This document discusses video signal property description code points and their combinations that are widely used in production and video content workflows. Video properties and values are usually expressed in "metadata" that can exist across production and distribution workflows. Knowledge of these properties and their combinations has value as content is processed in the end-to-end production-to-distribution workflow chain.
The combinations of all possible expressible video properties as code point values could hypothetically result in hundreds or thousands of permutations; but many of those combinations are rarely or never used in practice. For example, it is highly unlikely that perceptual quantization (PQ) transfer characteristics function specified in Recommendation ITU-R BT.2100 would be combined with the colour primaries specified in Recommendation ITU-R BT.601. Only a small subset of the possible combinations is used in practice.
This document is written to provide information to help the producers of various content processing tools to avoid processing mistakes that can cause video quality degradation due to having incorrect assumptions made about video property combinations. There are only a few limited sets of video property combinations that are widely used in present-day video production and distribution equipment chains. This document describes these limited sets of combinations that are currently widely used and describes how the associated signal type metadata is carried to aid in the automation of content workflows across various domains of capture, production, and distribution. Lastly, this document aims to help its readers, especially toolset developers, to repurpose tools to work properly across several domains (e.g., capture, production, production distribution, and service distribution) where similar video conversion functions (e.g., chroma subsampling or colour space conversions) may be performed.
