WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—After publishing its Archive eXchange Format (AXF) standard in 2014, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers has announced that the standard has been successfully adopted and deployed by multiple vendors. AXF supports the transparent and independent exchange of file-based assets and metadata between storage management applications from different vendors.
AXF was designed as a container capable of holding collections of files and metadata related to one another, known as AXF Objects. By supporting the interchange of AXF Objects, the AXF standard enables interoperability among different content storage systems and is meant for long-term availability. AXF is currently being used to store and protect media assets in Material eXchange Format, Interoperable Master Format, and Digital Picture eXchange, as well as enterprise information technology file-based assets.
"The real-world test of the SMPTE AXF standard proved an immediate success, demonstrating that the standard document so carefully crafted by the SMPTE AXF Working Group has solved the problem it was designed to address," said S. Merrill Weiss, chair of the SMPTE Working Group on Archive eXchange Format and SMPTE Fellow. "This landmark in standards implementation is exciting not only because it illustrates the value of SMPTE's ongoing standards work, but also because it validates many organizations' decisions to move forward using AXF to future-proof their media archives."
Business software provider Oracle and Digital Preservation Laboratories, a Burbank, Calif.-based developer of digital archiving technologies are among the first vendors to exchange SMPTE AXF Objects created by their respective storage management applications. Oracle was a major contributor to the development of the standard and among the first to market with software built on AXF. As a testament to the efforts of the SMPTE AXF Working Group, Digital Preservation Laboratories--which was not involved in the development of the standard--architected its entire implementation from the published standard document without any guidance or assistance, in a "clean-room" implementation, and was able to exchange AXF Objects immediately.
SMPTE reports that multiple vendors have adopted the AXF standard and that it is currently installed in more than 100 systems worldwide.
