BitJazz Press Releases
October 25, 2004

BitJazz Delivers Synchromy™ Revolutionary Nondestructive Color-Space Converter
in Version 2.0 of SheerVideo™ Pro Real-Time Nondestructive Video Codec
for Professional Film and Video Production and Postproduction

World's Fastest Video Codec Now Format-Conversion Hub with
RGB (Film) <-> Y'CbCr (Video) Lossless Interconversion Breakthrough

MARIN, California - October 25, 2004 -- BitJazz Inc. announces the immediate availability of version 2.0 of SheerVideo™, the acclaimed real-time powerful lossless software video codec. Launched last year as the fastest video codec in the world, SheerVideo doubles both the speed and the capacity of transmission and storage while encoding and decoding on the fly with perfect fidelity, thus helping to overcome the tremendous temporal and spatial obstacles that hinder the use of studio-quality uncompressed film and video. The new version adds many new professional features, including 10-bit channels, an optional alpha channel in all formats, gamma tracking, and interconversion between all standard pixel formats. And version 2.0 introduces Synchromy™, the world's most accurate color converter. In many workflows, Synchromy interconverts between spectral RGB colors and video Y'CbCr colors absolutely without any information loss, a feat previously considered impossible. Designed to facilitate the interchangeability of studio-quality video, film, and CGI image formats in professional video and film production and postproduction, Synchromy permits editors to switch between their favorite tools without worrying about error accumulation - nor any error at all - arising from repeated conversion between RGB and YUV color spaces. (SheerVideo and Synchromy protected by US Patents 7,693,339 and 7,659,911.)

"What if uncompressed video took only half as much space and only took half as much time to encode, store, transmit, retrieve, and decode? SheerVideo does that. What if you could repeatedly edit your video footage with RGB tools, and repeatedly edit your CGI and digitized film footage with YUV tools, without any generational loss or even first-generation loss? SheerVideo with Synchromy does that too."

Andreas Wittenstein, BitJazz Founder

price and availability

SheerVideo is available for Mac and Windows at http://www.bitjazz.com/ . SheerVideo Reader v2.0 for Mac and Windows is free. SheerVideo Pro v2.0 for Mac is available now at the introductory price of $149, and can be downloaded and evaluated for free for 20 days. SheerVideo Pro v2.0 for PC+Windows is currently available as a public beta, and will be available at the same price in about a month. This preliminary release of SheerVideo v2.0 is not yet optimized for MMX or G5, and does not yet run as quickly on the G5 as on the G4. Customers who purchase SheerVideo Pro v2.0 will the G5- or MMX-optimized version for free. Currently implemented as a set of QuickTime components, SheerVideo is also being developed for Windows Media (AVI) on the PC.

about BitJazz Inc.

BitJazz Inc. is the market leader in lossless image compression and conversion technology. The company first made headlines in 1998 with PhotoJazz, a revolutionary nondestructive image codec whose compression power of 2.5 for real-world imagery leapfrogged PNG's previous record of 1.8. SheerVideo was launched in July 2003. For additional company and product information, please visit http://www.bitjazz.com/.

BitJazz, SheerVideo, and PhotoJazz are trademarks of BitJazz Inc. All other product names and company names are trademarks of their respective owners. SheerVideo and Synchromy are protected by US Patents 7,693,339 and 7,659,911.