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IMF END-TO-END WORKFLOWS IN MEDIA ASSET MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (MAM) SYSTEMS

BY JAY BATISTA, TEDIAL’S GENERAL MANAGER, US OPERATIONS

Later this month, Julián Fernández-Campón, Director, Architectural Solutions at Tedial will address the realities of IMF, its challenges and benefits and how it relates to Media Asset Management at the SMPTE 2017 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition. The technical presentation proposes guidelines that new generation MAM systems must provide an IMF end-to-end workflow. This will tackle the challenges of processing IMF packages for different scenarios (masters, localized, editorial versions), how to address those packages (CPL processing) and how to take advantage of the IMF spec to build a content library that provides efficient and flexible delivery to multiple destinations by re-creating new IMF packages.

MAM systems should offer an end-to-end IMF workflow that takes advantage of IMF specs without overloading processes due to internal conversions / limitations in the content management structure. In addition, new version generation needs to be completed efficiently so that no media is replicated until required: masters are referenced from different versions in a composition that includes additional elements needed for new material: i.e. localized version in French with text insertions, and audio and subtitles in French, linked with other commercial versions with annotations for edit cuts, different technical versions, etc. Finally, content delivery needs to fit perfectly into an IMF specification so that the package delivered takes advantage of ‘logical versions,’ offering a flexible mechanism to select the components to deliver (video, audio subtitles), in the correct order with media transformations completed.

To summarize, new MAM Systems should support:

• IMF Import – processing the IMF and creating assets that can be physical or virtual, preserving the IMF composition playlist without media duplication
• Content Enrichment – creating new versions establishing logical references to the Master taking advantage of the logical references to the media from the Master(s)
• IMF Delivery – not limited to the original IMF received packages but able to generate new packages with any compatible combination of components for a specific title: video (SDR, HDR, different aspect ratios), audio languages, subtitles, and associated files such as artwork, photography and documents.

Tedial has taken the lead in supplying IMF end-to-end workflows that imply full support of the IMF packages at all levels, not ‘IMF-ish’ type MAMs that store and manage the IMF packages without actually processing them and maximizing the true advantages and cost savings of content exchange.

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