Ingex is a suite of software applications designed to enable low-cost flexible tapeless television production. The functionality of the software includes SDI video and audio capture, real-time transcoding and wrapping in MXF, archiving to LTO-3 data tape and network file serving of media files. The software was originally developed by BBC Research and Development in 2005 for series three of the BAMZOOKi BBC children's program and is now released under the terms of the GPL software licence.

Ingex has since been used by the EastEnders and Dragons' Den television productions as well as a music video production for BBC Radio One.

Three white papers describing Ingex and its use for various BBC television productions are available. The first paper looks in particular at the use of MXF and AAF files in the system, while the second paper looks at the practical benefits achieved by the tapeless capture and logging system. The third and most recent paper (Sep 2007) covers the use of Ingex for EastEnders, Dragons' Den and the BBC Archive. An 8-minute video (63MB) has been produced demonstrating the use of Ingex for BAMZOOKi in October 2005.

The software consists of the following components:

• Ingex Studio - a multi-camera television studio ingest and transcoding system.
  Currently supported SD codecs are:
  • Avid-compatible JPEG codec resolutions known as 2:1, 3:1, 10:1, 20:1, 15:1s, 10:1m, 4:1m
  • DVCPRO50 (50Mbps) and DV (25Mbps)
  • IMX 50/40/30 (50/40/30Mbps)
  • Uncompressed SD video at 8 bits-per-sample and 10 bits-per-sample
  Supported HD codecs are:
  • DNxHD (VC-3) at 120Mbps and 185Mbps
  • DVCPRO HD
  • Uncompressed HD video at 8 bits-per-sample
• Ingex Player - software player for playback of MXF OP-Atom and MXF OP-1a files. Supports playout to computer monitor or over SDI I/O card. Features include quad-split, audio monitor, timecode display and jog-shuttle control.
• Ingex Archive - ingest system designed for video tape archive preservation. Video tape is played back from a VTR, ingested over SDI, and stored as an MXF OP-1a file, including all audio channels, VITC and LTC timecodes and archive database metadata. Features include VTR-control, D-3 tape error recording, PSE analysis and MPEG-2 browse generation.
• MediaHarmony - a Samba VFS module which allows multiple Avid editing workstations to use low-cost commodity storage without conflicts around the .pmr and .mdb database files. This is particularly useful for workgroups of editors using Avid XpressDV.
• libMXF - a low-level C library for reading and writing MXF files. Particular attention has been made to creating MXF files compatible with Avid software and P2 cameras. Several useful command line tools are included.

• TransferToP2 - Re-wrap Avid MXF (OP-Atom) files into P2 compatible MXF files
• Re-wrap EVS JPEG coded "MXF" files into Avid-compatible MXF
• Re-wrap P2 MXF (OP-Atom) files into Avid-compatible MXF for older versions of Avid software which do not support P2 MXF files

If you have a query or wish to contribute to Ingex please get in touch.