Ultra high-definition (UHD) displays are everywhere, but UHD content, at least in this country, is limited to streaming sources such as Netflix, Amazon and other online services. And since the current bandwidth allocated to U. S. over-the-air broadcasters is not sufficient to carry a UHD signal it’s driving them crazy. Although the public is still unaware, that’s leading to the ATSC 3.0 proposition of asking everyone to please purchase completely new home entertainment equipment to accommodate OTA broadcasters’ future business model.

LG’s 88-inch 8K TV was on display at CES 2018.

Of course, UHD’s 3840x2160 pixel resolution is actually the video derivative of digital cinema’s 4K (4096x2160). But instead of being a production standard like the Digital Cinema Initiative’s 4K, supported by SMPTE and ISO, UHD is more of a display standard first proclaimed by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) in October 2012 for 16:9 images that had at least one digital input with a native video pixel count of 3840x2160.

Then in January 2016, an industry consortium called the UHD Alliance released the “Ultra HD Premium” specification, which required greater bit depth, color gamut, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) and rendering (HDRR) required for Ultra HD (UHDTV) content and displays to carry the Ultra HD Premium logo.

But, nevertheless, retailers still often call them “4K” sets. Why confuse the situation with clarity?

A CONUNDRUM
This odyssey has been simplified by necessity to make the point that although UHD displays are everywhere, UHD post for broadcast is still a conundrum. It makes just about as much sense as the fact that all of us drive cars that can easily exceed 100 mph, but there isn’t a mile of public roads where that would be legal. And yet, Detroit would be unable to sell a single car without that capability.

Atsushi (Alex) Kataoka

So since post-production pros are inherently the problem solvers of the broadcast industry, I welcomed the chance to speak with Atsushi (Alex) Kataoka, product manager for Grass Valley, about what we need to look forward to when getting ready for UHD post.

“First of all, UHD is all progressive,” Kataoka began. “Even in Japan, most high-definition post is still interlaced. We don’t see much 1080p over here. Only in China do we see a lot of HD progressive.”

Most people remember the original rationale for the implementation of interlaced video was to save bandwidth or storage, but Kataoka felt pretty certain if that ever became an issue producers would rather resort to 4K/30 fps (or 4K/25 overseas) if needed.

Although even Grass Valley could not find any major post houses specializing in UHD work in the United States, Kataoka assured that their EDIUS NLE could easily handle its resolution today.

But the color depth is a different question. True UHD requires 10-bit video with the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) codec, also known as H.265 and MPEG-H Part 2, delivering a maximum rate of 340 Mbps to conform to UHD’s new Rec. 2020 color space that expands upon HD’s Rec. 709 slice of the visible spectrum.

You are also going to need a lot more computing horsepower. Kataoka envisions editing workstations with dual eight or 10-core Xeon CPUs working with fast RAID storage to handle the UHD I/O.

If you are wondering how high is up, rest assured that Kataoka tells us at last November’s Inter BEE in Tokyo, Grass Valley conducted a public demo with Sharp posting 8K video. Sharp rolled out an 8K, 60p camcorder at its National Dealer’s Meeting in Phoenix and Grass Valley has announced a special 8K version of EDIUS to cut it.

Not to be left behind, at this month’s CES in Las Vegas no less than four display manufacturers were scheduled to present 8K TVs in the Brobdingnagian 88-inch size and above, and last summer Japan’s NHK (who calls their version of 8K, “Super Hi-Vision’) announced the launch of satellite broadcasts in 8K and plans to broadcast the 2020 Olympics in 8K.

All of this flies in the face of the well-accepted “Lechner Distance” devised by famed researcher Bernard J. Lechner who calculated the optimal viewing between a viewer and the screen for different resolutions based on human visual acuity. He determined 5.5 feet produces the best viewing for a 42-inch 1080p image. Yet the average American sits 9 feet from the screen, which should require a 69-inch HD display. How will they get any perceived benefit from an 8K, 90-inch TV?

That’s as querulous as asking how you’re going to get it through the front door. But as stated at the beginning of this piece, this industry is not exactly running on logic.

A PRIVILEGE AND A PLEASURE
I feel it’s kind of fitting that this will be my last column for TV Technology magazine. During the last 32 years, I’ve had the privilege of reflecting on this industry in these “Focus on Editing” pages from the days of U-matic cassettes to our current hubris of 8K.

As a working editor, I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Emmy Award-winning editors, leading NLE manufacturers and startups working on the leading edge of technology. With your help, I have somewhat whimsically identified the greatest edit of the 20th century (the bone-to-spaceship cut in “2001: A Space Odyssey”), and looked at how our craft has evolved from the silent era of cinema through the HD revolution including yesterday’s 3D and tomorrow’s evolving visual grammar of VR.

