NAB 2018: Dalet To Showcase Plug-And-Play IMF Workflows
Dalet extends the Interoperable Master Format (IMF) capabilities and collaborative workflows within the new Dalet Galaxy five solution. Showing at NAB 2018 at booth SL8010, the Dalet Galaxy five component-based approach to IMF provides an exceptional user experience for maximum efficiency – simplifying IMF production and delivery workflows with visually intuitive graphical tools and automation.
“The overall change in moving from traditional workflow to Dalet’s IMF component-based approach is more than a technical uplift, it’s a change in the business value model,” says Matthieu Fasani, product manager, Dalet. “All too often a facility can be perceived as a provider of tapes and files that satisfy individual creative projects, but the real goal here is to move into a position of being able to fulfil a continuous business need by providing a technical back office and, potentially, a store-front for fulfilling the national and international distribution requirements. Dalet enables this by demystifying the complexity of IMF, industrializing the process with a component-based approach that is incredibly flexible and quick to adopt across organizations.”
Dalet has been pioneering component-based workflows and the IMF workflow industrialization with Dalet Galaxy, its flagship MAM and Workflow Orchestration platform, creating real business opportunities for global distribution.
“In a traditional workflow you need to re-render your entire project several times throughout its lifecycle including every version you need to distribute,” says Arnaud Elnecave, vice president, marketing, Dalet. “The Dalet Galaxy five data model and toolset supports comprehensive component-based workflows. This means you never render, you change only the specific elements that need to be modified or added supplements within a project or collection, eliminating the need to duplicate media files. This is a much more flexible approach that offers significant savings on time and resources for production and delivery. This will become more and more critical for efficient program versioning and distribution workflows where various essences are produced, transformed, arranged, packaged and exchanged repeatedly between media properties.”
New IMF Workflow Features of Dalet Galaxy five
The new features, introduced with Dalet Galaxy five and showing at NAB 2018, include native IMF support and a Video Timeline view to speed approvals and production including native support for IMF assets, such as the Composition Play List (CPL) and the Output Profile List (OPL), comes as default alongside objects like video, audio or images when you open Dalet Galaxy; generating proxies for preview of track files and CPLs in Dalet WebSpace; visualizing asset relationships (between track files and CPLs, CPLs and OPLs, and between CPLs belonging to the same title); automating the creation of new versions by leveraging the Workflow Orchestration platform capabilities; automatically connecting CPLs using EIDR (Entertainment Identifier Registry) and ISAN (International Standard Audiovisual Number) identifiers; orchestrating the rendering of compositions and the generation of new IMPs manually or automatically based on configurable business rules
A Great User Experience
“The IMF standard brings huge benefits at several key steps of the media supply and distribution chain but at the cost of some complexity. In order for users to leverage all of its benefits, IMF workflows need to be intuitive and easy to manage,” says Fasani. “That’s exactly what Dalet Galaxy five is introducing. The way the Dalet user experience exposes IMF assets for manipulation is so unique, it will change the way people perceive and understand IMF. In just one or two days you can set up sophisticated workflows to receive IMF packages, review the content, trigger export to Netflix or any distributor you wish, and simplify end-to-end IMF workflows for all of your team. We are replacing complexity with usability.”
Dalet Galaxy five introduces a new set of tools within Dalet WebSpace specifically designed for preview, review and approval of all objects of an IMF package, including the CPL, with a glance at the Video Timeline available on any web client. There is no need for an extensive mastering tool. Simply import the package content into Galaxy, automatically generate proxies and extend collaborative review and approval workflows.
The Bundle Object groups all the components that belong to the same title under one umbrella. Inside the Bundle Editor, users will find the lifecycle of component-based workflows presented in a simple, visual layout with the Media Tab lists all the component track files (video, audio, subtitles/captions, the Production Tab lists all the CPLs/OPLs, which describe how components have been assembled and should be transformed to an output deliverable, the Version Tab exposes the renderings of CPLs/OPLs into final deliverables for consumption by end-users (AS-11 for linear playout, HLS/DASH for OTT distribution), the Packages Tab tracks how individual components have been received/delivered and allows to generate new packages by simple drag-and-drop operations.
Extensive Third-Party Integration
Dalet works with the IMF eco-system of vendors (mastering tools from Marquise Technologies, Rohde & Schwarz and ColorFront; QC tools from Netflix Photon, Interra Systems and IRT) to ensure robust end-to-end IMF workflows, including receiving IMF packages, referencing IMF assets in a central repository and leveraging IMF metadata, both technical and editorial, to automate processes at scale and expose the relevant information to the appropriate users.