Video Breakthroughs

The Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA) released a new MXF Commercial Delivery specification, AS-12, on the opening day of the 2012 NAB Show conference program, April 14.

 

The constrained version of MXF has been developed to enable more efficient handling of commercials through the many transactional and media processing operations between conception and air.

 

As broadcasters look to serve commercials to long tail delivery platforms as well as their primary channels, controlling costs is important. Many versions may exist of the same commercial, adding confusion to the traffic operations. Versions may be sourced from different distribution routes, arriving with different wrappers and codecs, as well as different aspect ratios.

 

MXF Commercial Delivery aims to solve two problems: unique identification, and defining a master spot for the creation of long-tail versions.

At this year’s NAB Show, Cinegy will launch Version 9.1 of its Cinegy Archive, Cinegy Desktop, and Cinegy Air and Type workflow solutions.Cinegy Archive now has a new open API with SOAP and REST web services that also form the basis of the new Cinegy Workspace Web client as well as its highly customizable portal front-end for cloud apps.

Cinegy Air and Type Version 9.1 now plays out up to 16 channels per server via SDI and/or IP-streams.It offers new features for automated and/or manual driven branding, and now supports MXF AS-03 and MXF AS-11.

Aspera has integrated IRT’s MXF Analyser into Aspera Orchestrator (pictured), Aspera’s web-based application and SDK platform for automating and managing high-speed file transfers. With MXF rapidly gaining acceptance as a mandatory industry standard, Aspera claims Orchestrator is the first solution to comply with public broadcaster demands for MXF file validation with special focus on file transfer applications.

At this year’s NAB Show, RadiantGrid Technologies will highlight its support of the AS-02 file format along with trans-wrapping functionality as part of its RadiantGrid Platform for streamlined media workflows.

With support for MPEG-2, H.264, JPEG2000, among other video codecs, AS-02 can wrap multiple mono, stereo and surround audio tracks (PCM and compressed) and carry closed captions and other ancillary data. The RadiantGrid Platform provides them with an efficient way to update their archives than if the file was re-ingested into the workflow and transcoded.

Live slow motion expert EVS will unveil its latest toolset for media exchange and file mastering at NAB. The Media Toolset can be used to streamline any broadcast and media workflow operations including the new version of the OpenCube server. OpenCube server combines the best of MXF file mastering technologies and advanced media conforming systems. The new generation of MXF file-based server is offering full mastering of AS02, AS03, and IMF formats, as required by Hollywood studios. Used to digitise the French National Archive (INA), the server’s a format-agnostic platform supporting all standard codecs on a full service-oriented architecture.

See product page : http://opencubetech.com/rub12/VIDEO%20IT%20Servers

FFMPEG supports MXF, but apparently not the packaged MXF files that are stored on the P2 cards. There is a handy C++ library and accompanying tools from www.freemxf.org, that can do a handful of operations on MXF files.