Wednesday, July 2, 2008
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!!!
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6 comments:
as someone who builds software to address a lot of the issues you mention, i'm curious what you feel your main pain points are?
is the issue more in the management of all these files (assets), or in the transcoding process?
I think my pain comes from both the file management and the encoding / transcoding process. File management is a huge issue because A) Meta Data is difficult to handle between multiple platforms. B) File naming is difficult because everyone has their own idea as to how they name projects C) Long term storage of different file types is difficult and I only see it getting worse as the broadcast industry moves away from tape based storage. The transcoding process is time consuming as we have many different clients asking for many types of files, sizes etc... and the bottom line, most clients have no clue what kind of file they need. Thank you!
>.IMX30 is MPEG II I-frame only??? But isn't the .IMX wrapper suppose to be the equivalent of .MXF.
Well IMX isn't a container format in its own right Aaron. IMX is an SD MPEG2 422 codec variant (and yes its all I-frame) and it can be contained within an MXF wrapper ( or in an AVI or .MOV wrapper amongst others)
>Will AVC intra frame be the answer to eliminating the need for 10,000 different file types.
Ha ha. No, I;m afraid not. AVC-Intra will just be another of those 10,000 different file types for you to chose form
bandwidth limitations and the different forms of file usage will always demand transcodes, the key is automation. Within a structured organisation the central storage needs to be formalized in master formats and can be transcoded on demand for the specific needs of the suites / delivery etc. depending on the variety of file formats required.
Wouldn't a Rhozet Carbon Coder / Server automated watch folder help you to convert your source file into the different target files on upload?
A Proxsys MA-10 + Rimage Robot Control Software (+ Rimage Robot System of the users choice). This may be the ideal solution for somebody that not only wants a Media Asset Management system, but also wants to have a complete DVD/CD production system as well. Typically, the Rimage robot would sit on the network and during the day would produce CD & DVD’s for normal office/marketing use, and in the evening the robot would then archive the media assets to BluRay Disc.
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