Chroma Sampling: An Investigation

By Graeme Nattress www.nattress.com

In this article I hope to be able to show if there are any picture quality
benefits to bringing in DV (I'll refer to miniDV, DVCAM and DVCPro as
DV as they all share the same codec) to Apple's Final Cut Pro over
uncompressed SDI compared to the "normal" route of transfer over Firewire
and using the Apple DV codec. I will also investigate new algorithms for
dealing with DV chroma sampling issues. Many thanks to Peter McAuley of
AXYZ Edit in Toronto who made this article possible and AOL Canada for
permission to use the footage of the boy in the red shirt. Over the course of
writing this article, there was a bit of "scope creep" as more ideas to analyse
the video were thought of, and we decided to throw analogue BetacamSP into
the mix for consideration. Near the end of writing the article I came across a
controversy over whether Digital Betacam is an 8bit format or a 10bit format,
so that too was included into the scope of the investigations.
Before I start, I'd first like to look at some terminology and an explanation of
chroma sampling.
Terminology
Component digital video if often referred to as YUV, but this is not an
accurate description of component digital video, but instead refers to a set of
intermediate qualities used in the formation of analogue composite video.
The correct terminology for the components of digital video is Y' Cb Cr. The
Y' represents luma, the ' is important, reminding us that it is non-linear
(gamma corrected). The Cb and Cr are chroma components that are often
wrongly referred to as U and V. The Cb is calculated as B' - Y', and Cr is R' Y'. If you are interested in more details, check out Charles Poynton's
excellent articles at http://www.poynton.com/

Chroma Sampling
The CCDs that capture our image inside our video camera, capture colour by
the use of Red, Green, and Blue filters. The phosphors in our CRT monitor,
and filters in our LCD monitor and DLP projector also use Red, Green and
Blue filters. Why is it then, that digital video is stored and manipulated as
separate luma and chroma components? Separate luma and chroma are used
so that the resolution of the chroma can be reduced with respect to the
resolution of the luma so that large savings cand be made in the amount of
data that needs to be transmitted - it is a form of compression. This reduction
in the resolution of the chroma components works perceptually as our human
vision systems are not as able to see fine details in colour as we are in
lightness.
There are a number of methods of chroma sampling, and they each have
terminology that refers to the chroma resolution (the second and third
numbers) as compared to the luma resolution (first number):
4:4:4 Full resolution luma is represented by the number 4, and as the chroma
components Cb and Cr are also 4, there is no reduction in resolution. 4:4:4
sampling is mostly used for RGB images, although it can be used for Y'CbCr,
although no camera records 4:4:4 Y'CbCr

4:2:2 Full resolution luma, and half (2/4 = 0.5) resolution horizontally on the
chroma components. This is the traditional broadcast standard for chroma

sampling and is used by DigiBeta, DVCpro50 etc.

4:1:1 Full resolution luma and quarter (1/4 = 0.25) resolution chroma
components. This is the system used by NTSC DV and PAL DVCPro

4:2:0 Full resolution luma, and half resolution in the horizontal direction and
vertical direction for the chroma components. 4:2:0 is a very complex chroma
sampling with many variants depending on wether the video is progressive or
interlaced, or if it is being used by PAL DV or MPEG2. 4:2:0 compresses the
resolution of the colour to 1/4, just like 4:1:1 compresses the resolution of the
colour, but whereas the compression in 4:1:1 is horizontal only, the
compression in 4:2:0 is horizontal and vertical. The illustration below is for

PAL DV 4:2:0 chroma sampling.

Test 1 - Apple DV codec compared to Digital Betacam

Before we look at the DV over SDI v Firewire comparison, it is useful to see
what a full quality 4:2:2 Digital Betacam image looks like, so that we have a
sense of how both the the SDI DV and Firewire compare. Due to the nature
of these tests we do not have the same footage for both this comparison and
the later tests, but I still think this is a worthwhile exploration.
To make these comparisons possible, I wrote a few plugins for Apple's Final
Cut Pro which allow us to examine the Y' Cb and Cr components seperately
(G Take). Also, due to some codecs (like the uncompressed 4:2:2 codec used
for the Digital Betacam captures) smoothing chroma and some (like the
Apple DV codec) leaving chroma unsmoothed, I wrote plugins (G Make 422
& G Make 411) to show us unsmooth chroma where there codec wants to
smooth it!
The Digital Betacam footage used is from 35mm film (Kodak 5293)
transferred on a Rank C Reality with a Da Vinci 2K colour corrector to a
DVW500 Digital Betacam deck. The Digital Betacam footage was brought
into Final Cut Pro using a Kona SD card (with Decklink 4.6 driver) via SDI
as fully uncompressed 8bit and 10bit files. With regards to chroma sampling,

there is no real difference between the 8bit and 10bit files, but the 10bit files
are of an overall higher quality. We will look at the difference between 10bit
and 8bit capture later.
Here are the block diagrams that show the path the video took to get to Final
Cut Pro.