Industry professionals are well aware of the celebrated Digital Cinema Initiatives, or DCI, a joint venture of Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros. Studios.

DCI was formed in 2002 as the industry began a sweeping change from film to digital cinema distribution and projection. DCI established and documented voluntary specifications for an open architecture for digital cinema that literally changed the face of cinema post production, distribution and exhibition around the world.

A decade later, the industry is facing another monumental shift, as it moves from tape to file-based workflows. Again the Hollywood studios have come together—this time under the umbrella of the Entertainment Technology Center@USC—to act on the change. The goal: To create a specification for an interoperable set of master files and associated metadata, to enable the interchange and automated creation of downstream distribution packages within the motion picture and television production and post production industries.

“Everyone is moving into a file-based world,” explained Howard Lukk, who chairs the Interoperable Mater Format, or IMF, technical committee. “We are now delivering multiple versions with multiple different file types and multiple different codecs. We are handicapping ourselves by not having a standardized way of exchanging these files. No longer can we keep all these different versions and keep track of them. We are trying to create one distribution servicing master.”

Following a significant amount of work, ETC@USC published a draft spec of the consortium’s proposed IMF, which is available for industry review at http://www.etcenter.org/imf-spec/.  The draft spec outlines elements of the proposal, including MXF wrapping and support for compressed and uncompressed content. As part of the spec, the IMF team also introduces the notion of “dynamic metadata” as a method of moving standardized pan-and-scan information between postproduction systems from different manufacturers.

Another new concept in the spec is the “Output Profile List,” or OPL. “The IMF is the source if you will, and the OPL would be an XML script that would tell a transcoder or any other downstream device how to set up for what an output is on the other side,” Lukk explained.

The IMF draft spec was developed with several objectives in mind. In addition to development of a distribution servicing master, the aims include creation of a way to minimize the amount of storage required in versioning and a method to automate the process of the downstream distribution.

The IMF draft spec has been submitted to SMPTE for input into the standardization process, but can still be downloaded on the ETC website.

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