DPP: Boosting Metadata Performance
By now, the whole UK broadcast industry have heard of AS-11 and DPP, from post houses, broadcasters to equipment manufacturers are more than familiar with these acronyms for quite some time and their goal is to be sure that the files they either receive or create are compliant with this shim.
The initiative driven by the Digital Production Partnership (DPP), formed by the UK’s public service broadcasters to help producers and broadcasters maximize the potential of digital production is in its final countdown. On the 1st of October, DPP should (and will) be a reality!
For those familiar with MXF (Material eXchange Format), this SMPTE standard already defined the concept of Segmentation Tracks, but with AS-11 ( a subset of the MXF file format to use for delivery of finished programming from program producers and distributors to broadcast stations. More at http://www.amwa.tv/projects/AS-11.shtml) and more specifically with the UK DPP shim, this concept seems to be taken to the next level, enabling that programme parts can be easily searched and its associated media streams more quickly restored.
For example, in a nearline storage scenario and focusing on a highly-efficient restoring of content, our customers have their media scanned either upon entering their system or upon archival and by scanning an MXF file, they’ll be able to retrieve the media’s descriptive and structural metadata in a format that is fully compliant with their system. In order to easily associate material’s timecode and the corresponding file position, an optimized extraction of the file’s Index Tables is also included in this scanned information.
Matching the programme parts start timecode and the duration in DPP’s files’ Segmentation Tracks with the Index Tables scanned information allows to accurately determine the boundaries from where to restore the media content, thus optimising its access and increasing performance.
By helping our customers to support AS-11 metadata and namely its Segmentation Tracks along with Indexation information, our customers are now able to provide products that not only allow users to search for specific AS-11 metadata properties, but also to restore the material of a specific programme part number in an efficient manner.
In fact, the introduction of AS-11 and in this particular case of the UK DPP shim, sees standard MXF Segmentation Tracks industry usage boosted ensuring that the information to enable media business practices is also contained in the file.
And you? Are you ready for the File Delivery Day?