Cineform’s Technology in Wafian Recorders

Wafian systems record your footage into AVI or MOV files utilizing the award winning CineForm Intermediate ™ Codec for superior quality and unmatched performance.  This Codec employs a full-frame temporal Wavelet transform, not DCT like you find when recording to tape.  This eliminates “block artifacts” often present when using DCT compression.  Wafian recorders deliver scalable precision and operate in 10-bit quality, with optimized arithmetic precision based on source resolution.

Streams compressed using CineForm's Visually Perfect ™ Codec preserve the characteristics of the original source material, even through more than 15 generations of post-production rendering.  Even noisy 16mm film scans retain the grain structure of the source through multiple generations.  CineForm's Visually Perfect ™ codec delivers a constant-quality, variable bitrate (VBR) compression that allows compression rates to rise dynamically for more complex scenes, and allows it to dynamically fall for less-complex scenes.

Compressed file sizes are approximately 6:1 to 10:1 smaller than their uncompressed YUV equivalent.  As an example, source material which is 1920x1080 at 24 fps with 10 bits of precision has an uncompressed YUV bandwidth of about 15MB/sec.  After compression, depending on the complexity of the source material, the resulting file size for this footage will be nominally 12MB/sec to 20MB/sec, even while preserving visual quality indistinguishable from the source. 

Learn more about Wafian recorders with CineForm Intermediate ™ by calling or emailing the Wafian sales team.

Quality Analysis:  10-bit CineForm Intermediate workflow versus DVCPRO HD.