Throughout the day, participants created, exchanged, and consumed IMF content. Cross-checking IMF content between implementations ensures the standard is supported and helps reveal potential improvements to both implementations and the standard. The following are selected highlights of the plugfest:
ApplicationIdentification . One 8K App 2E Composition did not contain the ApplicationIdentification value defined in the PCD (https://github.com/SMPTE/st2067-21/releases/tag/pcd-2025-06-17), which is required since earlier editions of App 2E do not support 8K image.The UG thanks Miles DelHoyo, Michael Smith and Warner Bros. for hosting the meeting and Amazon for hosting the plugfest files.
]]>Moderator: JoAnne Kim, Panelists: Carlos M. Carmona, Brandon Heaslip, Brian Holter, Wolfgang Ruppel
]]>A plugfest is a unique opportunity to gain implementation experience with IMF and network with the members of the community. Read our explainer at https://www.imfug.com/plugfest/.
Thanks to Warner Bros. Discovery, the plugfest will be held in person in Burbank, CA, USA.
The plugfest will be open to members and guests, with guests being subject to the IMF UG participation rules, including a duty to keep the contents of the meeting confidential. Any result made available publicly will be anonymized.
You must register at the link below before August 18, 2025:
https://forms.gle/parW6HXgRzUr12pR9
Space is limited.
10:00 Plugfest starts
12:00 Lunch
14:00 Plugfest ends
All times are in Los Angeles local time.
The mini-plugfest will focus on:
Our plugfests are cloud first. Content will be submitted to and accessed from a shared Amazon S3 bucket.
Michael Smith [Host]
Pierre-Anthony Lemieux [IMF UG chair]
]]>A plugfest is a unique opportunity to gain implementation experience with]]>
A plugfest is a unique opportunity to gain implementation experience with IMF and network with the members of the community. Read our explainer at https://www.imfug.com/plugfest/.
Thanks to NBCUniversal, the plugfest will be held in person in Burbank, CA, USA. Two virtual breakout sessions with remote participation are planned.
The plugfest will be open to members and guests, with guests being subject to the IMF UG participation rules, including a duty to keep the contents of the meeting confidential. Any result made available publicly will be anonymized.
You must register at the link below before November 1, 2024:
https://forms.gle/RwRnL3Zkmv6yz2xz5
Space is limited.
Catering is kindly sponsored by Colorfront and storage by Amazon AWS.
10:00 Plugfest starts
12:00 Virtual breakout session
12:30 Lunch
14:30 Virtual breakout session
15:00 Plugfest ends
All times are in Los Angeles local time.
The mini-plugfest will focus on:
Our plugfests are cloud first. Content will be submitted to and accessed from a shared Amazon S3 bucket.
Harvey Landy [Host, Program committee]
Michael Smith [Program committee]
Pierre-Anthony Lemieux [IMF UG chair]
]]>A plugfest is a unique opportunity to gain implementation experience with]]>
Throughout the day, participants created, exchanged, and consumed IMF content. Cross-checking IMF content between implementations ensures the standard is supported and helps reveal potential improvements to both implementations and the standard.
This report summarizes the use cases studied during the plugfest.
HTJ2K significantly improves the encoding and decoding speed of JPEG 2000, reducing processing costs and allowing real time playback on consumer desktops and laptops. This use case involved QC and playback of compositions that used HTJ2K-encoded video.
Use case and source content provided by NBCUniversal and The Walt Disney Studios.
Photon is an open-source library for parsing, interpreting and validating constituent files that make an Interoperable Master Package (IMP). These include:
Currently, Photon provides support for IMF Application #2E (SMPTE ST 2067-21) and Application #5 ACES (SMPTE ST 2067-50), and the Immersive Audio Bitstream (IAB) Plug-in (SMPTE ST 2067-201).
For this plugfest, a pull request against Photon was created by Pierre-Anthony Lemieux that included additional checks for HTJ2K codestream header metadata. This build was used for the validation of the plugfest content.
Test content created with Colorfront, MTI, Blackmagic Design, and Telestream technologies.
Using no-proxy HTJ2K MXF JavaScript player, files are read from an AWS S3 bucket with pre-signed URLs. The MXFs are played directly in the browser using JavaScript, there is no proxy involved. If connection is limited, it will fetch only the low-resolution wavelet information and show a low-resolution image during playback. Pausing playback will fetch all the data for that frame. For lossless IMFs, this is the lossless data, for lossy IMFs this is the high quality you would experience from a normal full decode.
