CineForm Intermediate is an open source (from October 2017)

video codec A video codec is software or hardware that compresses and decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, '' codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while a device that only compresses is typically called an ...

developed for CineForm Inc by David Taylor, David Newman and Brian Schunck. On March 30, 2011, the company was acquired by

GoPro GoPro, Inc. (marketed as GoPro and sometimes stylized as GoPRO) is an American technology company founded in 2002 by Nick Woodman. It manufactures action cameras and develops its own mobile apps and video-editing software. Founded as Woodman ...

which in particular wanted to use the

3D film 3D films are motion pictures made to give an illusion of three-dimensional solidity, usually with the help of special glasses worn by viewers. They have existed in some form since 1915, but had been largely relegated to a niche in the motion pic ...

capabilities of the CineForm 444 Codec for its 3D HERO System. The press release in the GoPro acquisition noted that CineForm's codec had been used in movies including ''

Slumdog Millionaire ''Slumdog Millionaire'' is a 2008 British drama film that is a loose adaptation of the novel '' Q & A'' (2005) by Indian author Vikas Swarup. It narrates the story of 18-year-old Jamal Malik from the Juhu slums of Mumbai. Starring Dev Pa ...

'' and ''

Need For Speed ''Need for Speed'' (''NFS'') is a racing game franchise published by Electronic Arts and currently developed by Criterion Games, the developers of ''Burnout''. The series generally centers around illicit street racing and tasks players to c ...

''.

History

The CineForm Intermediate Codec was originally designed in 2002 for compressed

Digital Intermediate Digital intermediate (typically abbreviated DI) is a motion picture finishing process which classically involves digitizing a motion picture and manipulating the color and other image characteristics. Definition and overview A digital intermediat ...

workflows for film or television applications using HD or higher resolution media. The CineForm media is most commonly wrapped within AVI or MOV files types, using the 'CFHD' FOURCC code for all compressed media types. Implementations support image formatting for 10-bit 4:2:2 YUV, 12-bit 4:4:4 RGB and RGBA, and 12-bit CFA

Bayer filter A Bayer filter mosaic is a color filter array (CFA) for arranging RGB color filters on a square grid of photosensors. Its particular arrangement of color filters is used in most single-chip digital image sensors used in digital cameras, cam ...

RAW compression (as used with the Silicon Imaging SI-2K camera.) All compression is based on an integer reversible wavelet compression kernel, with a non-linear quantizer to increase compression. Compression data-rates typically range from 10:1 to 3.5:1, based on quality settings. An uncompressed mode supports RAW files. The codec uses a constant quality design, such that the data rate varies based on the source image data. It shares some properties with other wavelet codecs, like

JPEG 2000 JPEG 2000 (JP2) is an image compression standard and coding system. It was developed from 1997 to 2000 by a Joint Photographic Experts Group committee chaired by Touradj Ebrahimi (later the JPEG president), with the intention of superseding th ...

, yet it trades off some compression efficiency (larger file sizes) for greater decode and encode performance. CineForm is available only on

Mac OS Two major famlies of Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the "Classic" Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system, rebranded "M ...

and

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

platforms, however a Linux SDK is available.

FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of vid ...

is also capable of decoding and encoding CineForm files. The DPC format (also known as DPX-C) is a DPX file header with or without an uncompressed DPX image part that contains only a

thumbnail Thumbnails are reduced-size versions of pictures or videos, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words. In the age of digital images, visual search engines and imag ...

. A compressed CineForm sample is attached to that file, containing the wavelet compressed image. The format is used in post production when CineForm files are rendered. Tools can split up CineForm AVI or MOV files into DPC file sequences, and vice versa, to reassemble CineForm MOV and AVI files from DPC sequences. These steps just copy data and do not reencode the images, thus are fast and do not cause iterative recompression artifacts. Plugins for Eyeon Fusion and The Foundry Nuke compositing systems are available to read and write CineForm natively. These plugins were developed by Magna Mana Production. CineForm is stable to iterative recompression. Compared to JPEG2000, CineForm has a slightly higher data rate at similar PSNRs (peak signal to noise ratios) with the benefit of up to 7x faster encode/decode. According to a GoPro press release,

SMPTE The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) (, rarely ), founded in 1916 as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers or SMPE, is a global professional association of engineers, technologists, and executives working in the m ...

standardized the CineForm codec as the SMPTE ST 2073 VC-5 video compression standard. In practice the VC-5 specification did not provide enough information to decode Cineform files and

reverse engineering Reverse engineering (also known as backwards engineering or back engineering) is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accompli ...

was necessary. GoPro released CineForm as open source in October 2017 dually licensed under the

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

and the Apache License 2.0

References

External links

CineForm Main page
{{Compression software Free video codecs SMPTE standards

History

See also

References

External links