Glossary

Here is a list of terms commonly used in the post production industry.

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MATTE

An electronic signal or physical device that blocks or "holds back" a portion of an image, allowing another image to be placed in the matted area. This technique is used during "compositing" of several layers of picture information as in "special effects".

MP3

A commonly used term for the MPEG-1 Layer 3 or MPEG-2 Layer 3 audio compression formats. MPEG-1 Layer 3 is for up to 2 channels of audio and MPEG-2 Layer 3 is for up to 5.1 channels of audio. MP3 is not the same as MPEG-3.

MPEG

Moving Picture Experts Group. It follows from JPEG to add inter-frame compression, the extra compression potentially available through similarities between successive frames of moving pictures. Interest in the television industry lies mainly with MPEG-1 and MPEG-2.

MPEG-1

A compression scheme deigned to work at 1.2 Mb/s, the data rate of CD-ROM, so that video could be played from CDs. Its quality is not sufficient for TV broadcast.

MPEG-2

A family of inter- and intra-frame compression systems designed to cover a wide range of requirements from "VHS quality" all the way to HDTV. With data rates of between 4 and 100 Mb/s, the family includes the compression system that delivers digital TV to the home and puts video onto DVDs.

MXF

MXF is a "container" or "wrapper" format which supports a number of different streams of coded "essence", encoded with any of a variety of codecs, together with a metadata wrapper which describes the material contained within the MXF file. MXF has full timecode and metadata support, and is intended as a platform-agnostic stable standard for future professional video and audio applications.