New preview version of SheerVideo Pro available

BitJazz Inc. has released an upgrade to their SheerVideo Pro Preview. SheerVideo is an in-development QuickTime video codec for Mac OS X and Mac OS 9.x.

By storing in the Sheer format instead of uncompressed formats such as D1 or Cineon, you can double your disk capacity, disk speed, and transmission speed, according to Andreas Wittenstein of BitJazz. It allows your video editor automatically pack 10GB of video into 4.5GB on disk and “perfectly restore it on the fly faster than real time,” he added. The new version, 0.9.5, introduces the following changes and new features:

When decompressing to RGBA, the SheerVideo RGB decoder now sets alpha to 1 (opaque) instead of 0 (transparent), for greater convenience in compositing applications.

This universal Sheer encoder attempts to automatically select the pixel representation appropriate to the source data.

To reduce the chance of undesired data conversion, you can now explicitly select one of three format-specific SheerVideo codecs.

Prior versions of SheerVideo always automatically chose between interlaced and progressive-scan compression. However, some software, including Apple’s own Component Video codec, omits the requisite progressive/interlaced label, so the Sheer Y’CbCr codecs now offer a manual override in the Sheer Options dialog.

A Sheer Compression Options dialog now contains a switch to choose between G4 AltiVec accelerated code and an energy-saving pure G3 version for laptop users.