Digital film archival using JPEG 2000 and MXF formats and practical applications

Digital technologies have entered movie production and distribution and become more and more important for archives. Key factors in digital film archiving are the data formats that are used to store images,sound, and metadata. These formats must be carefully chosen to ensure that future generations will be able to view the movies of today. This article describes the formats that are used by the digital film archive system concept and prototype implementation that is under development in the European EDCine project. The most important properties of the chosen format, JPEG 2000, and the profiles for use in film archiving that have been proposed for standardization are described. The second part of the article explains the practical application of JPEG 2000 and workflows to encode image data to these profiles and back to distribution formats.