he first result of the cooperation will be the integration of Fraunhofer IIS‘s easyDCP Creator and Curator technology into Cube-Tec’s Media Rendering Farm in order to automate and scale these tools for quality-controlled mass-production of Digital Cinema Packages (DCP) and Master Archive Packages (MAP). Next step will be the development of migration technologies that enable a smooth transition from tapebased archives to digital preservation.

Dr. Siegfried Foessel, head of the Moving Picture Technologies department at Fraunhofer IIS says: “The cooperation between Cube-Tec and Fraunhofer IIS makes it possible to set-up complete new preservation workflows and to integrate our technologies in future-oriented archive solutions and systems.”

In digital preservation, open standards and formats are essential to ensure a long-term accessibility to images, audio and meta data. With JPEG2000 and MXF, two of the most important formats used in Digital Cinema distribution have been adapted to the requirements in media preservation.

The archive profile for MAP was standardized by the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 2010 as ISO/IEC 15444- 1:2004/Amd2. This archive profile is intended for long-term preservation formats and supports mathematically lossless compression for digital media archives.

Jörg Houpert, Cube-Tec‘s Technical Director adds: “JPEG2000 is known to be the future open standard for moving image preservation. Up to now, a widespread use has been very difficult due to the lack of flexible archive solutions on the market. With the support of Fraunhofer IIS we are able to make better solutions for media archives available.“