A generic content transformation solution
GENERIC CONTENT TRANSFORMATION (GCT)

Environment

Many multimedia solutions are designed for very individual tasks and problems, creating new data formats and codecs. The existing plurality of project data and distribution formats seems limitless. The digital "impedance mismatch" of media content makes it hard or impossible to exchange the results of creative design work and to manage changes across the heterogeneous format requirements of different authoring tools. The availability of interfaces is mostly limited to exchanging proprietary package formats and a sparse selection of dedicated assets. Asset import is often restricted to low complexity and oriented towards uniform codecs. Media production processes require significant time and manpower for conversion and extraction of content into compatible file formats, both activities that do not add value to the work. The loss of creative components, like layout, navigation and functionality will certainly occur.


Vision

The project aims at overcoming current point-to-point integration facilities to evolve towards a framework, that allows for the subsequent addition of further transformations between other input and output formats. This challenge necessitated the definition of a generic set of architectural structures and processes to deal with the import, editing, and export of multiple formats. A further issue is storing all formats in a unified project format. Thus, these considerations motivated and initiated the work on Generic Content Transformation (GCT). It was developed to allow transcoding data from entire media containers to alternative forms of representation. The vision is to develop a transformation framework offering the modularity and flexibility of a Content HUB both as a desktop application as well as a background Enterprise Content Integration application.


© MOCCA Team, last changed 8/25/08