Several studies and user reports claim JPEG 2000 to be the solution for audio-visual archiving

JPEG 2000 as archiving format

Three technical advantages of using JPEG 2000 for audio-visual archiving are usually stressed: • Truly lossless compression: It enables a reduction in storage requirement of 50% on average while still allowing the exact original image information to be recovered.

• Scalability: allowing proxy extraction, efficient browsing, retrieval, trans-coding and streaming.

• Open standard: The JPEG 2000 standard supports every resolution, colour depth, number of components and frame rates. Moreover, a non-technical feature makes JPEG 2000 even more attractive for long- term projects: it is license and royalty free…

Conclusion Figure 3: JPEG 2000 offers up to mathematically lossless quality.

For several years now, JPEG 2000 has been gaining ground as long term preservation format within the audio-visual community including digital cinema and broadcast.

Indeed, broadcasters and video archivists are looking for long-term digital preservation on disk. In most cases, the source material is not digital, but on film that needs to be scanned or high quality analogue videotape such as Betacam SP. As such, a destination digital format must then be selected. Key requirements here often include reducing the storage costs of uncompressed video while still maintaining indefinite protection from loss or damage. Moreover, the format should preferably enable digitized content to be exploited, which means providing flexibility – workflows again – and security.

For these reasons, several studies and user reports claim JPEG 2000 to be the solution for audio-visual archiving.

Note that not all the JPEG 2000 adopters rely on this format for the final archives exploitation. In particular, when the Internet is the prime target exploitation channel, the content is trans-coded from JPEG 2000 lossless to low bit rate H.264. The advantage is to also be more compatible with today’s web browsers – a weakness of JPEG 2000 – but it implies additional costs and complexity.

JPEG 2000 offers a number of advantageous features which makes it ideal for the broadcast production workflow as master format, contribution format or archiving format. Key strengths include high video quality, lossless compression, low latency, robustness to transmission errors, scalability and constant quality through encoding & decoding generations. Motion compensation based methods (e.g. MPEG family) are and will remain convenient solutions for the final diffusion of the content to the end- consumer. Complementarily, JPEG 2000 is fast becoming the mandatory standard for professional management of production workflow. As JPEG 2000 supports any resolution, colour depth, number of components and frame rates, it is also ready to address future applications.

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EMERGING STANDARDS