WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers have released several revisions of the Interoperable Master Format (IMF) standards documents that have grown out of IMF Plugfests and feedback from those who use the standard in content versioning, packaging and delivery.
The changes are aimed at ensuring compliant implementations, adding features, resolving conflicts among various provisions and improving consistency for IMF users.
“IMF is maturing as a standard, and revisions to SMPTE IMF standards documents reflect increasing adoption of the standard and learned wisdom through operational practice across the theatrical and broadcast communities,” said Bruce Devlin, SMPTE's standards vice president and founder of Mr MXF Ltd.
“Because SMPTE has instituted more agile tracking of standards usage and issues, more diverse representation in discussion of those issues and a more iterative approach to the revision process, we're able to identify and address needed revisions more effectively than ever. We're confident these new changes to the IMF standards documents will deliver genuine benefits to end users without imposing any significant burden on implementers.”
IMF provides a single, interchangeable master file format and structure for the distribution of content between businesses.
Revisions include:
The revision to Application #2E is the most significant change for IMF users, SMPTE said. It eliminates variability between various essence files, which increases the likelihood that files will work out of the box. SMPTE made no major changes that would impact backward compatibility.
Free downloads of the newly published documents are available from SMPTE.
More information is available on the SMPTE website.
