Media Workflows Research Articles

Transitions in Journalism—Toward a Semantic-Oriented Technological Framework

The technologies behind today’s web services, tools, and applications are evolving continually. As a result, the workflows and methods of different business sectors are undergoing constant change. The news industry and journalism are heavily affected by these changes. New technological means for practicing journalism and producing news items are being incorporated in media workflows, challenging well established journalistic norms and practices. The perpetual technological evolution of the web creates a wide range of opportunities. For this reason, both technology companies and media organizations have begun to experiment with semantic web technologies. Our focus in this paper was to discover and define the ways that semantic technologies can contribute to the technological upgrade of everyday journalism. From this perspective, we introduced the term ‘semantic journalism’ and attempted to investigate the transition of journalism to a semantic-oriented technological framework.

Update from the Standards Vice President: Media Workflows

<fig orientation="portrait" position="float" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <graphic orientation="portrait" position="float" xlink:href="devli-2923351.tif"/> </fig> The toughest thing about being the Standards Vice President (SVP) is that everyone expects <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">standards</b> to be the most important thing. This month’s Journal is all about media workflows, and I’ve yet to find any production workflow that is 100% standards-based. While it’s true that the title of the SVP job gives me a clue about my priorities, I get called on to talk to folks about <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">workflow</b> that may well be standards-based but is made up of many technology pieces, from open source code, through de facto delivery specifications based on Trade Association, or SMPTE Specifications that in turn depend on full standards to work. I can already hear some folks saying, “In the good old days, everything used standards,” but I beg to disagree.

Message from the Executive Director: Media Workflows Changing All the Time

A few weeks ago, I attended the SMPTE San Francisco Section’s ET@19 conference. In its seventh year, this event is becoming a regular item on the local calendar of events in the media tech community. This year, the Section collaborated with the Advanced Imaging Society (AIS) to craft a conference that brought together the creative and tech sectors. It was a good mixture of the art and science of media innovation, as was mentioned several times across the two-day event.

Multi-versioned media at scale

More video content is viewed today than ever before, but with more devices, more choice, more platforms and a fragmented viewing market, how does a content owner use media asset management (MAM) to improve their business? Interoperable Mastering Format (IMF) is an emerging standard from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). By combining rich metadata about media titles along with metadata fields optimised for process automation, it provides an excellent framework for MAM-driven media workflows. This paper examines how MAM integration can help facilities use IMF to create efficient, scalable versioning workflows.

How content intelligence and machine learning are transforming media workflows

The media and entertainment industry is undergoing a disruptive transformation in technology, business and monetisation models. This digital transformation is evident in many categories, including cloud-based workflows, internet protocol (IP)–based broadcasting, all IP media production, automated workflows that leverage metadata, content intelligence that exploits the power of analytics, indexing and search to streamline content distribution and consumption, etc. While many of these technologies were seen as being disruptive, the trend is only accelerating with the mainstream usage of machine learning and content intelligence giving rise to exciting new ways of conducting the media business. This paper examines the disruptive technologies of content intelligence and machine learning with selective use cases that are causing the most impact. Software and systems designs need to be reviewed in light of these developments. There is an urgent need to bridge the gap between the analytic world and the machine-learning world through proper orchestration rather than a mere handoff. The collection, analysis and processing of all varieties of data need to be streamlined in order to go from edge to outcome and derive useful insights. This paper will discuss the concepts of content intelligence as applied to media.

Lost in the Clouds? Cloud Storage Fits into Media Workflows—Just Not Everywhere

Within the media and entertainment space, the question businesses face with respect to cloud infrastructure is not whether to use it but how best to use it. Public cloud storage provides flexible, on-demand storage capacity and an operating expense financial model. While moving media post-production workflows entirely into “The Cloud” would solve content storage, sharing, and distribution challenges, there are limitations and cost implications. Cloud storage has attributes that make it perfectly suited for some workflow stages and perfectly ill-suited for others. The use of private cloud is adding another dimension to this tiered storage approach, offering many advantages. This paper describes a multitier storage strategy that maximizes the cost, access, and performance benefits of different types of storage with a particular focus on the most appropriate and beneficial uses of private and public cloud. It covers how the right storage and data management technology can aid media companies in making the most of all tiers of storage including cloud infrastructures.

Report from the Standards Vice President: Standards for Media Workflows

<fig orientation="portrait" position="float" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <graphic orientation="portrait" position="float" xlink:href="devli-2816699.tif"/> </fig> This year’s HPA Tech Retreat in Palm Desert opened with a supersession entitled “Really, we’re still in the era of snowflake workflows?” The word workflow is much overloaded nowadays and is often just a substitute for subjects around automation, process, connectivity, and interoperability.

