Study of the characteristics of the MPEG2 4:2:2 profile-application of MPEG2 in studio environment

We describe the MPEG2 4:2:2 Profile and present a study of its characteristics. The MPEG2 4:2:2 Profile provides a conformance point that addresses, among other applications, the needs of the professional studio and post-production environment, and that provides interoperability. The requirements of such an environment for compressed digital video together with a functional description of the 4:2:2 Profile are given. The 4:2:2 Profile provides a flexible compression solution that allows editability, supports a wide range of bit rates, and provides good to excellent quality in both an intra and interstudio environment. Our experiments show that the 4:2:2 Profile is very robust in a multigeneration environment, provides an efficient coding solution for transmission and storage, and provides transparency or near transparency in chroma keying operations. In addition, it compares favorably with existing digital compression standards, such as Motion-JPEG, and is superior to widely used analog technology.