UHD Spain analyzes the impact of the IMF in its first meeting of 2022

The first meeting organized by the association UHD Spain In 2022, it has addressed different issues related to the IMF (Interoperable Master Format) and delved a little deeper into its scope, when to use it, how it works and the associated standards on which it is based.

The meeting, in virtual format, has been led Julian Fernandez-Campon, CTO of Tedial, a reference company in content management solutions designed to maximize efficiency and interoperability, on IMF (Interoperable Master Format). The main objective of the meeting was to share their knowledge with the rest of the attendees about this standard.

The private event under the title IMF (Interoperable Master Format): Overview and Applications, lasted an hour and a half in virtual format and had an audience of approximately 30 people, including members of UHD Spain and the media.

Pere Vila, director of Technological Strategy and Digital Innovation at RTVE and president of the UHD Spain association, made a brief welcome introduction to the meeting where he pointed out the importance of the IMF, since "companies like Netflix have begun to demand work in these standards." He also expressed how these types of meetings consolidate the spirit of the association "by addressing issues together from the level of collaboration and professionalism, with companies that belong to the association and have been working on the IMF standard for years, such as in this case Tedial", which actively collaborates with the SMPTE and IMF Users Group associations at an international level.

Among the topics discussed by Fernández-Campón during the meeting, it was initially clarified that the “IMF is a specification for media files” and it is a “family of standards grouped within the ST2067 standard of the SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) that is supported by other standards such as MXF, DCP and XML.”

In these lines, Fernández-Cammón pointed out that the objective of the IMF is facilitate content distribution focused on the definition of a composition and focused on any finalized content of different types, mainly films, series, advertisements and short-duration materials. Instead of a single media file that has traditionally constituted a particular version of a program, an IMF package contains all the essentials (video, audio and optionally subtitles) as a set of individual files and the metadata associated with a specific piece of content.

Why the IMF

After the explanation by Tedial's CTO about what the IMF is and what it is not, during the meeting, the reasons to use it and its benefits. Thus, it is indicated that the IMF simplifies distribution workflows and reduces both storage costs and distribution time. “One of the key points of the IMF is that the versions of the different titles only contain the differences by referencing the original version, which drastically reduces storage space and shipping times.”

As a consequence of the previous point, new versions can be created in significantly less time, reducing the processes involved, the resources within the team and the number of files that must be created.

To Netflix, one of the main platforms that have opted for the IMF, a key benefit is to reduce several of its content reception problems, since another of the advantages of the IMF is that it allows you to define exactly the codecs in which the content will be received, thus reducing the complexities of managing the different versions in global markets.

There are other benefits to incorporating IMF into the content production chain. The IMF offers a best video quality, since the consumer has direct access to the original versions in high quality. It is also a way of reduce human error, since the original media files are only referenced and kept intact when creating new versions, only altering the auxiliary files that define the composition (XMLs). The IMF also offers a simplified approach to making incremental changes, such as text insertions, graphics, and content revisions.

At the end of the meeting, we moved on to the round of questions where the teacher Jose Manuel Menendez, professor at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), in charge of editing the White Paper on UHD in Spain and promoter of a new initiative with the creation of a course within the framework of UHD Spain, covering different elements of the entire chain and has proposed to Fernández Campón his participation with the creation of a chapter within the syllabus of one of the topics on information exchange systems.

The possibility of creating a special chapter dedicated to information exchange systems and including practical information on MFIs within the second edition of the White Paper on UHD in Spain has also been discussed.