Digital recording of performing arts: formats and conversion

In today's digital era, the cultural sector is confronted with a growing demand for making digital recordings - audio, video and pictures - of stage performances available over a multitude of channels, including digital television and the Internet. Essentially, this can be accomplished in two different ways. A single entity can act as a content aggregator, collecting digital recordings from all cultural partners and making this content available to content distributors or each individual partner can distribute its own recordings via the Internet. Both methods (content aggregation and individual Internet distribution) imply a different set of requirements for audio-visual compression and container formats.
Content aggregation requires high-resolution, high-quality material, suitable for editing/post-processing and conversion to different audio-visual formats suitable for specific distribution channels. In this case, storage and bandwidth limitations are of secondary importance, since the material is typically transferred off-line. Compression and container formats must be chosen such that the content can be processed using (semi)professional production tools. Additionally, the consistent use of metadata must be supported.
For Internet distribution the formats must be flexible enough to support a wide range of terminals (PC, Personal media player, Smartphone, ...) and bandwidth-limited connections (xDSL, UMTS, ...). This specifically implies the use of compression algorithms with a very good rate-distortion performance over a large range of resolutions, frame rates, and bit-rates. Moreover, the distribution formats must be supported by popular playback software.
Establishing a standard set of suitable content aggregation and distribution formats necessitates efficient tools for the conversion of contributed and legacy content to the chosen formats. This conversion is often a time- and resource consuming process. The efficiency of conversion tools can be ameliorated by performing transcoding instead of re-encoding.