BSA101: Differences between Interframe and Intra-frame compression (Week 4)

Interframe

An inter frame is a frame in a video compression stream which is expressed in terms of one or more neighboring frames. The "inter" part of the term refers to the use of Inter frame prediction. This kind of prediction tries to take advantage from temporal redundancy between neighboring frames allowing to achieve higher compression rates. It is divided into blocks known as macroblocks. After that, instead of directly encoding the raw pixel values for each block, the encoder will try to find a block similar to the one it is encoding on a previously encoded frame, referred to as a reference frame.

Intra-Frame

Intra-frame coding is used in video coding (compression). It is part of an intra-frame codec like ProRes: a group of pictures codec with inter frames. The term intra-frame coding refers to the fact that the various lossless and lossy compression techniques are performed relative to information that is contained only within the current frame, and not relative to any other frame in the video sequence.

Under which circumstances might you use either of these?

When editing video footage, you will get a better performance if you are using video with Intra-frame compression because it include Prores 422, Prores 4444, Photo-JPEG, any image sequences, while popular inter-frame codecs are H264 and MPEG-4. So it all depends on what is going to produce.