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NAB, April 14 2007, Las Vegas, USA 

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2007, April 16 - 19
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Transmission and Distribution

Implementation of a File Format
A MXF template shall be implemented according to the MXF format specification for Digital Cinema and adapted to acquisition, production and distribution phases. It shall support the wrapping of layered compression schemes and the metadata model corresponding to the requirements of Digital Cinema applications. New essence analysers will be developed according to the layered compression scheme chosen as well as specific modules to extract and transcode essence on different resolutions and distribution formats. Support for metadata shall include different types of metadata necessary to create multi-language as well as country-specific versions.

Prototype Implementation of a Layered Scheme Decoder
A multi-standard decoder shall be developed. This prototype will have a modular layout due the selected architecture. Assuming a BPU (Basic Processing Unit) capable of decoding a 1k resolution codestream and assuming a tile-based approach for the parallelization of the decoding task of the MJPEG2000 codestream, the main decoder board will be able to host from 4 up to 16 BPU in order to provide modular support for 2k, 3k and 4k resolutions.

Prototype Architecture of an Interframe Transmission System
Research on 3D wavelet coding (3DWC) or comparable scalable interframe coding schemes using Motion Compensated Temporal Filtering (MCTF) will be carried out. This work will follow the mainstream of ongoing MPEG activities on Scalable Video Coding(SVC). The performance and architecture for a scalable hardware decoder with d-cinema resolution of up to 4k, high chrominance resolution (e.g. Yc1c2 @ 4:2:2, 4:4:4 or RGB @ 4:4:4) and high resolution per pixel component (12 bit) will be investigated. The system will support atleast two layers with 4k and 2k resolution. Due to the MCTF structure including motion compensation and temporal filtering as well as the very high spatial resolution, it is necessary to design sophisticated memory and bus architectures as well as efficient filters or transforms for extremely high clock frequencies.

Adaptation to Transport Layers
A distribution system making use of the layered compression schemes and the MXF packaging format will be designed. It will be able to send to each cinema the adequate technical quality with respect to e.g. screen size and projection equipment. The layered compression format will support this by allowing for transcoding movies on-the-fly from a single master format into different distribution formats. A store-and-forward approach will be implemented using sophisticated retransmission algorithms for the transfer of very large files over high-speed links where the use of well-know control formats like TCP is not appropriate. The EDCF has recently started an initiative at DVB Commercial Module (CM) on this.