ABSTRACT
In the early days of digital media, little thought was given to metadata. Recording, mixing, editing, and display systems typically worked with a single media format. The challenges of coaxing sufficient performance from the hardware to process the pixels were such that the idea of building agile decoders seemed ludicrous. Equipment was designed to be single-purpose, and most essence parameters were burned into hardware. In this context, it is little wonder that metadata was limited to controlling the few switches that existed—such as selecting 625 lines or 525 lines, or choosing one of ten possible wipe patterns. Further, the industry was vertically integrated, and it was possible to obtain most or all components of a system from a single supplier. Design engineers felt at liberty to specify a unique metadata code for each switch. They were asked to share the specification only with those immediately before and after them in the signal chain.
