Overview

At the time of writing this book, MXF is a new file interchange and storage format that is set to play a significant part in professional program production and distribution. MXF will allow interoperability between equipment and systems from different manufacturers and interoperability between systems belonging to different organizations. MXF is already central to major investments of many broadcasters and program makers.

In planning this book, it was thought that it would be informative to give examples of the different approaches taken by end users and by manufacturers when adopting this new format for their production systems and equipment.

As an illustration of architectures being planned and implemented by broadcasters, we have contributions from NOB and the BBC; these are public service broadcasters in the Netherlands and the UK, respectively.

From industry, we have short contributions from Grass Valley, Panasonic, Sony, Pinnacle Systems, and Omneon Video Networks. These contributions show, in their different ways, the issues that each company has faced in implementing and integrating MXF into their product range.

We hope that, through these different perspectives, the reader can get a flavor of the real-world application of MXF.

MXF and Infrastructure Change at NOB

Henk den Bok

Embracing the Digital Workflow

The broadcast processes for the Dutch public television channels went through a fandamental change in 2005. Almost all activities associated with public television broadcasting migrated into the digital world. Four large projects, that had been germinating and cross-fertilizing for some years, came to fruition:

• PowerStation