To promote more efficient, global file interchange, the Digital Production Partnership Ltd (DPP) just released The Business Benefits of IMF, a guide to understanding the financial and operational benefits of Interoperable Master Format (IMF).
“The global market for quality content has brought enormous opportunity for media companies, by creating demand for different versions of master material. But that also brings great cost and complexity,” says DPP Managing Director, Mark Harrison. “That’s the problem that IMF solves: it enables faster, cheaper and higher quality versioning. It brings huge financial and operational benefits.”
The guide not only covers the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) IMF standard for premium content, it also explains the new IMF for Broadcast and Online specification. According to the DPP, the new standard they’re developing with SMPTE saves significant time and money by enabling automation of the content supply chain, eliminating unnecessary versioning, enabling workflow efficiencies, and reducing QC and archive storage requirements, without sacrificing quality.
Produced with DPP Member EditShare, provider of the QScan Automated Quality Control family of products, The Business Benefits of IMF explains how IMF works, the problems it solves, the benefits it brings, as well as how best to implement the IMF for Broadcast and Online specification.
According to Howard Twine, Director of Software Strategy, EditShare, "IMF represents a new level of efficiency within our industry. .. Our QScan range of Automated Quality Control products will help deliver this kind of efficiency to any media workflow. Users will be able to roll out technologies like IMF in a much more agile and less disruptive way."
[Read: SMPTE, DPP Partner On IMF For Broadcast And Online]
Once SMPTE publishes the new IMF for Broadcast & Online specification, the DPP will launch a compliance testing program designed to give media professionals confidence that DPP tested tools and IMF packages are interoperable and can be exchanged internationally.
As the media industry moves towards a future dominated by large, super resolution files, inter-connected workflows, and multiple cloud solutions, DPP announced that its next guide will be Home Truths No.12: Cloud Exchange, followed by a DPP at Home May 2018 workshop.
The Business Benefits of IMF is downloadable as a PDF booklet for DPP members, and also as a presentation deck with handout notes to support the DPP’s broadcaster, supplier and distributor members in the adoption of IMF for Broadcast & Online.
