A SMPTE community for users and implementers of the Interoperable Master Format (IMF) standards #ispeakimf
https://tech.ebu.ch/publications/presentations/2024/efficient_qc_using_imf_webinar
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.
Join a panel of experts on June 17, 2024 for a discussion on improving QC efficiency across the supply chain using EBU QC cards and the Interoperable Master Format (IMF)!
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
You are invited to participate in our upcoming mini-plugfest, which picks-up where our December plugfest ended.
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]
We are hosting a panel at NAB 2024 on leveraging IMF to Prevent Repeated QC Failures.
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.
After many years under the steadfast stewardship of the Hollywood Professional Association, we will now be operating as the first, of hopefully many, user group under the umbrella of SMPTE, the home of the Interoperable Master Format (IMF) standard.
Our mission and activities remain unchanged: to make IMF responsive to the needs of the community.
The IMF UG held a hybrid plugfest on December 13 and 14, 2023, with physical locations in Los Angeles (USA) and Cologne (Germany), and remote participation through shared cloud storage, virtual breakout sessions and instant messaging. The plugfest, the first since February 2020, gathered more than 50 participants from the content creator, user, and implementer communities.
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.
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.
Do you have a content library or an implementation that speaks IMF, then join us at the December 2023 IMF plugfest, which will be held concurrently in Los Angeles, USA and Cologne, Germany.
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.
Please upload plugfest test content before November 8, 2023.
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.
You are invited to participate in our upcoming hybrid plugfest. This is a unique opportunity to gain implementation experience with IMF and network with the members of the community.
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.
![IMF Mini-Plugfest [June 26, 2024]](https://www.imfug.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/banner-2.png)
