VRT-medialab

27/10/2008 van 10:00 tot 8:00 te Hollywood

Op de jaarlijkse SMPTE technische conference & tentoonstelling verzamelen de technologische experts van de top-mediabedrijven op mondiaal niveau. Matthias De Geyter zal er een paper presenteren over het automatiseren van HD workflows, de bijhorende uitdagingen voor MXF en de toepassing van het SOA paradigma. De publicatie kwam tot stand met zijn collega’s in het Geisha-project, Luk Overmeire, Steven Van Assche and Dieter Van Rijsselbergen.

Op de jaarlijkse SMPTE technische conference & tentoonstelling verzamelen de technologische experts van de top-mediabedrijven op mondiaal niveau. Matthias De Geyter zal er een paper presenteren over het automatiseren van HD workflows, de bijhorende uitdagingen voor MXF en de toepassing van het SOA paradigma. De publicatie kwam tot stand met zijn collega’s in het Geisha-project, Luk Overmeire, Steven Van Assche and Dieter Van Rijsselbergen.

Dit is de (Engelse) abstract van de publicatie:

Nowadays, broadcasters are rapidly adopting integrated, file-based media production architectures for their back-end facilities, while simultaneously facing the transition from Standard Definition (SD) to High Definition (HD) Television. Broadcasters take full advantage of file-based workflows by applying standard file formats to bring about the essential glue for system integration. Indeed, the use of MXF for the exchange of media materials in SDTV production is widely accepted, but only because of continued efforts to keep the file format complexity low and rigorous testing procedures. In order to deal with interoperability issues, broadcaster-specific MXF Application Specifications have materialized that strictly define the rules of MXF usage in the production environment. These rules can differ per application (production, editing, play-out, archive) and quality level (compression format), and may evolve in due course. Based on the lessons learned for SD, this paper discusses MXF and AAF’s far-reaching, future challenges for mixed SD/HD media production, taking into account the expected impact of HD on the technical architecture. In particular, the forthcoming adoption of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm will increasingly enable the automation of broadcaster-specific workflows based on central, reusable services and human interactions. Firstly, HD-specific MXF requirements, such as surround sound and time labeling are elaborated. Then, an effective strategy is presented for automating the laborious MXF validation processes based on Application Specifications, and subsequent corrective updates, all realized in a service-oriented way. The use of additional metadata in MXF for further automating production workflows is mooted and a number of useful applications are suggested: media tracking, quality control and preservation, efficient repurposing based on audio-visual information, etc. Finally, refinement of the current MXF strategy and the pros and cons of applying higher MXF operational patterns in order to improve efficiency in multi-platform production scenarios are contemplated on a per-application basis.