Introduction

Operational patterns are the way of controlling the complexity of MXF Files. Various names were tried during the design of MXF; for example, templates was rejected because it was already laden with expectations that differed depending on whether you came from a video or a software community. Profiles was rejected because there is a well-known video server with this name. Operational patterns was chosen because it had not already been used and conveyed the idea of the operational use of MXF. The design of the generalized operational patterns that appear in the MXF File Format Specification was governed by the desire to limit the complexity of encoders and decoders to acceptable levels. It was envisaged that specialist operational patterns would be created to cover the requirements of specific application areas such as non-linear editing and live file usage.

Generalized Operational Patterns

MXF was intended to be applicable to all parts of the multimedia content creation and manipulation chain. The goal was to create a file format that would be the equivalent of the BNC connector for streams. It would allow applications to speak to each other and it would allow facilities to be created using MXF as the interface of choice to connect together the various operational areas.

Because of this broad scope, there are many tools within the MXF suite of documents that are not applicable or not relevant to many designs. For this reason, the design committee looked at ways of simplification that would allow...