IBC2007 saw the launch of a new user-led forum to tackle the challenge of achieving interoperability between IT-based systems in production and post production. Xchange Technology, chaired by former MPC director of technology and current BKSTS president, Roland Brown, held its first meeting in Amsterdam, writes Nick Radlo.
“There are significant areas where formats like MXF have been implemented in different equipment, but often these implementations don’t work together, so it’s urgent that the industry tackles this issue,” said Brown.
The new group is a cross-industry initiative, with users and manufacturers invited to take part, to talk through the issues.
“We want to get manufacturers to come together, with users, to talk about what, in this new IT environment, doesn’t work together. We want users to come up with what they want in terms of interoperability, what their current workflows demand, so we can get all the different formats and standards to join up and work across different equipment,” said Brown.
AMWA executive director Brad Gilmer welcomed the new group. “It’s good to see more attention going to solving the interchange problems with the new formats — we welcome their activity and we’d be happy to collaborate and share ideas. We want MXF and AAF to be successfully deployed, or we’ll end up using IT technologies that weren’t really designed for our industry. We need to be pro-active in this effort to achieve interoperability,” said Gilmer.
AMWA is holding an MXF Summit on 13 November in London, hosted by the Digital TV Group, followed by AMWA’s autumn engineering meetings. Several case studies during the Summit will detail successful deployments of MXF by broadcasters in Europe, including the new Turner Broadcasting implementation in London that went live with Nuts TV following IBC.
