History of MetaRex

2 minute read

All aboard the METAdata Resource EXpress

The history of MetaRex

MetaRex was shown to work waaay back in 1998, when the original MXF team demonstrated file workflows with metadata preservation at the BBC in a project called G-FORS (see page 219). The demo was brought up to date with live networking and VFX and shown at the ARRI International Broadcast Day in 2019, but in 2022 there still wasn’t a similar solution available on the market.

Throughout 2022, while at NAB, IBC and the DPP Leader’s Briefing, the MetaRex team did a lot of talking to content creators, facility owners, software vendors and many others about what were the blockers that stopped metadata being a first class citizen. The biggest issue was “the metadata gets lost”. Games companies complained that every new virtual set was a custom engineering job, just to get the metadata to the right place at the right time. So, with this all in mind, the MetaRex Project was created.

What even was the MetaRex Project?

The aim of the project was to create a body of free to use, Open Source software that allows media metadata to be created, transmitted and stored over common links and file systems.

In the first stages of the project, it was completely funded by Backers. We had three tiers, Gold, Sliver and Regular and each tier contributed towards to MetaRex Project. The full list of Backers is on our Collaboration page.

MetaRex has successfully completed its first phase and has created a pool of software available on GitHub .