Above all, it has been the goal of this column to help define what the role of an editor is, and I stand by the credo from three decades ago that, “An editor is a creative artist who takes unconnected, diverse ideas and through the use of context, contrast and rhythm brings meaning out of confusion.”

It’s all based on your individual aesthetic sense, and if you know what I mean by recommending you try some mustard on a pickle, then you’ve been paying attention. Thank you. Fade out.

Jay Ankeney is a freelance editor and post-production consultant based in Los Angeles. Write him atJayAnkeney@mac.com.

As Dean Zimmerman received the golden statuette for “Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing” on the stage of the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles last month, for cutting Netflix’s “Stranger Things Chapter One: The Vanishing Of Will Byers,” there was no doubt in his mind where this journey to this Creative Arts Emmy had begun.

Zimmerman received an Emmy for his work cutting Netflix’s “Stranger Things Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers.”
Curtis Baker/Netflix

He was 13, in the Cary Grant theater on the Sony Pictures lot at the premiere of “Rocky IV.” With tears in his eyes he went running up the stairs to the rear console where Stallone and all the producers were sitting and jumped into his father’s lap. Young Dean knew that what his father had done was how he wanted to build his own career—choosing images and pictures, sights and sounds that combined to move people in a way that no other medium could equal. You see, his father was Don Zimmerman, the editor of “Rocky IV.”

Dean Zimmerman had chosen his life’s work, but despite his father having been nominated for an Academy Award for editing Hal Ashby’s “Coming Home,” he set out to do it on his own. He went to St. Mary’s College in the Bay area, then got a job at 18 at Pacific Title as a driver on the graveyard watch.

PA grunt shifts got him near cutting rooms until he became an apprentice editor on “A Walk in the Clouds” in 1995. Moving up the ranks of assistants he was qualified to be his dad’s assistant editor on “The Cat in the Hat” in 2003.

They worked together on several films including the original “Night at the Museum” which eventually lead to Dean Zimmerman taking the editor’s seat on 2010’s “Date Night” produced by Shawn Levy.

Dean Zimmerman accepts his award at the 2017 Creative Arts Emmys.
Jordan Strauss/Invision for Television Academy/AP Images

ON UNTEMPERED TURF
When Levy pitched the idea to Netflix to tackle a new episodic called “Stranger Things”, Zimmerman was so impressed with the script he responded to Levy’s call by signing on for seven weeks.

But coming from the world of features, Zimmerman was not prepared for the fact that since this was Netflix’s first foray into producing a TV series, he and his fellow editor, Kevin D. Ross (“Halt and Catch Fire,” “Californication”), would be treading on untempered turf.

“Getting in on the ground floor meant there were a lot of post-production procedures we had to institute into the Netflix operation,” Zimmerman recalled. “It was up to us to create a grand plan for post, treating the series like one big eight-hour feature film.”

“Stranger Things” is not your typical TV episodic, but one reason for its growing popularity is the craftsmanship that goes into its creation. In fact, this year it garnered an impressive five separate Creative Arts Emmys, from Sound Editing to the design of the title sequence, which actually started being composed before principle photography began.

Trying hard to avoid spoilers here, episode one of “Stranger Things” is the story of a fairly typical American small town situated near an Area 51 shadowland. Episode one deals with one kid (probably Will Byers) mysteriously disappearing and another one just as inexplicably coming onto the scene. Meanwhile, teens fall in love, parents squabble, and something just isn’t right in the background.

Zimmerman credits the directing Duffer brothers, Matt and Ross, for giving him and Kevin Ross a lot of freedom in the cutting room as they checker boarded editing the episodes.

“We basically took the best from the feature film workflow, which was my background, and the best from television episodics workflow, which was Kevin’s background, and created new procedural templates which became the model by which Netflix now approaches post production,” Zimmerman said. “They gave us the responsibility for making great creativity, and it was a great experience working with them.”

A CHILD’S TEARS
As every editor knows, what finally appears on the screen, be it big or little, stems from a collaborative process. In the episode, “Stranger Things Chapter One: The Vanishing of Will Byers,” Zimmerman feels there were some instances where scenes were significantly enhanced in the edit bay.

Again, under the constraints of not giving away too much of the plot, Zimmerman was able to let us look over his shoulder while one of the key scenes evolved significantly as its timeline moved through his Avid Media Composer.

