In theory processing in the digital domain should enhance quality and creativity, reduce costs and support more personalised entertainment. In practice, the process remains craft based, labour intensive, and prone to errors that result in wasted effort and cost. Challenging problems arise from the massive expansion of the volume of data as data resolutions increase and more versions are stored, increasing both the size and number of files. Postproduction generally works on uncompressed data streams, and has to deal with numerous versions of scenes and shots. Digital cinema workflows are increasingly built around standardised metadata formats and file wrappers such as AAF at the production/postproduction stages and MXF at the distribution stage. There is a trend toward the use of persistent, re-usable metadata that can be transferred from capture through postproduction to versioning and playout, instead of metadata being extracted from or attached to essence each time it is needed for a process, and then discarded.