SMPTE ST 429-10:2023-09
Revision of SMPTE ST 429-10:2008
SMPTE Standard

D-Cinema Packaging β€” Stereoscopic Picture Track File

Approved - 2023-09-12

Table of contentsπŸ”—

  1. Foreword
  2. 1 Scope
  3. 2 Conformance
  4. 3 Normative references
  5. 4 Terms and definitions
  6. 5 Stereoscopic Picture Track Files Structure
  7. 6 MainStereoscopicPicture Element
  8. 7 Composition Playlist Constraints
    1. 7.1 CPL Reels
    2. 7.2 MainStereoscopicPicture Assets
      1. 7.2.1 Edit Rate
      2. 7.2.2 Frame Rate
  9. 8 Schema
  10. 9 Sample (Informative)
  11. Annex A Stereoscopic Picture Sub-Descriptor (Normative)
  12. Annex B Additional elements
  13. Bibliography

ForewordπŸ”—

SMPTE (the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) is an internationally-recognized standards developing organization. Headquartered and incorporated in the United States of America, SMPTE has members in over 80 countries on six continents. SMPTE’s Engineering Documents, including Standards, Recommended Practices, and Engineering Guidelines, are prepared by SMPTE’s Technology Committees. Participation in these Committees is open to all with a bona fide interest in their work. SMPTE cooperates closely with other standards-developing organizations, including ISO, IEC and ITU. SMPTE Engineering Documents are drafted in accordance with the rules given in its Standards Operations Manual.

At the time of publication no notice had been received by SMPTE claiming patent rights essential to the implementation of this Engineering Document. However, attention is drawn to the possibility that some of the elements of this document may be the subject of patent rights. SMPTE shall not be held responsible for identifying any or all such patent rights.

This document was prepared by Technology Committee 27C.

This edition updates external references to their latest versions.

Copyright Β© 2024, Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced, by any means whatsoever, without the prior written permission of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.

1 ScopeπŸ”—

This document provides the definition of a single MXF file design for Stereoscopic Picture content wrapping. It also defines a new Composition Playlist (CPL) extension element to reference such Stereoscopic Picture Track File.

2 ConformanceπŸ”—

Normative text is text that describes elements of the design that are indispensable or contains the conformance language keywords: "shall", "should", or "may". Informative text is text that is potentially helpful to the user, but not indispensable, and can be removed, changed, or added editorially without affecting interoperability. Informative text does not contain any conformance keywords.

All text in this document is, by default, normative, except: the Introduction, any section explicitly labeled as "Informative" or individual paragraphs that start with "Note:"

The keywords "shall" and "shall not" indicate requirements strictly to be followed in order to conform to the document and from which no deviation is permitted.

The keywords, "should" and "should not" indicate that, among several possibilities, one is recommended as particularly suitable, without mentioning or excluding others; or that a certain course of action is preferred but not necessarily required; or that (in the negative form) a certain possibility or course of action is deprecated but not prohibited.

The keywords "may" and "need not" indicate courses of action permissible within the limits of the document.

The keyword "reserved" indicates a provision that is not defined at this time, shall not be used, and may be defined in the future. The keyword "forbidden" indicates "reserved" and in addition indicates that the provision will never be defined in the future.

A conformant implementation according to this document is one that includes all mandatory provisions ("shall") and, if implemented, all recommended provisions ("should") as described. A conformant implementation need not implement optional provisions ("may") and need not implement them as described.

Unless otherwise specified, the order of precedence of the types of normative information in this document shall be as follows: Normative prose shall be the authoritative definition; Tables shall be next; then formal languages; then figures; and then any other language forms.

3 Normative referencesπŸ”—

The following documents are referred to in the text in such a way that some or all of their content constitutes requirements of this document. For dated references, only the edition cited applies. For undated references, the latest edition of the referenced document (including any amendments) applies.

4 Terms and definitionsπŸ”—

For the purposes of this document, the terms and definitions given in the following documents and the additional terms and definitions apply:

Composition Playlist
CPL
[SOURCE: SMPTE ST 429-7]
Material Exchange Format
MXF
[SOURCE: SMPTE ST 377-1]
Uniform Resource Identifier
URI
[SOURCE: IETF RFC 3986]
eXtensible Markup Language
XML
[SOURCE: W3C XML 1.0]
2D
non-stereoscopic

5 Stereoscopic Picture Track Files StructureπŸ”—

The starting point of this stereoscopic picture packaging method is a single "Stereoscopic Picture Essence Stream" corresponding to the frame based interleaving of the two sequences of frames associated respectively with the left eye and the right eye as presented in Figure 1:

Figure 1 –⁠ Stereoscopic Picture Essence Stream Structure.

This single Stereoscopic Picture Essence Stream shall contain the same number of left and right frames and shall be wrapped according to SMPTE ST 429-3, with the constraint that the KLV Fill item shall not be used between the left frame and the right frame of the same frames pair.