Traditional IMF J2K part 1 encoding uses the CPRL progression order, for this player to work the no-proxy player needs HTJ2K with RPCL progression order. The no-proxy player is currently limited to 4:4:4 sources. While the 4:2:2 source will decode, it will only show the actual Y, and half-vertical with Cb and Cr that is associated with 4:2:2.
The goal of this plugfest was to focus on creation and interchange of HTJ2K within IMF. The focus has increasingly pointed to the need for the community to have consistent ways of validating content.
We are already working on future plugfests, possibly as early as November 2024. In the meantime, testing should never stop, and the content used during the plugfest remains available to all IMF UG members.
Join the UG today to get access to past plugfest content and help the community plan future plugfests!
Many thanks to Pierre-Anthony Lemieux, Harvey Landy, Mike Krause, and Dave Deelo for their contributions to the program committee; to NBCUniversal who hosted the event; and to Amazon Studios who provides cloud services for the IMF UG.
]]>Ad Signal has a range of unique SaaS products. Our Match product deduplicates content regardless of format, codec and resolution. Our patent-pending Compose product is able to create IMF from traditional content fully automatically; paired with Match we identify all of the unique content at the best quality to keep and Compose turns these assets into a single IMF package with all the required CPLs etc. We believe this is the only product capable of doing this to date.
Contact: tom.dunning@ad-signal.io or Meet at IBC
The smartWork platform offers comprehensive IMF support from acquisition to delivery. With smartWork, customers can select third-party systems tailored to their specific needs, such as mastering, transcoding, QC, and AI tools. By natively storing IMF, smartWork | EVO maximizes standard benefits while simplifying user interaction with the package’s internal structure.
Contact: sales@tedial.com
Ateliere Creative Technologies revolutionizes the media supply chain by delivering AI-driven, cloud-native solutions that streamline content creation, management, and distribution from concept to consumer. Our platform, Ateliere Connect, automates media workflows, reduces storage costs, and accelerates time-to-market, enabling clients to maximize their media profitability. A key component of our service is our integration of the Interoperable Master Format. By leveraging IMF’s component-based architecture, Ateliere helps media companies significantly reduce their online storage footprint, enhance content management, and simplify global distribution, ensuring seamless delivery across all platforms.
The R&S®CLIPSTER is the gold standard solution for mastering and distribution of feature films and episodic TV. It provides a powerful way to edit any type of media, in any resolution, and create high-quality professional deliverables that meet stringent, professional delivery specifications. Featuring a highly refined IMF delivery wizard R&S®CLIPSTER is able to simplify the creation of IMF’s, so that the outputs are constrained to comply with standards and ensure interoperability. R&S®CLIPSTER makes versioning IMF’s quick and easy and features a dedicated tool to merge and combine multiple IMFs into a single package.
Contact: matthew.ellsworth@rohde-schwarz.com
Private Demo Suite - Okura Hotel
Colorfront, headquartered in Budapest with offices in Los Angeles and sales partners worldwide, is a leader in IMF and DCP mastering and known for its award-winning on-set dailies and transcoding systems used by companies of all sizes for Hollywood blockbusters, high-end TV, and OTT entertainment. Founded in 2000 by Mark and Aron Jaszberenyi, the company combines expertise in image color science and software development, earning an Academy Award for its innovations. Today, Colorfront is renowned for its camera-to-post products and offers advanced cloud services alongside a state-of-the-art DI and post-production facility in Budapest.
Contact: brandon@colorfront.com
Marquise Technologies has developed a comprehensive product range for IMF workflows, including the mastering of any IMF application packages, the versioning, the validation and the QC. Marquise Technologies’ mastering & transcoding solutions also permit the creation of digital cinema.broadcast and online deliverables from any IMF master.For IMF master creations or complex versioning MIST Studio is the tool of choice. ICE Studio is the QC solution with version’s comparison, package validations and content analysis capabilities. ICE Prime is the ideal desktop player for IMF playback and control, TORNADO allows volume transcoding to and from IMF, batch validation and analysis.
Contact: lstoll@marquise-tech.com or Meet with us
Venera Technologies provides cutting-edge AI and ML enabled file-based auto QC solutions to the digital media industry, tailored to the evolving requirements of its customers and the industry. Venera provides a comprehensive list of IMF/DCP QC checks in both its on-prem A/V auto QC solution (Pulsar) and its native-cloud A/V auto QC solution (Quasar). As an active member of the IMF User Group, Venera is the only auto QC vendor with an extensive category of checks for verification of variety of IMF packages.
