Demystifying the use of Compression in Virtual Production

Virtual Production (VP) technologies have continued to improve the flexibility of on-set filming and enhance the live concert experience. The core technology of VP relies on high-resolution, high-brightness LED panels to playback/render video content. There are a number of technical challenges to effective deployment e.g. image tile synchronisation across the panels, cross panel colour balancing and compensating for colour fluctuations due to changes in camera angles. Given the complexity and potential quality degradation, the industry prefers "pristine" or lossless compressed source material for displays, which requires significant storage and bandwidth. Modern lossy compression standards like AV1 or H.265 could maintain the same quality at significantly lower bitrates and resource demands. There is yet no agreed methodology for assessing the impact of these standards on quality when the VP scene is recorded in-camera. We present a methodology to assess this impact by comparing lossless and lossy compressed footage displayed through VP screens and recorded in-camera. We assess the quality impact of HAP/NotchLC/Daniel2 and AV1/HEVC/H.264 compression bitrates from 2 Mb/s to 2000 Mb/s with various GOP sizes. Several perceptual quality metrics are then used to automatically evaluate in-camera picture quality, referencing the original uncompressed source content through the LED wall. Our results show that we can achieve the same quality with hybrid codecs as with intermediate encoders at orders of magnitude less bitrate and storage requirements.

Predicting total time to compress a video corpus using online inference systems

Predicting the computational cost of compressing/transcoding clips in a video corpus is important for resource management of cloud services and VOD (Video On Demand) providers. Currently, customers of cloud video services are unaware of the cost of transcoding their files until the task is completed. Previous work concentrated on predicting perclip compression time, and thus estimating the cost of video compression. In this work, we propose new Machine Learning (ML) systems which predict cost for the entire corpus instead. This is a more appropriate goal since users are not interested in per-clip cost but instead the cost for the whole corpus. In this work, we evaluate our systems with respect to two video codecs (x264, x265) and a novel high-quality video corpus. We find that the accuracy of aggregate time prediction for a video corpus more than two times better than using per-clip predictions. Furthermore, we present an online inference framework in which we update the ML models as files are processed. A consideration of video compute overhead and appropriate choice of ML predictor for each fraction of corpus completed yields a prediction error of less than 5%. This is approximately two times better than previous work which proposed generalised predictors.

Unravelling the Power of Single-Pass Look-Ahead in Modern Codecs for Optimized Transcoding Deployment

Modern video encoders have evolved into sophisticated pieces of software in which various coding tools interact with each other. In the past, singlepass encoding was not considered for Video-On-Demand (VOD) use cases. In this work, we evaluate production-ready encoders for H.264 (x264), H.265 (HEVC), AV1 (SVT-AV1) along with direct comparisons to the latest AV1 encoder inside NVIDIA GPUs (40 series), and AWS Mediaconvert's AV1 implementation. Our experimental results demonstrate single pass encoding inside modern encoder implementations can give us very good quality at a reasonable compute cost. The results are presented as three different scenarios targeting High, Medium, and Low complexity accounting quality/bitrate/compute load. Finally, a set of recommendations is presented for end-users to help decide which encoder/preset combination might be more suited to their use case.