The left frame shall be the first frame in the left/right frames pair as presented in the Figure 1 above.

The Picture Essence Descriptor shall have a strong reference to a Stereoscopic Picture Essence Sub-Descriptor, defined in Annex A. This Stereoscopic Picture Essence Sub-Descriptor shall be used to identify a Track File as being a Stereoscopic Picture Track File belonging to this standard.

The Sample Rate property of the Picture Essence Descriptor shall be set to the frame rate of the essence stream. The Edit Rate in the Picture Track of the MXF header Packages shall be half the Sample Rate. The Index Table shall use Edit Units that are defined for the left/right frames pairs and as illustrated in Figure 2. The Index Start Position of the first Index Table Segment shall index the position of the first frame (which is a left eye frame) of the stereoscopic picture track.

Figure 2 –⁠ Stereoscopic Picture Track File Body.
NOTE 1 —⁠

The relationship between Edit Units and Sample Rate is defined in SMPTE ST 377-1 and can be summarized as follows:

NOTE 2 —⁠

Given a gross picture rate of 48, the Sample Rate property of the Picture Essence Descriptor would be set to 48 – as one sample unit corresponds to one frame in this design, the Sample Rate is the Frame Rate. Since the left/right pictures are grouped as pairs, the Edit Rate in the Picture Track of the MXF header Packages will be half the Sample Rate: 24. In this example, the MXF file will contain the following information:

NOTE 3 —⁠ The indexing of left/right frames pairs permits decoders to unambiguously determine the first frame of a stereoscopic frames pair at any point in the essence container.

6 MainStereoscopicPicture ElementπŸ”—

In order to reference the Stereoscopic Picture Track File in a standard Composition Playlist, a MainStereoscopicPicture element is defined and shall be used as an extension element in the Reel element of a Composition Playlist as specified in SMPTE ST 429-7.

The MainStereoscopicPicture element shall indicate stereoscopic picture essence to be projected onto the main screen and shall reference an external Track File as defined in Clause 5. The MainStereoscopicPicture element shall be an instance of PictureTrackFileAssetType and its structure is defined in SMPTE ST 429-7.

The MainStereoscopicPicture element structure defined in this standard is represented using W3C XML 1.0, and specified using W3C XML Schema Part 1 and W3C XML Schema Part 2. This MainStereoscopicPicture element specification shall be associated with a unique XML namespace name that shall be the string value http://www.smpte-ra.org/schemas/429-10/2008/Main-Stereo-Picture-CPL. This namespace name conveys both structural and semantic version information, and serves the purpose of a traditional version number field.

XML namespace names used in this standard are identified in Table 1. Namespace names are represented as Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) values.

Although a URI value begins with a method element (http in this case), the value is designed primarily to be a unique string and does not necessarily correspond to an actual on-line resource. Applications implementing this standard should not attempt to resolve URI values on-line.

Table 1 –⁠ XML Namespaces
Qualifier URI
msp-cpl http://www.smpte-ra.org/schemas/429-10/2008/Main-Stereo-Picture-CPL
cpl http://www.smpte-ra.org/schemas/429-7/2006/CPL
xs http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema

URIs listed in Table 1 are normative, whereas the namespace qualifier values themselves (used in Table 1 and elsewhere in this standard) are not normative. Thus, namespace qualifier values may be replaced in instance documents by any arbitrary XML compliant namespace qualifier, meaning that conformant implementations shall expect any XML compliant namespace qualifier value that is associated with a URI from Table 1.

7 Composition Playlist ConstraintsπŸ”—

7.1 CPL ReelsπŸ”—

If present in a Composition Playlist, the MainStereoscopicPicture element shall indicate the existence of stereoscopic content as specified in this document and the optional MainPicture element shall be omitted.

NOTE —⁠ The MainStereoscopicPicture element avoids erroneous 2D playback of a Stereoscopic Picture Track File.

7.2 MainStereoscopicPicture AssetsπŸ”—

7.2.1 Edit RateπŸ”—

The Edit Rate of each MainStereoscopicPicture asset in the CPL shall match the Edit Rate of the underlying Stereoscopic Picture Track File.

7.2.2 Frame RateπŸ”—

The Frame Rate of each MainStereoscopicPicture asset in the CPL shall match the Sample Rate of the underlying Stereoscopic Picture Track File.

NOTE —⁠ As highlighted in Clause 5, the Frame Rate of a Stereoscopic Picture Track File is provided by the Picture Essence Descriptor Sample Rate property.

8 SchemaπŸ”—

The XML schema of the MainStereoscopicPicture element is provided in Element a.

In case of conflict between the prose and the schema, the prose shall be the authoritative expression of the MainStereoscopicPicture element definition.

