...
systems. It was first defined in the
H.261 standard in 1988.
As the word "common" in its name implies, CIF was designed as a common compromise format to be relatively easy to convert for use either with
PAL or
NTSC
The first American standard for analog television broadcast was developed by National Television System Committee (NTSC)National Television System Committee (1951–1953), Report and Reports of Panel No. 11, 11-A, 12–19, with Some supplement ...
standard displays and cameras. CIF defines a video sequence with a resolution of 352 × 288, which has a simple relationship to the PAL picture size, but with a frame rate of 30000/1001 (roughly 29.97) frames per second like NTSC, with color encoded using a
YCbCr
YCbCr, Y′CbCr, or Y Pb/Cb Pr/Cr, also written as YCBCR or Y′CBCR, is a family of color spaces used as a part of the color image pipeline in video and digital photography systems. Y′ is the Luma (video), luma component and CB and CR are t ...
representation with