Technology news and Jobs arrow linux.conf.au arrow linux.conf.au: The Beeb and the penguin
linux.conf.au: The Beeb and the penguin E-mail
by Sam Varghese   
Sunday, 27 January 2008

Although the system used for news is a proprietary system, Cunningham says in the area, of research and development the BBC has put in a lot of effort into standards-based equipment, "so if something does go wrong, we can replace a component.
"The main standards in this area are MXF or Material Exchange Format. And that's an open standard that is, if you like, the BBC's required format for video footage. ...we use it in different editors and so, we've sort of broken out of the old lock-in stage, where you bought equipment from this company you had to use their storage and everything. Now we can change these files; so for example if someone shoots on a Panasonic P2 camera, it's got a memory stick in the camera so it writes to a file directly, and that's an MXF file. And that can be brought in to the editors immediately, once you've got the file off the memory stick."

The BBC's use of FOSS will have an effect downstream given the size of the organisation and the number of clients with which it interacts.

Says Cunningham: "I think it will have an effect, because of the way, particularly in our area, in research and development - we see that's a great benefit, if we promote it. Then we get improvements back to the community. We've already done this with Dirac and we've put a number of improvements and suggestions back. We've already got some feedback about the Ingex software, and so we see the benefit for that, and that's why we continue to promote it, and release our software as open source.

"And quite a few other things the BBC's done - some of the web side of things - they've released a number of tools for web development. Betsie was one of the first, I think. That was a script... it helped produce different versions of a web page for the sight impaired.

"And also there will be the AAF toolkit... Advanced Authoring Format. Its scope is interchanging between editing systems. So where MXF was acquisition, and getting it into the editing system, AAF is when you want to change - you might have edited something in a very quick and dirty way on a low-end editing system, and then you want to bring it into another editing system to do some fancy effects. AAF is the format which can do that. And we've put a lot of effort into making AAF work."


 
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