Just came across this today in case you have not seen it.
http://www.eoshd.com/content/11534/new-h-265-codec-test-prores-4444-quality-1-file-size
CineMartin are the first company I know of to give us H.265 HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) conversion with the just-announced CINEC v2.7. It supports up to 4K resolution and you can try it today.
In case you live at 12 Under Rock Drive, the H.265 standard is the biggest codec of the decade. It supersedes today’s most common codec for encoding and internet delivery of video (H.264) and makes 4K recording to SD cards possible on DSLRs.
Cinemartin say in their tests a ProRes 4:4:4 video of 590MB was converted to H.265 HEVC with CINEC 2.7 to an output video of 4.9MB with little or no noticeable differences in image quality.
You can see the image samples below (click to enlarge), even at 1:1 I can’t tell a difference -
This low data rate and file size makes all kinds of magic possible, because at the same data rate as the old codec you get a massive leap in image quality and resolution.
This is the codec that future 4K enabled consumer DSLRs will use to record video and the codec Netflix, YouTube and Vimeo will use to stream 4K movies. H.265 makes possible cinema quality 4K streaming via the internet on a normal DSL connection, or the streaming of 10bit 4:4:4 at ProRes quality, from current cameras. No longer will people need to download the original file on Vimeo to get a sense of the total image quality.
For grading footage of course raw and ProRes will still be the codec of choice – because you cannot ideally grade a baked in compressed image. Like its predecessor H.265 is also much heavier on the CPU than a standard low efficiency codec.
For playback and especially editing you will need a quad core CPU. Encoding itself does work on dual core CPUs like the i5 in a Macbook Air but it will be much slower.
