During NAB, the Digital Production Partnership (DPP) released its new guide on the advantages of adopting the Interoperable Master Format (IMF).  

Attendees at nab 2018 innovative tech on the show floor

Attendees at NAB Show 2018 

The Business Benefits of IMF guide highlights the financial and operational benefits of adopting IMF for premium content for influencers and decision makers from content supply companies. 

The guide has been curated with the current Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) standard in mind as well as the new IMF for Broadcast and Online specification that is being developed by SMPTE and the DPP. 

IMF for broadcast and online makes it possible to automate the content supply chain and eliminate unnecessary duplication of content copies whilst also maintaining the original asset which will allow for a more efficient workflow and reduce the QC and archive storage requirements. The guide illustrates the adoption of IMF results in significant cost and time savings. 

The DPP Managing Director Mark Harrison said: “The global market for quality content has brought enormous opportunity for media companies, by creating demand for different versions of master material. But that also brings great cost and complexity.

“That’s the problem that IMF solves: it enables faster, cheaper and higher quality versioning. It brings huge financial and operational benefits.”

 “It enables faster, cheaper and higher quality versioning, it brings huge financial and operational benefits” - Mark Harrison 

Howard twine editshare

Howard Twine

The guide provides an introduction to IMF, explaining how IMF works, outlines the problems IMF solves and the benefits it brings and looks at the path to implementation of the new IMF for Broadcast and Online specification. 

The Business Benefits of IMF is produced in partnership with DPP Member EditShare and its new QScan Automated Quality Control family of products. 

EditShare Director of Software Strategy Howard Twine said: “IMF represents a new level of efficiency within our industry.”

IMF: A thing of dark mystery, or one of simple beauty? 

SMPTE is hosting a section meeting in Reading, the United Kingdom on 6 June offering attendees the opportunity to discover how IMF will benefit broadcast and online workflows. As well as understand how it has changed the existing subtitling and dubbing pipelines for film regionalisation.  

Experts from the DPP and SMPTE will discuss the achievements, demystify what IMF is and why objects matter. 

The event will open with the IMF Primer - 101, briefly looking at the film industry and how it has been changed with the deployment of IMF for regionalisation delivery. There will follow an examination of how the first SMPTE specification on IMF for broadcast and online has progressed and the plans to integrate for broadcaster and production workflows. 

It will conclude with a discussion on how IMF is working for different segments of the industry and the next steps. 

For more information visit the SMPTE event page.

The publication of the IMF for Broadcast & Online specification by SMPTE, the DPP will launch a compliance testing programme for IMF for Broadcast & Online tools. This will provide buyers and sellers with the confidence that DPP tested tools and IMF packages will be interoperable and can be exchanged internationally, thereby delivering the benefits outlined in The Business Benefits of IMF.

Download the report here.