“I love to add a layer of comedy into serious scenes to unlock the tension,” he began. “In Episode One there is a dinner table scene where the parents are talking about an evening curfew being imposed by the local sheriff after some children have disappeared.”

The daughter complains she wants to meet her study buddy (i.e. clandestinely link up with her boyfriend), while the son is determined to get out to search for his missing best friend.

The rebellion escalates while caught in the middle is a sweet little two year-old trying to make sense of the mounting conflict.

“We had a close up of her, which I cut away to. But it didn’t seem enough,” Zimmerman said. “So we started looking though out takes, or footage before the slates. The Duffer brothers even went out and shot some pick-ups of the kid for us. Heck, we went so far as to cut in close ups of the child out of split screens.”

As you will see in the final version, the family’s mounting emotional interplay gets played off the face of this innocent child who is progressively dissolving into tears.

“We even had the child actor’s real mother come in and sit next to her so we could get some deeper emotion out of the little girl,” Zimmerman recalls. “On the set it was all very safe for her. But as we intercut her reactions into the scene, her emotions serve as an almost humorous counterpoint to the vitriol that is swirling around her.”

A child being deeply moved by the juxtaposition of sound and imagery? Does that sound vaguely familiar?

“We even reversed the motion on some of the shots to make sure the child was reacting to the proper person,” Zimmerman said. “We pulled out all of the tricks in the book.”

When Netflix expressed how blown away they were at how much could be done in the edit bay, Zimmerman’s reaction was one every budding editor could benefit from.

“Oh, no,” he said. “You gave us all the material. We just put it together for you.”

I can just see that statuette on his shelf… winking.

Jay Ankeney is a freelance editor and post-production consultant based in Los Angeles. Write him atjayankeney@mac.com.

For starry-eyed pilgrims like this foot-sore columnist, the NAB Show is an endless spree of techno-splendor. But let’s face it. The real purpose for exhibitors is to showcase their new products and sign mega-buck deals for new equipment.

So it was striking how many post-production companies this year have discovered that the road to fortune is paved with free giveaways to further the acceptance of the uniqueness of their products.

AVID MEDIA COMPOSER|FIRST

Even before the exhibit halls opened, Avid’s CEO Louis Hernandez told their Avid Connect pre-show gathering that the whole Avid MediaCentral environment would be extended to the cloud using Azure servers, thanks to their new partnership with Microsoft.

Hernandez also announced they would offer Avid Media Composer|First, a free version of their flagship NLE. Although it’s a fully featured version of Media Composer, Media Composer|First is limited to four video tracks and eight audio tracks and outputs to streaming social media channels. It joins their existing, free offering of Pro Tools|First, which has been available for download for more than a year.

Avid CEO Louis Hernandez said Avid is reaching for the cloud.

Pro Tools|First is available from the Avid website now and is actively involved in cloud collaboration. You can register for Media Composer|First on the site today and download it beginning June 29. Its cloud component will be coming in the near future.

LIGHTWORKS FREE

EditShare’s v14.0 of their Lightworks NLE is available on Windows, Mac and Linux as a version gratis: Lightworks Free. It has all the same tools as Lightworks Pro, except you don’t get advanced features such as project sharing, stereo 3D editing or Avid DNxHD codec support, and its output is limited to exporting to You Tube or Vimeo at up to 720P.

However, the Lightworks site provides a large library of tutorials to help you get started and there is an active community of users to share advice. As an editor you get to import a long list of formats, play with more than 100 built-in FXs and train on the same user interface that was employed to cut a whole bunch of feature films (such as all of Scorsese’s flicks).

MISTIKA

Another powerful edit system that is seeing the advantage of free training is SGO’s Mistika. Actually, SGO has taken the Mistika hero suite and broken it down to its components, with the first to be released being Mistika VR for stitching equirectilinear virtual reality images together. The next will be Mistika Color. Once they are all available, you can reassemble the modules to get the original Titan, which will then be called Mistika Ultima.

This takes considerable learning to master. So SGO is also releasing Mistika Insight, a free software intended for education and training that lets students and freelancers learn the Mistika technology. Supported by weekly webinars and online tutorials, Mistika Insight runs on Mac, Windows and Linux.

MYNC

One of the niftiest freebies dangled in front of us at the 2017 NAB Show may only be available through June 30, although Grass Valley, a Belden Co., may extend the offer. This little pip is called Mync, a “personal content management tool.” Originally bundled with GV Browser in EDIUS v8 back in 2015, Mync has now been cut out on its own in two versions: Basic (free) and Standard (not much more).

