Introduction

This chapter explains the standards used for encapsulating JPEG 2000 into MXF. The JPEG 2000 codestream is specified by the ISO-IEC15444 1 standard. ^[1] Essentially, JPEG 2000 is an update to the JPEG standard widely used for still picture compression. The primary difference is that the JPEG 2000 picture transform uses wavelet filters rather than the more common DCT (discrete cosine transform). JPEG 2000 is a good deal more complex than the original JPEG standard, but is also much more capable of rendering superior pictures. The most important development is that the source images can exceed 8-bits resolution a prerequisite for high-quality imaging. More information on JPEG 2000 can be found at: http://www.jpeg.org/jpeg2000/ .

JPEG 2000 codestreams represent the coded data of a single picture. Sequences of pictures can be coded easily by simply concatenating the codestreams and this is the approach described in this chapter. There is also a specification for wrapping these codestreams in the ISO file format (based on Apple s QuickTime format) defined specifically for JPEG 2000, and this is likely to be widely used in most software applications. However, the seven major Hollywood studios set up an organization called Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) whose purpose was to define a specification for digital cinema. This specification was the keystone for the development of SMPTE standards that specified digital cinema. At the time of writing, the many documents involved in specifying digital cinema are mostly still in...