M+E Daily

Deluxe Exec: UHD Growth’s Helping to Drive IMF Adoption

The introductions of Ultra High-Def (UHD) and high dynamic range (HDR) distribution platforms represent a major force that’s helping to drive adoption and implementation of the Interoperable Master Format (IMF), but challenges to wider IMF adoption remain, according to Eric King, VP of U.S. Mastering Operations, Deluxe Technicolor Digital Cinema.

With UHD, “obviously the impact is in terms of file size” because, “all other things being held constant, you have four times as many pixels to deliver, so obviously your payload would increase” similarly, King told the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) in a phone interview.

Other factors that are driving IMF adoption include delivery specifications requiring Interoperable Master Packages (IMPs) as deliverables and the rapid growth of localized international iterations for over-the-top (OTT), video on demand (VoD) and subscription video on demand (SVoD), King said.

IMF first started being developed back in about 2007 or 2008, evolving out of the Digital Cinema Package (DCP) architecture, he pointed out. The SMPTE standard was designed to streamline the interchange and automated creation of downstream distribution packages, making it cheaper, easier and faster for content to be distributed globally. IMF stores a single master set of file-based elements that can be assembled using multiple composition play lists (also known as “recipes”).

Despite the support of IMF by companies across the entertainment industry, it is a “very large standard” and, “as we’re still relatively early in the operational rollout, implementing all of the parts takes some time and some effort,” he explained to MESA.

Netflix is an example of an early IMF adopter, he said, telling MESA all that company’s UHD sources that are “coming in for them to work from are now being delivered as IMP” and “that has been the case for over a year.”

For wider IMF adoption, the industry needs more fully interoperable toolsets to widen the base of users and more users to solidify the interchangeable advantages of the format, according to King.

“It’s an understood standard. It just needs more rollout and support, and it’s getting it,” he said of IMF.

Although early adopters are forced to limit the features they implement due to limited toolsets and interchange issues, the continued participation of technologists, vendors and users can bring the benefits of IMF to more users globally, according to Deluxe.

Among the issues that must still be addressed in a future version of the IMF standard are challenges with subtitles and captioning via Internet Media Caption and Subs (IMCS), King told MESA, noting we’re currently at IMSC1. “That’s being worked out” within the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and W3C, he said, adding “version 1.1 and IMSC2 are in development.”

One lingering issue is that “some of the characters in the Asian languages weren’t covered well” and “don’t display correctly” now, he pointed out.

Asked to predict where IMF implementation will be in the next few years, he said:
“Within a year, I would expect things to be better. Within five years, I would expect full implementation.” It’s hard to predict whether the latter might happen in two or three years, but he told us: “I expect to be much farther along within two years.”

Deluxe has already partnered with “several studios and distributors to help them develop and implement IMF as either a mezzanine standard or a distribution standard, and all of those implementations have only scaled up,” he said. Those companies have “solved a lot of the versioning and logistics problems that came from massive version counts” across their data, he said.