Towards a
New Meta-Standard for Long-Term Digital Video Preservation - A Quick
Overview
Glenn Pearson December 7, 2005
Concept
Main Goal
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Develop a specification for long-term lossless digital preservation masters, for NTSC material from studio-quality and (secondarily) distribution-quality analog video tape. |
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Follows up a conference at NLM ( http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/VideoArchivists2005) |
Implementation Approach
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Promote lossless JPEG 2000 as the frame format |
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Encourage two “wrappers” |
o an extended form of Motion JPEG 2000 (MJ2), called MJX
o suggested forms of Material eXchange Format (MXF)
Standardization Strategy
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Develop an MPEG-A “Media Application Format” (MAF) meta-standard. |
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Steps |
o Create initial “strawman drafts” (done).
o Make these public, for consideration and collective revision by interested video archivists, technologists (e.g., SMPTE members), and vendors.
o Submit evolved versions of these eventually to ISO/MPEG.
The Current Document Set
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Available as Word documents |
o from the author (Glenn_Pearson@nlm.nih.gov)
o shortly at http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/VideoArchivists2005.
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A collaborative document version of this is being built elsewhere… more about this on the foregoing site in January, 2006. |
“READ ME for Archivists about MPEG-A Process”
Four-part “Application for an MPEG-A Media Application Format Supporting Lossless Digital Video Archiving for Long-Term Preservation”
Part 1. Introduction.
Part 2. JPEG 2000 Frame Format for NTSC-Source Material.
Part 3. MJ2-Extended Wrapping of JPEG 2000 Frames and Transport of Metadata and Audio.
Part 4. MXF Wrapping of JPEG 2000 Frames and Transport of Metadata and Audio, and Compatibility with MJX.
MAF Part 1. Introduction
Introduces the overall application scenario (extended in subsequent Parts), and the multi-part nature of the submission.
MAF Part 2. JPEG 2000 Frame Format for NTSC-Source Material
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Proposes the lossless JPEG 2000 frame format. |
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Recommends [draft] parameters, e.g., relating to frame size, bit depth, color space, and encoding choices. |
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Addresses metadata that is embedded in the source video signal. |
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Considers subsidiary lossy encodings. |
MAF Part 3. MJ2-Extended (MJX) Wrapping of JPEG 2000 Frames and Transport of Metadata and Audio
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Proposes an extended version of the MJ2 file specification |
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Has new brand and file extension “MJX” (and “Simple Profile” brand “MJXS”) |
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Supports these additional features: |
o Timestamps in SMPTE and other formats;
o Overall static metadata, in the form of MPEG-7 XML (binary or text), other XML (binary or text), and non-XML text;
o Synchronized metadata tracks, analogous to MPEG-4, for closed captioning, subtitles, speech-to-text transcriptions, and scene-level annotations. Track/stream formats would support MPEG-7 XML metadata in binary or text form, and non-XML text;
o Synchronized sound in the B-WAV [and possibly RF64] format.
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Resulting file viewable in an MJ2 player, with new tracks and timestamps ignored. |
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A MJX-aware player or editor would access additional info. |
MAF Part 4. MXF Wrapping of JPEG 2000 Frames and Transport of Metadata and Audio, and Compatibility with MJX
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Promotes MXF as another good choice to convey lossless JP2-encoded video frames. |
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Considers three frameworks in particular, where: |
o only the video is a MXF file, with audio and some metadata in other formats;
o the video, audio, and metadata are all in MFX files, but separate ones;
o the video, audio, and metadata are combined in MXF.
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For first two, simplified Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) is considered as model. |
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Appropriate MXF Op Patterns to encompass this are discussed. |
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Ways to embed MJ2 into MXF, or transcode between the two, are explored. |
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Last updated: 12/12/05.