Motion JPEG2000 at U.S. National Library of Medicine
Posted by Sachin Garg on 1st December 2005 | Permanent Link
With archivists making the transition from analog videotape to digital archiving, the question is no longer where to store everything — since hard drives and digital video recorders (DVRs) are replacing the stacks of tape stored inside an air-conditioned room — but how to store it. If lossiness is a concern, they need to figure out what format works best for them. But, no matter what format they choose, there are software solutions that may solve their dilemma.
The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM, Bethesda, MD) recently hosted “Getting to Disk-Based Lossless Digital Video Compression,” a topical meeting that included the first public demonstration of real-time, full-screen, mathematically-lossless video compression and decompression based on the Motion JPEG2000 (MJ2) standard. Participants considered the potential of lossless, on-disk video storage in light of the “twilight of tape” as a cost-effective storage media.
Glenn Pearson, senior software developer of Management Systems Designers Inc. (MSD, Fairfax, VA) says that migration from analog tape to digital archiving as a preservation strategy continues in the digital domain, and can still incur generational losses if using lossy rather than mathematically lossless codecs. The latter include ones based on JPEG2000 (JP2) lossless and MPEG-4/AVC lossless.
Rob Buckley, a research fellow at Xerox (Stamford, CT), stressed the advantages of JPEG2000 image compression that lets portions be extracted “scalably” so that a low-bandwidth, lossy stream can be extracted for a high-quality lossless file. JPEG2000 is used to compress individual frames in both MJ2 and (in a digital cinema content) MXF file formats. He also reviewed the color spaces needed for quality video and scanned-film masters.
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