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Technical Review | January-March 2013
Regarding item 1, because more than a decade has passed since the initial introduction of UMID to the industry, there exist various trials of UMID applications so far. Current uses of the UMID have been limited only within a particular products and/or a systems despite its original intention. But many of the lessons learned from such trials still should be applicable even to use of the UMID as a globally unique material identifier. Therefore, we propose to collect existing UMID application practices used so far by the industry and explore the best practices through analysis of the responses.
Regarding item 2, analysis of existing practices also leads to the identification and collation of UMID Application Principles, i.e., the candidate statements for the principles will be carefully tested against the existing practices in order to refine them.
Regarding item 3, identification of relevant technologies that needs to be standardized to enhance UMID applications is an important task of this project. While plausible technologies already identified include the UMID resolution protocol and basic rules for the UMID application in MXF, some aspects of the UMID Managed Domain need to be further examined to identify those parts that need to be standardized to achieve interoperability.
While the most well-known use of a UMID is as a linking tool between the AV material identified by the UMID and its metadata referencing to the material via the UMID, using the UMID as an industry common globally unique AV material identifier in practice is also relevant to the following topics:
– As a common material identifier that goes through multiple MAM systems from different vendors, resulting in their seamless integration,
– As a common material identifier for a distributed AV material management system, enabling to achieve “Manage locally, Search globally”,
– As a dynamic linking tool between the upper Application layer and the lower Media layer (See Figure 2), realizing their loose coupling.
Finally, it should be noted that this project was initially started as a study group. This does not conduct any standardization process itself but submits one or more reports to the parent Technology Committee (TC-30MR) with any recommendations for standardizations. The work of the study group is due to be concluded by March 2013.
author
Yoshiaki Shibata
metaFrontier.jp, LLC – Japan
Yoshiaki Shibata is the President and Chief Consultant of
metaFrontier.jp, LLC. He started his career at Sony in 1991. In 1998, Shibata joined the MPEG-7 standardization activity, in charge of the MPEG-7 schema design. Since 2001, he started working in the M&E industry, where his initial contributions include successful implementations of UMID and EssenceMarkTM for professional VTRs. In 2002, he joined the XDCAMTM project, played a crucial role in the metadata part of the product development, including applying for more than forty patents on metadata related technology. In 2011, Shibata has left Sony to be the Japan’s first independent consultant for the media and metadata technology, and founded
metaFrontier.jp, LLC in 2012. He is an active member of SMPTE, FIMS, AMWA, EBU Technical, ITE and IPSJ.
The actual standardization activities can then start based on the outcome of the study group reports.
Conclusions
In this article, the UMID and its applications are discussed based on the observation that it has not been used so much as originally intended because of a lack of supplementary rules for the UMID application. The provision of such rules will significantly enhance the usefulness of UMID within our industry. In particular, because the UMID has been adopted as a core component of MXF, the UMID has the potential to be the core of a media IT infrastructure for the future file-based media production system.
To address the UMID application issue, a new project called SMPTE TC-30MR SG UMID Application has just started within SMPTE. The project has initially been set up as a study group, whose guidance will lead to the relevant standardization activities in the near future.
Because this project has just started, it is a good time for those involved in AV material management, based on the UMID or any other unique material identifier, to join the project. Furthermore, even though the UMID was designed specifically for AV material identification, those having knowledge and/ or experience of unique identifier based entity management are also welcome to join because their expertise could be also applicable to UMID based AV material management.
At the time of writing, there are more than thirty participants in the project. But, unfortunately, none of them is from the Asia-Pacific region (except Japan). Therefore, experts from this region are especially welcome to join the project and to contribute their expertise to the future-proof activity. Historically, most of standardizations for the file-based workflow have been led by the US and EU experts. But now, this is your turn to take part in developing the future file-based media production system!
For more information, please don’t hesitate to contact the author at
info@metafrontier.jp
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Mr. Jim Wilkinson (Wellspring Digital) for his valuable assistance in the preparation of this article.
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