Tc 06 Draft Outline 5 July 2011

Dear all,

Last year at the IASA-2010 in Philadelphia, we have addressed the identification of the important topics that are of importance for Video while not for Audio. One of the important issue relates to the Wrappers!

It is clear that the wrapping of Audio with Video and ensuring the synchronisation of both aspects and the capacity of structuring and embedding or linking the metadata should be radically different for TC-06 than for TC-04.

As an illustration, the place of the MXF wrapper: two extreme approaches could be followed:
1. The MXF file includes everythings (the Carl Fleischhauer contribution to the IASA Journal N°37). In that case, the MXF declination is defined by a "Application profile".
2. The MXF file covers only the Audio-Video essence and a few identification and technical metadata (it corresponds to a unambiguous and broadly implemented standard MXF-OP1A). In that case, the structures and the metadata are expressed independently, the whole being bind by a higher level wrapper (such as METS). It is clear that in that case other wrappers could be applied in place of or in parrallel with the MXF-OP1A, such as the QuickTime, the AVI, the DVB-Transport stream and mix such as JPEG2000 and MPEG-4 / H264.
Within the Library of Congress, the two approaches have been followed: for example, the first for the "Culpeper media Center archiving project" and the second for the "Public TV Broadcast archiving project". Each approaches have their advantages and drawbacks The first appoach is fitting for large and stable projects; the second is fitting when flexibility and simplicity is requested.
In consequence, I recommend that the draft "Table of Content" of TC-06 as proposed by Kevin should be revised with a specific chapter on the "Wrapping" recommendations and issues and with subsequent adaptations of the other chapters, in particular the introduction of cases for the metadata and the structures.

Best to all,
Guy Maréchal