As part of the EBU's HIPS Strategic Programme, EBU Members and manufacturers have agreed a set of Acquisition Technical Metadata that is to be collected through interfaces from live cameras and camcorders.
The Acquisition Technical Metadata Set has been published as EBU Tech 3349; it is intended to improve interoperability for the purposes of exchange of material.
Why is this Specification Important?
In order to facilitate exchange between different TV production platforms, it is essential that the relevant parameters characterising capture of content are open (standardised) or at least they must be available to third parties on fair and
equitable terms.
This information is vital and interoperability is required for the lossless exchange of this data.
A new generation of live cameras and file-based camcorders must provide the functionalities necessary to permit an economical integration into IT based production platforms. Particular importance is placed on the support of non-linear operations.
More metadata is now natively generated by cameras and camcorders; far beyond the tape timecodes and labels of old. In file-based (e.g. service oriented) production architectures, it is expected that this metadata will play a key role at each production stage. For this reason, the metadata attributes defined in this acquisition metadata set have been structured to be compatible with other metadata sets and common practice in a generic operational production environment.
Original capture structural/technical metadata is important to keep memory of the original shooting conditions in particular in a digital world where content is re-processed several times during its lifetime. This information, when available, may also actively contribute to a more effective restoration process.
For more information on this document, contact Jean-Pierre Evain, [email protected].