Post Production Leaders Welcome The Arrival Of AAF In Systems
It's the right choice, they say
Las Vegas, Nev. (April 7, 2024) - The post production community has come out firmly in favor of AAF, the Advanced Authoring Format, which has been developed specifically to meet the increasingly complex demands of networked post production. NAB 2002 will show several more manufacturers now including AAF in their products, a step warmly welcomed by TV and Post Production leaders. The Advanced Authoring Format toolkit is used to transfer video, audio and metadata between different manufacturers' systems in the Post Production environment.
According to Gavin Schutz, Chief Technology Officer of the post production group Liberty Livewire, widespread use of AAF can't come soon enough. "It's needed by the media and entertainment business as a whole. One of the prime reasons is it provides an agnostic and open platform with respect to transferring images and sound. It's not proprietary to one company. The lack of something like AAF in the past has limited manufacturers' ability to provide extensible and interoperable solutions - and that has damaged the industry," he says. The move to IT-based Post Production means AAF is now essential, according to Schutz. "The EDL environment has been superseded by processes and delivery platforms that are all network-centric and packetized, so it's important to have something that layers on to that. I'll now require AAF compatibility and I'll be looking for interoperability not just between my systems, but between the majority of vendors and for the client base too. It's now counterproductive not to have that interoperability built into the hardware. AAF is going to become the default format required by users," says Schutz.
Fox Digital favors the use of AAF to remove the bottlenecks that can stall the move to efficient production and post production for multichannel television. "It's inefficient to do that now because of the bottlenecks that arise when you're re-versioning material. We now have a 500 channel world to produce content for, and we see AAF as the right choice for a file format, when the essential element becomes the use of metadata," says Jim Defilippis, Vice President of TV engineering at Fox Digital. He credits AAF for the interoperability it provides, as well. "Before AAF, we couldn't take a project file from Avid and drop it into Quantel, but AAF allows us to do that. When most of the systems we use become AAF enabled, it will represent a tremendous improvement for the industry."
Ken Brady, Manager of Post Production at Turner Studios, agrees. "Project and file interchange has always been, and still remains a very difficult problem when working on a multi-platform production. From shoot to transfer to post to effects to sound design to web publishing, you want to maintain data integrity, and allow all of the operators to have access to portions of the information that apply to their particular piece of the production puzzle. The toughest part is making all of these specialized boxes speak the same language. As we move deeper into fully digital production, the speed of projects increases, and the amount of data needed at all stages increases - AAF solves many of these issues," says Brady..
Demonstrations in the Interoperability Center at NAB 2002 (Suite S230, South Hall) will show how AAF is being adopted by equipment vendors and broadcasters, and the support it is receiving from the post production community. "People are implementing AAF in product, which has been our goal from the beginning - so it's really exciting to see AAF take off - and I'm looking forward to users using it for what it's been invented for - to allow people to move content and metadata seamlessly throughout the post production environment" says Brad Gilmer, AAF Association Executive Director.
Avid Technology, Quantel, Pandora International and Snell & Wilcox will all exhibit products at NAB 2002 that implement AAF.
NAB 2002 will also see the debut of AAF version 1.0.1, a maintenance release that includes the work accomplished at developers conferences during the past year. Several manufacturers have developed extensions to the AAF code, which are also included in this release.
"We've taken all the contributed changes and tested them to ensure they work with previous versions of AAF, and also work on all AAF supported platforms -- Windows, MAC, IRIX and Linux. This is very much an exercise in quality assurance," says AAF Engineering Director Phil Tudor.
At NAB 2002, the AAF Association will also present a multi-generation test system that automatically tests AAF file modifications to meet quality assurance guidelines. Another recent advance to be presented are enhancements to the AAF reference toolkit, which now includes a set of edit implementation guidelines that explain how to model edit decisions in the post production environment. The guidelines also act as a FAQ for developers writing their first AAF programs.
ABOUT AAF:
The Advanced Authoring Format is a completely open-source format that is free to use and include in products with no restrictions. Its development has featured a nearly unique collaboration in which several major companies have contributed essential parts of the code, which were created by their top software design engineers. Avid is contributing the majority of code, while Microsoft is contributing Structured Storage, BBC is contributing an MPEG codec, Sony has developed numerous code enhancements, NOB has added to the data model and name space via SMPTE metadata dictionaries, Quantel is contributing an AAF-to-EDL converter, and Discreet is contributing an AAF port to UNIX. Other members are contributing significantly with testing and review.
The AAF is an interchange toolkit, which exists to exchange video, audio and metadata from one production system to another. It includes the capacity for very rich metadata features, optimized to meet the requirements of the modern post production environment.
AAF can wrap video, audio, data and even references to external essence along with instructions on how to render this material into a finished program. It can be used to describe complex relationships in content, map essence on to a timeline, synchronize essence streams, describe layering and effects compositions, and retain project history data. It remains robust through round trips between systems, and it can carry all essence and metadata for a project in a single, archivable file.
AAF is issued under the AAF Public Source License. It is free to use, and derivative works can be made from the SDK without restriction. Developers can include AAF in products that will be sold, while being afforded copyright infringement protection by any contributor to the AAF SDK..
ABOUT THE AAF ASSOCIATION:
The Advanced Authoring Format is administered by the AAF Association, a cross industry, not-for-profit organization introducing new solutions to the complicated world of multimedia authoring. At present, 45 organizations are members of the AAF Association, including manufacturers, broadcasters, post production houses and other support groups.
PRESS CONTACTS:
BRAD GILMER, AAF Association Executive Director [email protected],
+1 770 414 9952.
MARK HORTON, AAF Association Marketing Director [email protected],
+44 1635 48222.
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