Contact: Terry Frechette, 978/640-3541, [email protected]

For Immediate Release

AAF Debuts At IBC '99;
Advanced Authoring Format Software Developer’s Kit Released

—Broad Industry Support From Leading Tools
Vendors Demonstrated at IBC Event—

AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS (September 9, 2023) — Avid Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ: AVID) and other Advanced Authoring Format (AAF) promoters today announced the availability of the AAF Software Developers Kit (SDK), and the formation of the AAF Association - an independent trade organization aimed at promoting the adoption of AAF and directing its future development.

AAF, first introduced at National Association of Broadcasters Conference ’98, is a broad industry initiative to create a file interchange standard for the easy exchange of rich media data and metadata among digital production tools and content creation applications, regardless of platform. The release of the SDK marks the culmination of 18 months of collaboration among the AAF promoters (who presently include Microsoft Corp., Avid, Adobe Systems Inc., Pinnacle Systems Inc., Matrox Electronic Systems Ltd., the Sonic Foundry, Sony Corporation and Discreet, a division of Autodesk.) The SDK, which is available for the Macintosh, Windows NT and SGI Irix platforms, can be downloaded from the AAF Association’s web site, www.AAFassociation.org.

"The development of a standard such as AAF needs to be driven not by a single company, but by a large group of companies representing various views within the industry to ensure that the standard fits the needs of the entire market," said Rose O’Donnell, Avid’s Chief Technology Officer. "The formation of the AAF Association will put a single voice behind the drive to make AAF an industry standard and brings the digital content creation industry another step closer to completely open digital content creation, regardless of platform or tool."

"The availability of the AAF spec and SDK marks an important milestone in the evolution of AAF into a broadly adopted interchange standard," said Anthony Bay, General Manager, Streaming Media Division, Microsoft. "Microsoft is excited to participate with other industry leaders to deliver open standards in this space."

Broad Industry Support

The AAF initiative has attracted the enthusiastic support of the industry’s leading vendors of digital content creation and production tools.

"Adobe is excited about the growing industry consensus behind AAF," said David Trescot, Group Product Manager for Dynamic Media at Adobe. "Desktop video systems are proliferating, and our Adobe Premiere and After Effects customers need interoperability with the wide range of products used in production. AAF meets that need."

"Creative tools, interoperability and productivity are key success factors for today's content creators," said Mahmoud Al-Daccak, Vice President of Product Development at Discreet. "To excel in their markets, post and broadcast facilities need a powerful level of inter-product metadata transfer to preserve creative decisions throughout the content creation process. Discreet has long been a pioneer of high performance open solutions that offer horizontal, vertical and 2-D/3-D integration, and facility infrastructure solutions. Our active role in the AAF Association will enable us to influence the design of the multi-platform interchange file format in the context of our customer's needs and to ensure its acceptance as an industry standard."

"Matrox is happy to see the efforts of the AAF workgroup come to fruition with the release of the SDK and the founding of the AAF Association to further the development of this important industry initiative," said Alain Legault, Vice President, Product Development at Matrox. "As a promoter of AAF, Matrox is committed to ensuring its partners and customers will benefit from this emerging standard on our open-architecture video editing platforms."

"Philips Digital Video Systems recognizes that OMFI/AAF is the industry format of choice for linking offline and online editing and effects operations in moving image production," said Ralph Chaloub, Marketing Manager Europe for Philips. "To participate in and benefit from this consensus, Philips Digital Film Imaging products, starting with the Specter Virtual DataCine, will be compliant with the AAF specification for online conforming and transition effects rendering operations performed in our products. Philips Digital further supports the adoption of the AAF specification as an exchange format in the open, internationally-standardized domain."

"Pinnacle Systems supplies both codec and effects hardware for leading non-linear editing

systems from companies such as Avid, Sony, Panasonic, Discreet Logic, Adobe and In-Sync," said Laurin Herr, Vice President of Strategic Development at Pinnacle. "As a pioneer in desktop video, Pinnacle believes that the open systems approach has led to dramatic growth and innovation within the industry. AAF is the next step in the path to truly interoperable media authoring platforms and Pinnacle is committed to ensuring that its hardware interfaces allow for the creation of compatible media and effects across platforms."

"At Quantel, our objective is to offer post and broadcast customers the highest levels of productivity and flexibility. To address workflow efficiency though, we need the foundation of broad industry agreement and open standards. We see AAF as an important move forward, offering our customers the opportunity for significant improvements in workflow and better project management," said Nigel Turner, Marketing Director at Quantel Ltd.

"Previously, Sony has established many of its own formats for the video industry," said Takato Narita, General Manager, Technical and Strategic Relations Department at Sony. "Facing the networking era, Sony has decided to adopt AAF and to be an AAF Promoter. We could have made our own as we did for other formats, however we recognize the importance of openness and flexibility especially in the computer-based, network-oriented world. We think it is very important now for the video industry to work closely with the computer industry. We are very pleased to work with the other AAF Promoters to establish AAF in this industry."

About AAF

AAF is an interchange format that will help media professionals realize the full value of creating, editing and distributing content in an all-digital environment. Based on the AvidÒ Open Media Framework® Interchange (OMFI), with added capabilities for EBU/SMPTE Metadata and for the management of Pluggable Effects and Codecs, AAF enables film, television, and post-production professionals to share and exchange digital media and metadata between production tools across multiple computing platforms. With the ability to exchange media, compositions, and other data quickly and efficiently between compliant systems, content creators will improve workflow, save time and increase creative freedom by bringing nonlinear flexibility to the overall creative process.

© 1999 Avid Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Product specifications are subject to change without notice. Avid and Open Media Framework are registered trademarks of Avid Technology, Inc. All other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.