Fraunhofer Moving Pictures announces CURATOR Archive Suite
by Debra Kaufman|
Creative COW Magazine : Fraunhofer Moving Pictures announces CURATOR Archive Suite | ||||||
UNESCO estimates there's 1 million feet of nitrate film that's never been transferred to any other medium. Archiving is a crucial part of our industry, both our heritage and our future. At NAB 2011, Fraunhofer IIS's Moving Picture Technologies department unveiled some crucial tools to move digital restoration forward. The German company's CURATOR Archive Suite is a long-term, JPEG2000-based archive solution with the tools to create a Master Archive Package (MAP) and an Intermediate Access Package (IAP), an extension of the Digital Cinema Package (DCP). DCPs can be directly extracted from the IAP without recoding. The software creates MAP files with lossless coding; for IAP files, it creates an MXF-container in 2K and 4K horizontal resolutions.  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 quick quality checks and unpackaging; and the Fraunhofer J2K Quicktime plug-in to convert images into MOV files with JPEG2000 encoded images. The CURATOR Archive Suite supports a complete workflow for archives, which begins when the analog material is converted to digital data at the maximum native resolution and bit depth. The image is then encoded to JPEG2000, either with the Fraunhofer J2K plug-in for Quicktime or the CURATOR Creator. After encoding, 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). Fraunhofer IIS concentrated on integrating standards-compliant pre-settings. As a result, the solution can import DPX, TIFF, J2K and MOV files and also store technical and descriptive metadata in XML format. Fraunhofer also demonstrated its easyDCP Creator bundled with its easyDCP Player at NAB 2011, which enables real-time playback of Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs) on a standard PC. That offers another option for high-end post houses that may need to use their screening theatres for other purposes, and also enables smaller post houses to playback DCPs without building such a theater. Designed for use in a secured environment, easyDCP is a JPEG2000 decoding solution that can play back encrypted DCPs. The easyDCP Player is system independent so users can use it on Windows-based PCs, MACs or Linux-based computers.  easyDCP The software is compliant with both SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) and J2K INTEROP DCPS and resulting DCPs can be ingested in all DCI-compliant cinema servers. The easyDCP Creator+ version adds support for stereoscopic 3D functionality and encryption with a Key Delivery Message (KDM) generating tool. A test download for easyDCP Creator and easyDCP Player is available via download here.
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