EDCine focuses on the optimisation, enhancement and interoperability issues of Digital Cinema based future standards. JPEG-2000 compression and the ‘DCI specifications’ document are the cornerstones of the project’s efforts.

What is JPEG2000 ?

The ‘DCI specifications’ document published in July’05 confirms the SMPTE decision to choose JPEG 2000 instead of MPEG for digital cinema coding doesn’t take into account many European issues. The MXF file format and security tools specifications are being adopted following the DCI studios’ wishes. They lead to large files because of the lower compression rate but allow larger colour space, better resolution and bitstreams adaptable in quality and resolution. To continue to be able to project digital content, cinemas will have to comply with those requirements within a few years.

EDCine will push the limits of the SMPTE specifications by including quality optimisation, robustness to transmission errors, content security tools, stereoscopic imaging, interactive access, forensic marking and metadata for indexing and retrieval. The project will also supply interoperability with equipments using transcoding to/from MPEG and insure end-to-end security from production to projection and to the others content distribution markets (e.g. television, mobile devices, internet). Networked access to cinema archives allow users optimised access of video data for retrieval and downloading.

EDCine will demonstrate that interoperable solutions between the DCI requirements and the European digital cinema needs may be found. EDCine in particular will demonstrate the possible convergence between DCI model and the European needs and networked audio-visual systems while keeping as mush as possible the high level of perceived quality, and ensuring security of content along the distribution chain. EDCine developments will be actively pushed at the ITU, SMPTE, JPEG and MPEG standard bodies where the partners are already active, directly or through the European Digital Cinema Forum (EDCF).

The EDCine project will do more than putting Europe at the forefront of the race to standardise the world’s digital cinema, it will also push the whole European D-Cinema industry to the front line with solutions compliant with Europe’s needs.

Principal Research Areas of EDCine

Our RTD (Research and Technological Development) work is best described as a matrix crossing four technological domains and three usages of those technologies :

The matrix of technological developments of EDCine include the following areas:

• Content coding and decoding
•  JPEG 2000 quality optimisation
•  Quality enhancement of decoded images suited for 4k, 2K and HD projectors
• Transcoding, rewrapping and remultiplexing tools
• Stereoscopic cinema
• Enhanced 2D, descriptive and acoustic 3D sound, wave field synthesis
• digital adaptation for sound rendering environments
• Security and DRM
• Security tools
• Digital Cinema forensic marking tools
• Robust and efficient transmission
• Packaging, storage
• Wireless distribution
• Transport mechanism, including transmission error protection
• Transmission error concealment and masking
• Interactive access to live events and to archived movies
• Audiovisual quality assessment
• Subjective image quality evaluation
• Subjective sound quality evaluation
• Objective models study and tests