MOX, the new open source format

From the Indiegogo fundraising site Indiegogo comes to us MOXa proposed cross-platform, patent-free video format that combines audio and video within an MXF container.

The idea comes from Brendan Bolles, plug-in developer and VFX expert, who aims to solve the problem with most of today’s formats. Some are not cross-platform, others do not support certain bit depths or lossless compression, and many of them require licensing fees.

In support of the project, Stu Maschwitz, who worked with Brendan Bolles at VFX company The Orpahanage, had this to say on his blog:

“Imagine if ProRes wasn’t controlled by Apple. Imagine a file that plays with the right gamut on any computer. Imagine multi-channel, high bit depth files for VFX collaboration. Imagine a camera that records both a lightly compressed, uncorrected logarithmic file and a proxy for editing, compressed and with a LUT burned into the image, both in the same file.”

Its characteristics

MOX will use the MXF container to store a specific list of open source video and audio codecs, many of which use image streams, so it is possible to copy them in and out of MOX as if it were a Zip file.

The video formats will be: Dirac, OpenEXR, DPX, PNG and JPEG.
If we add all these codecs together, we will realize that MOX will be able to store video in 8, 10, 12 and 16 bits, as well as 16 and 32 bits floating point. In addition, each of these depths will have the option of lossy or lossless compression.

Audio codecs will be FLAC, Opus and PCM raw to include 8, 16, 24 and 32 bit compressed and uncompressed audio.

Both video and audio will support any number of channels, so alpha channels, Z-depth, 3D stereo or multiple video streams can be carried.

MOX will also support file-level or frame-specific metadata. Color space metadata may include ICC profiles, color spaces such as Rec. 709, gamma and chroma values, OpenColor IO configuration information and embedded LUTs.

The open source library and plugins will be programmed in C++, hosted on GitHub, and available under the BSD license, allowing both commercial and non-commercial software to use them freely.

Collections

On this page it is possible to collaborate for them to carry out the project. If they reach $20,000, developer Brendan Bolles will create the plugin for Adobe Premiere, followed by After Effects ($25,000) and Nuke ($30,000).