Mync is a video player running on Windows, which is no big deal. But it’s also a video organizer, and one that can handle the kind of files you’ll get from smartphones, USB flash drives, memory cards and DSLR cameras. And that is a big deal. Imagine being able to browse and search files shot on your iPhone.

Mync can create a storyboard that can be shared with others over YouTube, FTP, Facebook or Vimeo, even trimming shots and exporting to an XML file. And that’s with the free Basic version. The standard version adds the ability to import professional file formats, and export unlimited storyboards and MP4 movies.

But just being able to organize your cell phone photos/videos on the free Basic version is a gift in itself. Claiming absolutely no inside knowledge, but just judging from Grass Valley’s nomenclature, I’ll bet there is going to be a Mync Pro somewhere in our future. Until then, you ought to grab that Mync Basic while it’s still there for the downloading.

CINEXINSERT

The final unexpected gift from the video gods I found at the NAB Show was truly unexpected. Not just unexpected that it’s free. Unexpected that it works at all.

If there is one thing everyone in postproduction knows, it’s that once a master file has been rendered, you can’t unmix the soup. So if even a single subtitle has to be changed, the whole production has to be remastered, re-exported, and, equally time-consuming, re-QCd. But somehow “everyone” didn’t tell the folks at Cinedeck.

By treating the rendered master as data instead of video, they figured out a way to insert edit into it without having to remaster the whole kit-and-kaboodle. It’s called CineXinsert, and this utility to their recorder has proved to be a rather disruptive technology in the post houses of Hollywood that specialize in making deliverables, although it’s gradually catching on.

So what does Cinedeck do next? They’re giving a version of this technology away for free and calling it cineXtools BASIC. I’ve spoken with them, and their goal is to reach more users to let them know the impossible is possible.

The catch is that cineXtools BASIC only works on rendered master files with two soundtracks. That pretty much eliminates the next “Star Wars,” but makes it perfectly applicable for corporate videos, house of worship productions, student projects and anyone who simply wants to see the way this magic works.

Of course, Cinedeck will be glad to sell you the full version once your budget is convinced it’s worth it.

Jay Ankeney is a freelance editor and post-production consultant based in Los Angeles. Write him atJayAnkeney@mac.com.

What better way to welcome the New Year than by taking stock of the state of post production with insights from representatives of some of the leading NLE manufacturers?

Al MooneyADOBE

Al Mooney, senior product manager for editing at Adobe, thinks the past year has been a juggernaut, filled with fascinating changes headed off by a rapidly increasing need for collaboration.

“Even 12 months ago I was seeing a lot more trepidation about relying on the cloud for media exchange and collaborative workflow than there is now,” he said, “because people need to be able to work together wherever they are. In addition to our own Team Projects concept, look at the success of Frame.io and Wipster. Those things have gone stratospheric because people have become more comfortable with the reliability of working in the cloud.”

Mooney also sees workflows becoming far less linear. “Within the edit bay itself, more and more editors are being asked to deal with audio, color grading and effects, all within one system,” he said. “Sure, the highest-end productions will always rely on individual specialists, but time and budget pressures are increasingly requiring faster turnarounds within a multifaceted edit bay under the control of an editor who commands many different disciplines.”

In addition, Mooney sees an exciting future for virtual reality. “This is a whole new, completely different way of consuming video content and represents a bleeding-edge technology,” he said. “I think it’s going to move faster into interactive content, especially when it gets ‘gameified.’ VR should have longer legs than the 3D boomlet did.”

Dave ColantuoniAVID

For Dave Colantuoni, senior director of product management at Avid, the call for 4K video is being superseded by 8K.

“Especially in the last six months, with an eye toward the upcoming Tokyo Olympics in 2020, NHK and NBC are considering a major investment in end-to-end workflows in 8K and that pushes out to all the post-production entities that are involved,” Colantuoni said. “At this year’s SMPTE [Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition] in Hollywood there were several presentations about 8K workflows, but largely as a production tool.”

He is likewise excited about the potential of Light Field imaging moving into the cinema production world.

“Lytro has already brought out a light field camera for cinema work, and when this kind of technology matures it opens new challenges for editorial,” said Colantuoni. “How we handle all that light field metadata and pass it through the post-production chain will be a subject for intense discussion, just as high frame rate and high dynamic range has been.”

The advent of phonetic indexing expediting the post process is another promising development for Colantuoni. “Combine that with the automatic detection of metadata and a lot of the drudgery work of post production could be eliminated,” he said. “Anything that accelerates labor-intensive bottlenecks by, for example, streamlining the logging procedure, makes editing more cost-efficient.”

