5.1.1 MXF: A Brief Introduction

The Material Exchange Format (MXF) is a file format optimized for the interchange of material in the content creation industries. MXF is a wrapper format intended to encapsulate and accurately describe one or more clips of essence. These essence clips may be pictures, sound, data, or some combination of these.

An MXF file contains enough information to allow two applications to interchange essence without any prior information. MXF contains information called metadata, which allows applications to know the duration of the file, what essence codecs are required, what timeline complexity is involved and other key points to allow interchange. The key to MXF is the accurate description of the essence.

How did MXF come into existence? A brief history of the development of the format and its relationship to its parent format, Advanced Authoring Format (AAF), is followed by an overview of how MXF works.

5.1.2 Acronyms and Terms

There are many acronyms and terms that are used to describe MXF. They are hard to avoid because it makes the whole subject easier to talk about. Here is a quick list of some of the more important ones, which will probably become the nouns and verbs of common MXF parlance.