Software-Defined Media Infrastructures

There are three generations of media infrastructure design patterns; analog, digital and now software-defined. This article outlines the salient aspects of software-defined networking, computing and storage. The focus is on the application of software-defined methods to support media workflows using private and public infrastructures. Considered are the fine tunings needed to use commodity hardware to achieve realtime, high quality, media transport, sync/timing and audiovisual processing. Also covered are methods to scale for workflow loading and reliability.

The secret to automating multi-party asset workflows

Siloed archives are easy to build and inexpensive to maintain, but their commercial value and long-term viability are limited by their isolated nature. Very few end-to-end media workflows stay within a single domain. The vast majority involve multiple parties with data and process hand-offs at each interface point, some of which are automated, but far too many of which require some level of manual intervention. Increased automation and correspondingly decreased manual labour are the keys to long-term profitability, so manual touch-points must be eliminated where possible and relegated to exception handling where not. The key to all of this for media archives and the workflows they support is shared identification. There are many possible identifiers, each of which have their place, but the ideal solution for multi-party, commercial workflows is curated identification such as is provided by the Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR). Use of EIDR IDs by media archives and their partners enables process automation, cost reduction and transaction speed improvements across such diverse applications as acquisition of off-air recordings, intellectual property rights management, search and discovery and bulk digitisation. Curated identification does not provide these services, but it does make them easier to implement, more economical to run and more reliable to operate. To paraphrase the BASF slogan: ‘Curated identification does not provide the services you need. Curated identification makes those services better’.

Standards for Evolving Media Workflows [Message from the Standards Vice President

As I write this, I am in Geneva for our quarterly Standards Meetings, having just attended IBC 2014 in Amsterdam. During the past five days at the IBC, it was very obvious in both the conference sessions and in the exhibit halls that new technologies are pushing the envelope for content producers and distributors. There are far too many technologies showcased at IBC to highlight, however I would like to draw attention to two areas that directly affect SMPTE standards. The first is the move toward IP infrastructure, and the second the move toward Ultra High Definition TV.

Digital Storage in File-Based Workflows

The development of digital workflows have freed creative work from the capacity limits of any one physical storage media (such as silver halide film) and come close to commoditizing the basic operations of content creation. Today's best digital cameras can capture finer details, at higher speeds, than was ever before possible. Today's special effects can effectively mimic or convincingly distort reality. Post-production equipment is now available allowing faster production of complex stereoscopic content and more effective sharing of resources, including digital storage, for content creation. Digital storage is the nexus of file-based media workflows, since in digital workflows storage devices and systems are the home of this content.

Tying it all Together—A Watershed Moment in the Media Industry

In July of 1998, the joint SMPTE/European Broadcasting Union (EBU) Task Force for Harmonized Standards for the Exchange of Program Material as Bitstreams published its Final Report: Analyses and Results. Now some 13 years later, the basic framework outlined in this report is becoming a reality. However, more than this, the framework allows innovative media companies and manufacturers to expand the power and possibilities of the framework well beyond what was envisioned when the report was published. This paper connects the dots among serial digital interface (SDI), image compression, the invention of the Advanced Authoring Format/Material eXchange Format (AAF/MXF) data model, the MXF wrapper format, the subsequent development of AS-02, AS-03, and other MXF application specifications, developments in high-speed networking technology and network security, the SMPTE 2022 Standard for Professional Video over IP transmission, the recent activities of the Hollywood-based ETC's Interoperable Mastering Format (IMF), which has recently moved into SMPTE, and the Advanced Media Workflow Association/European Broadcasting Union (AMWA/EBU) Task Force on the Framework for Interoperable Media Services (FIMS), concentrating on service-oriented media workflows. I posit that we are at a watershed moment in the industry, which will create new opportunities, and even perhaps new media businesses that do not exist today.

Extending the Service Bus for Successful and Sustainable IPTV Services

Telecom carriers have positioned IPTV as one of the key components of triple-play (broadband, television, and voice) or quad-play (with the addition of mobility). Adoption of Web services within a SOA framework as building blocks for developing complex media workflows is an important step toward reuse of media processing tools in an IPTV environment. A Web services approach also provides the capability to abstract network-based services for creation of composite services that can be executed in an IPTV environment. At the same time, adoption of a service bus provides a single point of integration for multiple services, and common features such as service registry and discovery, reliable message delivery, and transformation in a heterogeneous production environment. In this article we present an approach of media enabling the service bus to support offline digital media processes and composite service execution in an IPTV production environment.