WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—SMPTE has published a pair of reports that offer insight into how the SMPTE Time Code standard can grow into a more useful tool in media production. The reports are the Time Code Summit Report and the Material eXchange Format (MXF) Time Code Study Report.
The Time Code Summit Report presents the methodology and findings of surveys performed at the Time Code Summit, a series of focus groups held in London, New York and Los Angeles. The findings provided user requirements that needed to be addressed in a new Time Code standard. This includes the proposed Time Labels standard that addresses changes from the transition to IP, the push to higher and variable frame rates, and other factors testing the limits of the existing Time Code standard.
With the MXF Time Code Study Report, current usage of Time Code within the MXF file format was the main focus. The report spent two years investigating current MXT Time Code practices. It considers applications that need to write MXF files with Time Code and applications that need to read MXF files containing Time Code. It also examines three core requirements: MXF should be able to store multiple Time Code values per frame, and they should all be identical; store multiple Time Code values per frame, though they may be from different sources and have different values; and include the appropriate Time Code in audio-only files.
SMPTE has made the reports available at www.SMPTE.org/committee-reports.
