• SMPTE ST 2067 IMF standard reaches a new milestone
  • IMF plugfests provide the opportunity to interchange, test and improving interoperability 
  • “Cornerstone of bringing immediacy and relevance to our standards,” says SMPTE Fellow

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SMPTE, along with 30 participants, have successfully marked another milestone in the development of the SMPTE ST 2067 IMF standard.

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) announced it has made significant progression towards interoperability during its IMF plugfest demonstrations in May at the Amazon UK headquarters.

The IMF family of standards are based on the exchange of component-based audio-visual masters intended for worldwide distribution, including films, TV programmes and advertisements.

The format is specifically designed to efficiently handle multiple-territory distribution and advanced content such as high dynamic range (HDR), wide colour gamut (WCG), immersive sound (object-based audio), and access services (subtitles, captions).

Implementers included Amazon, Dalet, Visible Light, Fraunhofer, Marquise, MTI, Ownzones, Rohde and Schwarz, and Venera Technologies with the test content was provided by Paramount, Universal, Turner, the BBC and 20th Century Fox.

The SMPTE Technology Committee 35PM (Media Packaging and Interchange), IMF plugfests provide implementers with opportunities to interchange test content with the objective of improving interoperability and identifying areas of improvement in the standard.

The SMPTE IMF plugfest included the following areas of focus:

● Packaging of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Timed Text Markup Language (TTML) Profiles for Internet Media Subtitles and Captions 1.1 (IMSC1.1), which is the subtitle and caption format in IMF that enables worldwide and accessible experiences.

● SMPTE ST 2067-50:2018 (IMF Application #5 ACES), which is intended for long-term archive of uncompressed Academy Color Encoding System (ACES) image essence.

● SMPTE RDD 45:2017 (Registered Disclosure Document IMF Application ProRes), which adds support for ProRes image essence and is intended to test HDR ProRes IMF packages.

● SMPTE TSP 2121-1:2018 (IMF Application DPP), which creates a profile of IMF designed for broadcast and online content use cases, meeting requirements expressed by DPP member companies.

SMPTE vice president Bruce Devlin said: “SMPTE IMF plugfests are the cornerstone of bringing immediacy and relevance to our standards. They remind us that standards are living examples of technology being used to build global platforms upon which agile applications are developed.

“The lively discussions of real implementers and users solving multivendor business problems in real-time show that standards can be relevant and dynamic in today’s disruptive technology world.”

DPP head of delivery and growth Rowan de Pomerai said: “Following the publication of SMPTE TSP 2121-1 last year, the DPP is committed to supporting the adoption of IMF more widely across the broadcast and online content communities.

“Participation in the IMF plugfest forms an important part of that commitment, and we’re thrilled to see so many vendors testing their support for our specification.”

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