TABLE OF CONTENTS Standard file wrappers like MXF greatly ease the interchange of content. But if the content is compressed in one format, and routed to a decoder for a different format, then the interchange cannot take place. So there is still the need for codecs to translate between uncompressed and compressed formats, and for transcoding between different compression schemes.
Most software applications use proprietary file formats. This may be for efficiency, or to support special features of the product. Consequently, there are hundreds of file formats supporting images, audio, and video. Most digital asset management systems use a web interface, which supports a mere handful of formats. Few system administrators will want to supply large numbers of browser plug-ins for viewing different formats. So it is usual to convert files at ingest to the asset repository to a limited number of formats. This process has traditionally been a time-consuming manual process that uses valuable human resources. If you have to make conversions on a small scale, then it is simple to write scripts to automate the conversion.
If you have large numbers of files to convert, then an alternative is to use a product designed for unattended and automated processing.
One of the commonest ways to convert images is to open them in Adobe Photoshop, and then save them in the required format. It may be just to change colour space (RGB/ CMYK) or the colour profile (ICC). It may be to change file format...
