Lossless Compression Storage Solution by Fraunhofer IIS

Fraunhofer IIS‘s Moving Picture Technologies department, with expertise in digital cinema and JPEG2000, announced the availability of its CURATOR Archive Suite at NAB 2011.

The CURATOR Archive Suite is a long-term archive solution that provides the suite for post production, archiving, and playback from the archive. It includes the tools to create both a Master Archive Package (MAP) and an Intermediate Access Package (IAP).

The software creates MAP files with lossless coding. For IAP files, it creates an MXF-Container in 2k and 4k horizontal resolutions. IAP is an extension of a Digital Cinema Package (DCP) and can be used for fast access and further distribution. DCPs can be directly extracted from the IAP without recoding.

"In production, lossless compression is critical to preserving the integrity of digital film archives," said Dr. Siegfried Foessel of Fraunhofer IIS’ s Moving Pictures Technology department. "This will be especially important as projectors and film production evolves to 8k or to higher color gamuts, because the archives will be only capable of producing a file for remastering based on their archived quality."

The suite consists of three components:

• CURATOR Creator to package the image, audio and metadata files for the creation of a MAP, IAP or DCP.
• CURATOR Player for real-time playback of the MAP or IAP on a standard PC for quality checks and unpackaging.
• Fraunhofer J2K Quicktime plug-in to convert images into MOV files with JPEG2000 encoded images.

Fraunhofer IIS’s CURATOR Archive Suite integrates a workflow for archives. The workflow starts when the analog material is converted to digital data and is done at the maximum native resolution and bit depth to preserve quality. The image is then encoded to JPEG2000, either with the Fraunhofer J2K plug-in for Quicktime or the CURATOR Creator allowing the choice of the appropriate format. After encoding, the next step is the mastering and packaging of a MAP or IAP. Image, audio and metadata are packaged into the MAP or IAP. Trackfiles are packed into separate (Metadata Exchange Format) MXF containers and linked together with metadata XML files. The software creates a digital data package containing all these components and adds a Packaging List (PKL) and a Composition Play List (CPL). For playback and extraction, the film can be decoded for a quality check.

Fraunhofer IIS concentrated on integrating standards-compliant pre-settings. The import of DPX, TIFF, J2K and MOV files is possible. It can also store technical and descriptive metadata in XML format. The software is based on the standardized JPEG2000 profiles for digital archiving and meets the standards defined by the International Organization for Standardization ISO (ISO15444-1:2004AMD2) and the International Federation of Film Archives FIAF.

The Fraunhofer IIS organization is part of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, based in Munich, Germany. Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft an European applied research organization and is partly funded by the German government. With 17,000 employees worldwide, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is composed of 59 Institutes conducting research in a broad range of research areas.