9 Sample (Informative)πŸ”—

A CPL Reel sample is provided below in order to illustrate such CPL implementation:

<cpl:Reel>
  <cpl:Id>urn:uuid:4e2606b0-b4ae-6447-a90e-1e5bf99d7f54</cpl:Id>
  <cpl:AnnotationText>Reel #1 of The Stereoscopic Feature</cpl:AnnotationText>
  <cpl:AssetList>
    <cpl:MainSound>
      <cpl:Id>urn:uuid:7af1dace-936d-d74c-a7a5-569abd492e12</cpl:Id>
      <cpl:AnnotationText>Soundtrack for Reel #1 of The Stereoscopic
        Feature</cpl:AnnotationText>
      <cpl:EditRate>24 1</cpl:EditRate>
      <cpl:IntrinsicDuration>3600</cpl:IntrinsicDuration>
      <cpl:KeyId>urn:uuid:6716450c-7e93-3549-806f-e18d5f4206cd</cpl:KeyId>
      <cpl:Language>en-us</cpl:Language>
    </cpl:MainSound>
    <msp-cpl:MainStereoscopicPicture
      xmlns:msp-cpl="http://www.smpte-ra.org/schemas/429-10/2008/Main-Stereo-Picture-CPL">
      <cpl:Id>urn:uuid:7e427ee5-434a-c142-b845-6aa67e1e97ff</cpl:Id>
      <cpl:AnnotationText>Stereoscopic Picture for Reel #1 of The Stereoscopic
        Feature</cpl:AnnotationText>
      <cpl:EditRate>24 1</cpl:EditRate>
      <cpl:IntrinsicDuration>3800</cpl:IntrinsicDuration>
      <cpl:EntryPoint>100</cpl:EntryPoint>
      <cpl:Duration>3600</cpl:Duration>
      <cpl:KeyId>urn:uuid:1f894844-e1d8-8643-a48d-341b96659499</cpl:KeyId>
      <cpl:FrameRate>48 1</cpl:FrameRate>
      <cpl:ScreenAspectRatio>185 100</cpl:ScreenAspectRatio>
    </msp-cpl:MainStereoscopicPicture>
  </cpl:AssetList>
</cpl:Reel>

Annex A
Stereoscopic Picture Sub-Descriptor (Normative)πŸ”—

The Stereoscopic Picture Sub-Descriptor is a supplementary Essence Descriptor that can be strongly referenced by any Picture Essence Descriptor. In order that the strong reference can be made, the MXF Generic Descriptor (as defined in SMPTE ST 377-1) has an additional optional property as defined in Table A.1.

The Local Tag value associated with this additional optional property (called Sub Descriptors) shall be dynamically allocated (dynamic) as defined in SMPTE ST 377-1. The translation from each dynamically allocated Local Tag value to its full UL value can be found using the Primer Pack mechanism defined in SMPTE ST 377-1.

Table A.1 –⁠ Additional Optional Property for the MXF Generic Descriptor
Item Name Type Len Local Tag Item Designator Req ? Meaning Default
All elements from the Generic Descriptor are defined in SMPTE ST 377-1
Sub Descriptors Array of StrongRef (Sub Descriptors) 8+
16n
dynamic urn:smpte:ul:060e2b34.01010109.06010104.06100000 Opt Array of strong references to Sub Descriptor Sets

Any Picture Essence Descriptor used to describe stereoscopic picture essence wrapped according to this standard shall have a strong reference to a Stereoscopic Picture Sub-Descriptor, defined in Table A.2 below. As the purpose of this Sub-Descriptor is only to identify a Track File as being a Stereoscopic Picture Track File belonging to this standard, it does not require any specific property.

Table A.2 –⁠ Stereoscopic Picture Sub-Descriptor
Item Name Type Len Local Tag UL Designator Req ? Meaning Default
Stereoscopic Picture Sub-Descriptor Set Key 16 See Table A.3 below Req Defines the Stereoscopic Picture Sub-Descriptor Set
Length BER Length var Req Set length
Instance UID UUID 16 3C.0A urn:smpte:ul:060e2b34.01010101.01011502.00000000 Req Unique ID of this instance
Generation UID UUID 16 01.02 urn:smpte:ul:060e2b34.01010102.05200701.08000000 Opt Generation Identifier

The Stereoscopic Picture Sub-Descriptor Set Length should be BER long-form encoded using 4 bytes.

Table A.3 –⁠ Key for Stereoscopic Picture Sub-Descriptor
Byte No. Description Value (hex) Meaning
1-13 Defined in SMPTE ST 377-1
14 Set Kind (1) 01h Defines the Key value for the Stereoscopic Picture Sub-Descriptor
15 Set Kind (2) 63h
16 Reserved 00h Reserved

NOTE —⁠ The method of adding a Sub-Descriptor was first used in SMPTE ST 422.

Annex B
Additional elementsπŸ”—

This annex lists non-prose elements of this document.

  1. a. XML schema document for the MainStereoscopicPicture element (file: MainStereoscopicPicture.xsd )

BibliographyπŸ”—