GEISHA

The rise of IP technology in the last decennia has totally changed the landscape of the IT industry. Steadily, this new technology is being introduced in other industries such as the media industry. The introduction of IP technology and the application of an IT-based infrastructure in media production introduce several opportunities. Video and audio can be handled, processes, stored and transported as data files independent of the format. This contrasts sharply with how today the classical media technology handles media as continuous streams.

IP based storage infrastructure for High Definition

The FIPA project has resulted in a storage architecture that was valorized with the construction of a central FC-based storage media infrastructure for Standard Definition (SD). Is it expected that within a couple of years the current Standard Definition (SD) video format will be pushed aside by High Definition as standard production format. However, the production in High Definition poses several new challenges concerning the media infrastructure, requiring the introduction of different new technological components into the architectural model to cope with the increased bandwidth and capacity requirements in a cost-effective way. Storing a second copy at hard disk-based systems becomes cheaper step by step and has to be evaluated as alternative for the current classical IT-backup/restore solutions.

Grid based services

As centralized resources gain in importance in an integrated end-to-end file based media production, more and more applications move from typical and specific media work centre applications to a central generic media application farms. The ever increasing requirements for media processing and integration urge for the adoption of the concept of GRID enabled computing as underlying technology for processing-intensive processes.

Service Oriented Architecture

The HD media production environment needs a complex, accurate and flexible integration between the central infrastructure and the accompanying media asset management system and the video and audio specific work centres. On a higher level, this integration should be approached by introducing the concept of Service Oriented Architectures, or SOA. This defines the use of so called services to support the requirements of the business users. In a SOA environment, nodes on a network make resources available to other participants in the network as independent services that the participants access in a standardized way.

High Definition Media Formats

In a HD-based media infrastructure, emerging new media formats will supersede the current standard definition video formats (e.g., D10, DV, MPEG2), browse video formats (e.g., MPEG-1) and audio formats (e.g., MPEG-1 layer 2). The selection of appropriate media formats for the different aspects of a HD-based media platform is of great importance. In order to obtain an optimal balance between media quality, bandwidth requirements and efficiency in use throughout the different workflows, decisions on the selected media format have to be preceded by thorough consideration and assessments.

Leaflet: Dutch, English