UHDTV-2 Mezzanine Compression Codec For Miniaturized and Simplified UHD Production System

This paper highlights our developments in hardware compression for production applications. The underlying compression scheme shows a minimal quality degradation through multiple encode/decode cycles, making it suitable for production systems. The Tiny Codec (TICO) codec takes an uncompressed UHDTV-2 bitstream of 48 Gbits/s (59.94 Hz, 10 bits, 4:2:2) and compresses it to fit into a single 12G-Serial Digital Interface (SDI) cable. The device can also be fitted with IP interfaces. These changes permit significant reductions in cable and switcher complexity.