Late last year Thomson started talking about an encoder product known as “Tiger,” which it had sold to its Technicolor unit for encoding of HD-DVD and Blu-ray contgent. At NAB Thomson was showing the encoder, though without the feline name — at this point it’s just “HD H.264 Encoder.” This is designed with the hardcore compressionist in mind, someone at a major DVD encoding house who’s looking for a powerful way to preserve as much quality as possible in high-def disc deliverables.

As such the HD H.264 Encoder offers a lot of features that will be especially interesting to compressionists who need to work quickly and accurately. The encoder runs on a SAN-based PC cluster architecture. A multipass encoder runs in the background. Tough scenes (such as transitions and those with lots of motion) can start to re-encode while other material is still going through its first pass. For most encoders using this system, 15Mbps VBR is going to be the target bit rate (Blu-ray goes up to about 40Mbps max; HD-DVD, 30Mbps). Thomson told me that a two hour movie would complete its first pass in about six hours, typically.

Related to that technology is Thomson’s Film Grain Technology. The conceit of this technology is that it’s preferable to keep film grain — which presents itself to encoders as random noise — than to lose it. The studios all want to keep the grain, Thomson says.

For each frame of video, an encoder that incorporates FGT can save a piece of metadata that describes the grain and allows film grain remodeling downstream. FGT is supported by the H.264 standard and it’s part of the HD-DVD video format spec, but not that of Blu-ray. Film Grain Technology authoring tools are being integrated into the encoder formerly known as Tiger.

Finally at the Thomson booth, I saw the Vampire Discpack, which is designed to work with the Viper Filmstream or other data-capturing camera. It captures 3TB of data to parallel ATA drives.