Contact: Fereidoon@veneratech.com or Meet at IBC
With IMF Studio, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits and easyDCP provide proven easyDCP technology tailored to the needs of anybody who masters, creates and inspects IMF packages and exports content to other formats.
IMF Studio consists of our IMF Creator app as well as the IMF Player for quality control on PC and Mac, and comes with flexible licensing options that fit your needs.
Contact: philipp.eibl@iis.fraunhofer.de
AWS helps media, entertainment, games, and sports customers transform the way they create, distribute, and monetize content with the most purpose-built services and capabilities for media and entertainment of any cloud. AWS offers M&E customers nine dedicated media services, 23 AWS industry solutions, and the ability to engage with more than 500 AWS for M&E Partners. AWS services and solutions for media and entertainment, games, and sports reinvent and transform the customer journey. Meet with AWS Elemental MediaConvert experts in the Builder Zone of our AWS stand (5.C90) at the RAI. MediaConvert provides native support for IMF, allowing media companies to easily incorporate IMF workflows into their video processing pipelines and distribution processes.
Details: AWS@IBC or Request a meeting or Download the attendee guide (PDF)
Telestream offers comprehensive solutions for reading (decoding), creating (encoding), and verifying IMF Packages. Vantage Post Producer can decode simple or complex packages and produce flattened outputs, Vantage Transcode Pro can create simple IMF packages from most media files including support for HTJ2K and IAB. For QC Qualify and Vidchecker can QC IMF Packages to ensure compliance.
Contact: Richard Andes
]]>A panel of industry experts joined forces to explore how IMF and EBU QC help reduce costly rejections and repeated QC!
Thank you to EBU for hosting the webinar and to our experts:
Preserving QC information through the supply chain using the Interoperable Master Format (IMF) improves automation and reduces costly rejections and repeated QC! Fereidoon Khosravi, Laurence Stoll, Raymond Yeung, Andrew Dunne and Pierre-Anthony Lemieux walk us through the state of the art.
]]>Preserving]]>
This webinar will consist of presentations by panelists followed by a Q&A session driven by the audience. It is a follow-up to our IMF UG workshop held at IBC 2023, which highlighted the urgent need to avoid repeated QC rejections based on false positives. IMF is the worldwide standard for the interchange of component-based studio masters and EBU QC is a standardized language for expressing QC reports.
This free webinar is made possible by a collaboration of the EBU and the IMF UG.
June 17, 2024 from 17:00 to 18:00 pm CEST
Fereidoon Khosravi, Chief Business Development Officer, Venera Technologies
Laurence Stoll, Co-Founder, Marquise Technologies
Andrew Dunne, Television Production and Delivery Expert, BBC
Andy Quested, co-chair EBU QC
Raymond Yeung, Head of Content Standards, Amazon MGM Studios
Moderated by Pierre-Anthony Lemieux, Chair, IMF User Group
]]>A plugfest is a unique opportunity to gain implementation experience with IMF and network with the members of the community. Read our explainer at https://www.imfug.com/plugfest/.
Thanks to NBCUniversal, the plugfest will be held in person in Burbank, CA, USA. Two virtual breakout sessions with remote participation are planned.
Registration is free but you must register, whether attending in person or remotely:
https://forms.gle/7jACEh4DW6TVc2aq5
Registration closes on June 15, 2024.
9:00 Setup and breakfast
10:00 Plugfest
12:00 Virtual breakout session
12:30 Lunch
13:00 Plugfest
16:30 Virtual breakout session
17:00 Plugfest ends
All times are in Los Angeles local time.
The mini-plugfest will focus on IMF App 2E with video coded using the APP2.HT.REV and APP2.HT.IRV constraints, including:
Our plugfests are cloud first. Content will be submitted to and accessed from s a shared Amazon S3 bucket.
The deadline for content submission is June 15, 2024.
The plugfest will be open to members and guests, with guests being subject to the IMF UG participation rules, including a duty to keep the contents of the meeting confidential. Any result made available publicly will be anonymized.
