IMF has become a key standard in delivering broadcast content, with leading service providers already preferring it and, in some cases, making it mandatory.
To ensure economic and operational efficiency benefits are achieved, media companies need a practical and reliable asset management system that provides full support for IMF. This is more than simply adding extra metadata fields.
For production companies, IMF is hugely advantageous as it slashes the amount of storage space required for content. Actual savings will depend upon the number of versions of each piece of content, but typical users are currently reporting a 25+ per cent saving in server and archive space.
Tedial has developed a suite of functionality called Hyper IMF. This goes much further than traditional asset management systems, in defining and supporting complex destinations as a single set of instructions, using standard relationships.
By supporting IMF natively, it ensures that relationships are inherently embedded within the asset management infrastructure. It provides for packaging of additional components including audio languages and subtitles, and it establishes links to related material like artwork, trailers, stills and poster art.
Storage is one of three key benefits of using IMF, which Tedial’s Hyper IMF unlocks. Along with the saving in storage space is a comparable saving in processing power – there is no need to generate complete new deliverable versions. A 500GB master might have many supplemental packages, each only a few gigabytes, and so much faster to generate.
The third key benefit derives from storage efficiency. Because the deliverables are much faster to generate, they become much faster to deliver, making the production company much more responsive. If you are delivering multiple versions to a single broadcaster, or if you are using a cloud service to deliver, then you only need send the master file once, followed by all the (much smaller) supplemental files. With broadcasters and production companies increasingly keen on day and date release, this is a significant benefit.
Hyper IMF, which will be demonstrated at IBC 2019 on stand 8.B44, gives users the flexibility to automate processes where appropriate through the use of profiles and business rules. It also allows package creation using proxies on desktop workstations to minimise the demand for craft editing, although there is also tight integration to automatically generate IMF metadata from edit workstations.
The software is built on Evolution, a proven media asset management platform that can be implemented on premises or in the cloud, and which is inherently and infinitely scalable. It is the IMF tool that provides a secure route to achieve real operational efficiencies and large-scale interoperability.
For more info, download the whitepaper: A Practical IMF MAM Implementation.
For a Hyper IMF demo, visit us at IBC 2019 on stand 8.B44. Check: Tedial at IBC 2019
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Tedial
