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Material eXchange Format (MXF) is a container format for professional digital video and audio media defined by a set of SMPTE standards.

Contents

A brief summary of MXF

MXF is a "container" or "wrapper" format that supports a number of different streams of coded "essence", encoded with any of a variety of codecs, together with a metadata wrapper which describes the material contained within the MXF file.

MXF has been designed to address a number of problems with non-professional formats. MXF has full timecode and metadata support, and is intended as a platform-agnostic stable standard for future professional video and audio applications.

MXF in use

As of Autumn 2005, there were major interoperability problems with MXF in broadcast postproduction use. The two data-recording camera systems that produce it, Sony's XDCAM and Panasonic's DVCPRO P2, produce files that are mutually incompatible due to opaque subformat options which are obscured behind the MXF file extension. Without advanced tools, it is impossible to tell these formats apart.

Additionally, many MXF systems produce split-file A/V, that is the video and audio components in separate files, and use a filenaming convention that relies on randomly-generated filenames to link them. Not only does this exacerbate the issue of knowing exactly what is in an MXF file without specialist tools, but it breaks the functionality of standard desktop computer techniques which are generally used to manipulate data on a level as fundamental as moving, copying, renaming and deleting. Using a randomly-generated filename is uninformative to the user, but changing the name breaks the loose database structure between files.

Also, MXF is unsupported by several prominent applications, including Adobe After Effects. The implementation in several products, including the prominent Avid Newscutter, is particularly wanting, and highlights the identification issue by easily confusing XDCAM and P2 MXF flavours. Despite MXF's purpose as an easily-archivable format, importing split-file MXF with external XML metadata intact can be brutally complicated.

The file extension for MXF files is ".mxf". The Macintosh File Type Code registered with Apple for MXF files is "mxf " (note the trailing space).

The MXF Standards

Availability of Standards

SMPTE's [top standards page] has information, for the ordering of CD-ROMs, which would hold formal copy of the SMPTE standards. Judging by SMPTE's index, all of the standards, referenced above, would be contained on those CD-ROMs, as available from [SMPTE].

See also

External links

 

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All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

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