Harvey Landy [Host, Program committee]
Dave Deelo [Program committee]
Brian Holter [Program committee]
Mike Krause [Program committee]
Pierre-Anthony Lemieux [IMF UG chair]
]]>Join our panel of experts for a discussion on using IMF to avoid costly QC rejections! This is a follow-up to our IBC workshop where the urgent need to transmit expected QC failures across the supply chain was highlighted.
]]>Our mission and activities remain unchanged: to make IMF responsive to the needs of the community.
]]>Over 2 days, participants created, exchanged, and consumed IMF content. Cross-checking IMF content between implementations ensures the standard is supported and helps reveal potential improvements to both implementations and the standard.
This report summarizes the use cases studied during the plugfest.
Download the report in PDFDownload
IMF Application ProRes (SMPTE RDD 45) enables lossless conversion of existing ProRes QuickTime files to IMF. For this use case, the ProRes video contained in MOV files was rewrapped into IMF Compositions without any decoding and re-encoding, demonstrating lossless conversion and eliminating generation losses.
Use case and source content provided by BBC.
Deduplication refers to the reuse of identical essence in multi-version titles, also known as “versioning”. A typical ProRes workflow produces one flat MOV file for every version of a title, even if only a few frames differ between those versions. For this use case, five MOV files were provided: one was identified as the source version and the others as derived versions with different inserts, cuts and pre-rolls. From these five flat files, five IMF composition playlists, each corresponding to one of the versions, and a collection of video components were created. One of the components contained all the frames of the source version while the others contained only inserts and pre-rolls. By allowing portions of the source version components to be reused across composition playlists, IMF achieved a 75% reduction in storage compared to the five flat files.
Use case and source content provided by RTL.
IAB is a mature format for encoding immersive sound fields as a collection of audio channels and audio objects. This use case involved successful QC and playback of an IMF composition whose audio essence consisted solely of IAB essence and did not contain multichannel audio essence.
Use case and source content provided by Sony Pictures Entertainment.
S-ADM (Serialized Audio Definition Model) and ADM (Audio Definition Model) are recent ITU-R Recommendations for interactive and immersive audio applications associating metadata with audio essence. The use case involved creating IMF compositions starting from audio essence with S-ADM and ADM metadata wrapped in MXF files.
Use case and source content provided by Fraunhofer IIS.
HTJ2K significantly improves the encoding and decoding speed of JPEG 2000, reducing processing costs and allowing real time playback on consumer desktops and laptops. This use case involved QC and playback of compositions that used HTJ2K-encoded video.
Use case and source content provided by Warner Bros Discovery, Sony Pictures Entertainment, NBC Universal, and Walt Disney Studios.
Carrying metadata as a separate component allows its addition, modification, and removal without having to modify associated essence components. This use case involved QC and playback of a composition that contained Dolby Vision metadata stored in a separate track file conforming to the Isochronous Stream of XML Documents (ISXD) plug-in.
Use case and source content provided by Walt Disney Studios.
Stereoscopic 3D video has been a core, but infrequently exercised, capability of IMF since its inception. This use case involved QC and playback of a Stereoscopic 3D composition.
Use case and source content provided by Walt Disney Studios.
IMF Application 2E supports both lossless and lossy JPEG 2000 video essence. This use case involved the transcoding of lossless JPEG 2000 (Main level 7 Sublevel 0) compositions (HDR and SDR) to lossy JPEG 2000 (Main level 6 Sublevel 4 and Main level 6 Sublevel 3) compositions, which were subsequently subjected to QC and playback.
Use case and source content provided by Sony Pictures Entertainment.
As IMF matures, the focus has increasingly turned to operational improvements and incremental upgrades.
We are already working on future plugfests. In the meantime, testing should never stop, and the content used during the plugfest remains available to all IMF UG members.
Join the UG today to get access to past plugfest content and help the community plan future plugfests!
Many thanks to David Gageos, Mike Krause, Wolfgang Ruppel, Brian Holter and Dave Deelo for their contributions to the program committee; to Walt Disney Studios and RTL, who hosted the event; and to Colorfront who sponsored lunch at the Los Angeles location.
]]>https://www.imfug.com/imf-plugfest-2023/
Only a few days left to register!
Test content from BBC, NBC Universal, RTL Technology, Fraunhofer DMT and The Walt Disney Studios is now available, with more to come.
This is a unique opportunity to gain implementation experience with IMF and network.
]]>The content should include:
Please email Dave Deelo (David_Deelo@spe.sony.com) and Pierre-Anthony Lemieux (pal@sandflow.com) for upload instructions.
