XAVC is a recording format that was introduced by

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

on October 30, 2012. XAVC is a format that will be licensed to companies that want to make XAVC products.

Technical details

XAVC uses level 5.2 of H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, which is the highest level supported by that video standard. XAVC can support

4K resolution 4K resolution refers to a horizontal display resolution of approximately 4,000 pixels. Digital television and digital cinematography commonly use several different 4K resolutions. In television and consumer media, 38402160 (4K UHD) is the domi ...

(4096 × 2160 and 3840 × 2160) at up to 60

frames per second A frame is often a structural system that supports other components of a physical construction and/or steel frame that limits the construction's extent. Frame and FRAME may also refer to: Physical objects In building construction *Framing (con ...

(fps). XAVC supports

color depth Color depth or colour depth (see spelling differences), also known as bit depth, is either the number of bits used to indicate the color of a single pixel, or the number of bits used for each color component of a single pixel. When referring ...

s of 8, 10, and 12 bits.

Chroma 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 u ...

can be 4:2:0, 4:2:2, or 4:4:4. The

Material Exchange Format Material Exchange Format (MXF) is a container format for professional digital video and audio media defined by a set of SMPTE standards. A typical example of its use is for delivering advertisements to TV stations and tapeless archiving of broadc ...

(MXF) can be used for the

digital container format A container format (informally, sometimes called a wrapper) or metafile is a file format that allows multiple data streams to be embedded into a single file, usually along with metadata for identifying and further detailing those streams. Nota ...

. XAVC allows for a wide range of content production including intra frame recording and long group of pictures (GOP) recording.

XAVC S

On April 7, 2013, Sony announced that it had expanded XAVC to the consumer market with the release of XAVC S. XAVC S supports resolutions up to 3840 × 2160, uses MP4 as the container format, and uses either AAC or LPCM for the audio. As example used in the Sony FDR-AX100 4K Ultra HD consumer camcorder and Sony HDR-AS100V action camera. The Sony α7S as well as some consumer stills cameras with movie support (e.g. the Sony RX10) also offer XAVC-S.

Hardware

Sony has announced that cameras that will support XAVC include two CineAlta cameras which are the Sony PMW-F55 and Sony PMW-F5. Both cameras record XAVC with a color depth of 10-bits and 4:2:2 chroma subsampling. The Sony PMW-F55 can record XAVC with 4K resolution at 60 fps at 600

Mbit/s In telecommunications, data-transfer rate is the average number of bits ( bitrate), characters or symbols ( baudrate), or data blocks per unit time passing through a communication link in a data-transmission system. Common data rate units are mu ...

and 2K resolution at 120 fps at 400 Mbit/s. The Sony PMW-F5 can record XAVC with 2K resolution at 120 fps at 400 Mbit/s. XAVC can record 4K resolution at 60 fps with 4:2:2 chroma subsampling at 600 Mbit/s. A 128

Gigabyte The gigabyte () is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix '' giga'' means 109 in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one gigabyte is one billion bytes. The unit symbol for the gigabyte is GB. This definit ...

SxS PRO+ media card can record up to 20 minutes of 4K resolution XAVC video at 60 fps, up to 40 minutes of 4K resolution XAVC video at 30 fps, and up to 120 minutes of 2K resolution XAVC video at 30 fps. The PXW-Z100 is a 7 lbs handheld camcorder with an integrated 20x 4K-compatible zoom lens. The PXW-Z100 is the first "prosumer" camera that uses Sony's XAVC recording format. MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 compression is used for HD (1920×1080), QFHD (3840×2160) and 4K (4096×2160) content. Image sampling is 4:2:2 10-bit, with an intra-frame system that compresses each frame individually at a maximum bit rate of 500 Mbit/s or 600 Mbit/s during 4K 50fps or 60fps recording, respectively, and 223 Mbit/s during HD 50fps or 60fps recording. On November 14, 2012, Sony stated that it might release consumer products that use XAVC. In March 2014, Sony launched the consumer video camera, FDR-AX100, which uses XAVC S. It provides a maximum resolution of 3840 x 2160 with a 60 Mbit/s bit rate. It provides 12X optical zoom and records to a

SDXC Secure Digital, officially abbreviated as SD, is a proprietary non-volatile flash memory card format developed by the SD Association (SDA) for use in portable devices. The standard was introduced in August 1999 by joint efforts between SanDis ...

memory card. In February 2015, Sony launched the consumer video camera, FDR-AX33, which uses XAVC S. It provides a maximum resolution of 3840 x 2160 and increased the bit rate to 100 Mbit/s. It provides 10X optical zoom and records to a

memory card. In late fall, 2015, Sony released
firmware update
(Version 2.0) for th
HXR-NX3
camcorder which gives the camcorder the option of recording in XAVC S format in addition to

AVCHD AVCHD (Advanced Video Coding High Definition) is a file-based format for the digital recording and playback of high-definition video. It is H.264 and Dolby AC-3 packaged into the MPEG transport stream, with a set of constraints designed around th ...

Software

Software that supports XAVC include Sony Vegas Pro, Adobe Creative Suite 6, Avid, Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve, Grass Valley's EDIUS Pro 7,

Quantel Quantel was a company based in the United Kingdom and founded in 1973 that designed and manufactured digital production equipment for the broadcast television, video production and motion picture industries. They were headquartered in Newbury, ...

, Rovi and

MainConcept MainConcept GmbH is a software company founded in Germany by Markus Moenig and Thomas Zabel. They specialize in developing video/audio codecs and also applications and plug-ins related to video/audio encoding. They are a subsidiary of Endeavor ...

SDK. Sony announced that XAVC licensing information and a

software development kit A software development kit (SDK) is a collection of software development tools in one installable package. They facilitate the creation of applications by having a compiler, debugger and sometimes a software framework. They are normally specific ...

(SDK) would be released in November 2012. Sony offers the free XAVC plugin PDZK-LT2 for Apples Final Cut Pro X downloadable a
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com
Version 10.2 of Final Cut Pro X supports XAVC-S natively. For XAVC S, CyberLink PowerDirector, Adobe Premiere Elements, Apple's

iMovie iMovie (known at times as iMovie HD) is a preinstalled video editing application developed by Apple Inc. for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS devices. It was originally released in 1999 as a Mac OS 8 application bundled with the first FireWire-ena ...

10, Pinnacle Studio 18 Ultimate and Sony Movie Studio Platinum support it for editing and production.

References

External links

XAVC InfoXAVC Sony UK article
{{Video storage formats Broadcasting standards Computer file formats Film and video technology

MPEG-4 AVC Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distr ...