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Files, Files and more Files

Ok!  It's time to talk about media files and I'm hoping some of our media file and media management experts will chime in on this one.  Now if I'm going to teach the world of media files to my younger employees...the words .MXF, .AVI, MPEG II, AVC, Long GOP, I Frame, H.264, Square Pixel/non Square Pixel just don't work well in one simple sentence.  It's a bit confusing for the rookie and I'm noticing a bit of gray hair on my head after playing in this file based world the past 10 years.  I had a broadcast engineer ask me the other day when the video world was going to create one type of file for recoding and transmitting.  I'm sure many of you have been faced with this question and wouldn't it be nice to have an answer that would fit between a capital letter and a period.  Now I am not the ultimate expert in all of this, I try to keep my eye to the view finder and far away from the file management aspect of our industry; but, as we all know, this is becoming a very challenging task.  Lets say I am shooting DVCPro 25mb footage to a Panasonic P2 card, The file has a .MXF wrapper.  From field to stand alone editor, this is not a problem as NLE have no problem eating up .MXF footage.  My problem is I am ingesting my material to a large server based broadcast edit system that is set up to handle .IMX30 material.  If I am informed properly, .IMX30 is MPEG II I-frame only???  But isn't the .IMX wrapper suppose to be the equivalent of .MXF.  In my world I shoot a lot of 4:3 and 16:9 and when on long shoots, I am required to FTP footage to our servers.  I prefer to send .AVI using windows media VCM 9 codec as it has alway proved effective. Today, I also like to use H.264 when I really have a demand for a quality file structure.  Will AVC intra frame be the answer to eliminating the need for 10,000 different file types.  Today, my company ingests material on the rate of about 32 hours of footage a day.  For every file that comes into our plant, 8 different types of files are being kicked out for various client needs both internal and external to my company.  Every .MXF file gets flipped to a .FLV, WMV, H.264 Hi Res, .IMX30 etc.  It's a file management nightmare and one that is frustrating at least the engineers I know. If you are sailing on the same boat as me, please comment and share your ideas with the rest of us!!! 

Digital TV Standards

Could someone please comment on the the difference between American, European and Japanese Digital TV Standards.  Who has the best option and why?  What company has the lead in technology as a DTV provider?

Setup and Digital Video

In a world where digital and anolog signals mix together.  I am curious when setup (7.5ire) needs to be added to the signal.  How smart is todays video equipment in correctly adding and subtracting setup from a signal?  If anyone is an expert, please leave a comment.

Welcome

I just want to take the opportunity to welcome all of you to TBT's blog site.  My goal as author is to allow a market place of ideas to flow across this page.  I would like to start off this blog with comments on "File Management" and what it means to you?  How do you move product from capture to transmission?  What methods do you use to store your footage for short-term and for long-term archiving? What role does meta-data play in your work-flow process?  Does this sound like enough to get started? Blog On!