The content, and any derivative, will remain confidential to the participants of the plugfest.
]]>The content should include:
The registration closed on December 1. Please contact Pierre-Anthony Lemieux (pal@sandflow.com) [IMF UG chair] with requests or questions.
The plugfest is open to members and guests, with guests being subject to the IMF UG participation rules, including a duty to keep the contents of the meeting confidential. Any result made available publicly will be anonymized.
Download the report in PDFDownload
QC ensures consistent consumer experiences, prevents technical failures, and avoids regulatory penalties. QC involves testing a media asset against a list of requirements, ranging from objective, e.g., ensuring that the audio loudness level remains below a specified level, to subjective, e.g., detecting incorrect color conversions.
Performing QC is costly. QC involves complex operations on large media files and expert human review. It is therefore critical to avoid performing QC multiple times on the same media assets.
Failing QC is costly. Failing QC nearly always means human intervention, which does not scale, and redelivery, which takes time and incurs expenses**.** It is therefore critical to minimize QC failures.
IMFallows the re-use of media assets across versions of a program. As such, IMF makes it possible to avoid repeating QC on media assets that are shared across versions of a program. This results in significant cost savings when, for example, a small part of a program is modified to correct an error or when multiple language versions have largely identical video content.
This, however, comes with challenges. Tools must provide context is needed when performing QC on a new part of a program: while the new part might pass QC on its own, it might not when considered with the rest of the program. For example, a video frame might have been duplicated where the new part meets the original program. It is also necessary to design workflows such that QC results on the original part of the program can be trusted when performing QC on new parts.
Consider, for example, a program where a long silence is part of the storyline. Such a program will likely repeatedly fail QC tests designed to detect missing audio, potentially resulting in multiple rejections as the program moves across the supply chain. QC tests that a program is expected to fail should therefore be captured as machine-readable data and as early as possible in the supply chain. It is also critical that such expected-failure metadata remain synchronized with the program across the supply chain.
IMF is uniquely positioned to be the source of expected-failure metadata: such metadata is generated at mastering, where IMF is typically used, and IMF allows rich metadata to be synchronized with a program. Additional specification work however remains to fully define the syntax of expected-failure metadata.
Automation is impossible without standardization. Today, QC reports are routinely shared in a non-machine-readable form, e.g., as a PDF file, and using vendor-specific terminology. This makes it difficult to automate QC, keep QC data synchronized with the program, and trust QC data across the supply chain. Standardizing QC data is a non-trivial problem given the historical disparities in QC practices worldwide. Efforts, such as EBU QC (https://tech.ebu.ch/qc), are underway to standardize QC tests.
As the number of programs explodes worldwide, IMF offers the opportunity to reduce QC costs by reusing assets across versions and being the source of QC data for the supply chain. Challenges remain in standardizing QC data and designing workflows and tools that make use of it. Get involved today with the HPA IMF UG to contribute to these efforts.
Many thanks to Tedial, who kindly sponsored the location and catering, and to our program committee: Fereidoon Khosravi (chair), Andrew Dunne, Andy Quested, Brian Holter, Harvey Landy, and Bruce Devlin.
Pixelogic Media Partners, Venera Technologies, BBC, EBU, Amazon Studios, Tedial, RTL, Marquise Technologies, Andy Quested, Mr. MXF, Lum::Invent, Netflix, MediaArea, Colorfront, Motion Picture Solutions, Deluxe, Sky UK, nomalab, BFI, Bitmax, Walt Disney Studios, Sky UK, Ateliere Creative Technologies, Dolby Laboratories, DI Factory.
Topic: Quality control for the Interoperable Master Format (IMF)
When: September 16, 2023 from 13:00 to 17:00
Where: Eye Museum, Amsterdam
This unique event will bring together decision makers from the user and supplier communities to discuss the state of the art and future of QC for IMF across the supply chain, from the perspective of veterans and newcomers.
The workshop will be organized around short presentations and interactive discussions. A report summarizing the conclusions of the workshop will be published.
A response to your application will be provided on August 4, 2023.
]]>Topic: Quality control for the Interoperable Master Format (IM]]>
There is no longer any barrier for IMF in the broadcast environment! Listen to Fereidoon Khosravi, Carlos M. Carmona, Jonathan Solomon, Julian Fernandez-Campon and Pierre-Anthony Lemieux walk us through an IMF-based playout workflow deployed on AWS.
]]>There is n]]>