Alpha a7S II

Alpha Series
Sony FS5

PXW-FS5 II
Sony FS7 II

PXW-FS7 II
Sony FX9

PXW-FX9
Sony FS7

PMW-F55
Sony VENICE

VENICE

Click above for resources on specific Sony 4k camera models.

The brilliance. Without the baggage. Sony’s XAVC™ recording

Exquisite recording typically requires extreme bitrates, quickly filling up your cards, overwhelming your storage and bogging down your network. The answer is Sony’s clever XAVC encoding. Here’s the supple texture of 4K, beautiful super slow motion, extraordinary 10-bit contrast and precise 4:2:2 color—all at real-world bitrates. Here’s the quality you want with the savings you need.

Colorist Jason Fabbro of Technicolor gets his hands on XAVC-I 4K footage shot by Curtis Clark, ASC.
Colorist Jason Fabbro of Technicolor gets his hands on XAVC-I 4K footage shot by Curtis Clark, ASC.

Master quality from the codec masters

Codec technology is where the mathematics of entropy meets the psychophysics of human vision. It’s a subtle science that requires comprehensive understanding of everything from cinematography to digital signal processing and semiconductor design. And it’s an area where Sony excels.

Hollywood Boulevard at night reveals extraordinary texture and dynamic range with the XAVC codec. Curtis Clark, ASC, did the test.
Hollywood Boulevard at night reveals extraordinary texture and dynamic range with the XAVC codec. Curtis Clark, ASC, did the test.

Sony as a codec company

Sony created the world’s first professional acquisition codec, Digital Betacam® recording, in 1993. Ever since, we’ve been developing ground-breaking codecs including XDCAM®, HDCAM® and HDCAM-SR® recording. And we play nicely with others. Sony is an enthusiastic participant in industry standards-setting bodies, including the Motion Pictures Experts Group (MPEG). In the ultimate endorsement, even other camcorder companies use the XDCAM® MPEG-2 50 Mbps 4:2:2 implementation developed by Sony.
Sony’s new platform
Like Betacam® and XDCAM recording before it, the XAVC codec is the new platform for Sony’s product development moving forward. Look for an even broader choice of XAVC products in the time to come.
Sony's XAVC I pre-coder circuit enables multi-pass encoding, for superior performance compared to previous professional AVC Intra-frame only encoding.
Sony’s XAVC I pre-coder circuit enables multi-pass encoding, for superior performance compared to previous professional AVC Intra-frame only encoding.

H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding
The XAVC codec is an efficient implementation of the industry-standard H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding at its highest level of performance, Level 5.2. We apply the H.264 compression techniques to achieve far greater efficiency than was possible with the previous-generation workhorse codec: MPEG-2. Sony’s implementation of H.264 takes advantage of unique encoding technology to offer the highest quality at each bitrate.

MXF OP-1a file wrapper

Like XDCAM® MPEG-2 recording before it, XAVC recording uses the simple, familiar MXF OP-1a wrapper. Audio and video “essence” is interleaved for simple, single file management.

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