Bob CanigliaBLACKMAGIC DESIGN

Bob Caniglia, senior key accounts manager at Blackmagic Design, is aware of the need for optimized media to match the proper hardware with all the codec and format requirements editors face today.

“There is a difference between someone editing at home on a laptop and someone color-grading in a large suite with a massive computer,” he said. “Playing back H.264 material or MPEG-4 AVC can be as computer intensive as 4K, so we have been designing our software to keep in mind the capabilities of different platforms.”

Part of this approach is to sandbox some of the more complex media into a sophisticated proxy that is only relinked to the timeline when needed.

“After all, we are never sure what kind of computer power an editor will be using when addressing a given project, so we optimize the media that can be relinked to the original at any time,” Caniglia said.

Then there’s audio. “NHK is already moving toward 22-channel sound, so, of course, editors will need to better deal with audio files as they do with color-graded files,” he said. “We already see this happening on set with the imagery, where the creatives expect to see the video as it will look when finished even though it is being shot RAW. Therefore, the LUT [Look Up Table] the cameraman is using needs to be applied on location just as it will be in the edit bay and in the grading suite. The LUT is becoming one of the editor’s best friends.”

Atsushi (Alex) KataokaGRASS VALLEY

“We are focusing on quick cut editing, since we see people are producing a lot more product for news and for the web,” said Atsushi (Alex) Kataoka, product manager for video editing at Grass Valley. “Of course, this is increasingly including the ability to handle even 4K, but being able to connect to the cloud is of key importance to editors these days.”

Kataoka is aware that being able to provide content in multiple deliverable formats is going to be a major challenge even in near term. “IMF (Interoperable Master Format) is going to be something we are putting a lot of effort into,” he said, “In addition, at the recent Inter BEE Exhibition in Japan we worked together with Amazon’s cloud platform to demonstrate how material could be edited in the cloud from a local NLE. We think this is going to be a major trend in the future.”

Author’s note: My thanks to everyone who participated in this year’s State of the Edit roundup. It’s going to be one heck of a year for post.

Jay Ankeney is a freelance editor and post-production consultant based in Los Angeles. Write him atJayAnkeney@mac.com.

As the new year dawns, if the purpose of an editor is to take raw chaos (source material) in the left hand and produce creatively crafted meaning (finished masters) out of the right, we are in for a major paradigm change. And its name is Interoperable Master Format or “IMF.”

Some mega hit films such as Disney’s “Frozen” need to be released in as many as 35,000 different deliverable formats. The impetus behind the IMF initiative is the massive data requirements needed to produce all the different formats the international and multiplatform marketplace demands for a major broadcast or theatrical release.

Several people have told me a film such as Walt Disney Studios’ mega hit “Frozen” needs to be released in as many as 35,000 different deliverable formats, so the days when an editor could simply swap out a language track to create a foreign version are long gone. That is one reason Netflix, a pioneer in 4K distribution to the home, requires all UHD or 4K productions be submitted to them as IMF files.

ESSENTIALS ONLY
Stripped down to its essentials, an XML-based IMF file contains all of the elements that comprise a given project including source video, production audio, subtitles, vfx and anything else that will appear on the screen along with all of their associated metadata. Then a Composition Playlist (CPL) tells the system how to put it all together, and an Output Profile List (OPL) specifies how it is to be played out.

Arjun Ramamurthy, vice president of technology at 20th Century Fox, was involved with the development of IMF from the beginning in 2009 when the Hollywood studios asked the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at the University of Southern California to create a standardized set of requirements for advanced mastering.

“The preliminary specification was handed off to SMPTE in 2011, and they then broke the project into ad hoc groups to finish the work,” said Ramamurthy. “Fundamentally, it makes a lot of sense for content owners. The biggest questions are, ‘where do we introduce it into the production flow?’ and ‘how do we create a standard that the industry will universally accept?’ After all, duplicating masters for each different version may be cumbersome, but it is a train on the track that is working and it can sometimes be hard to make an aircraft carrier turn around quickly.”

Within SMPTE, Pierre-Anthony Lemieux chairs technology committee 31FS, which is directly related to IMF, and where he is responsible for editing the IMF standard, (he also serves as a partner at Sandflow Consulting).

“The initial version was standardized in 2013, and anyone can download them from the SMPTE site,” Lemieux said. “The first revision or IMF 1.1, the last step before publication, should be ready early this year. It includes support for high dynamic range, higher frame rates (120 fps), wider color gamut and international subtitles.”

In December, Archimedia Technologies released a major upgrade to it Iris software suite that lets users collectively view IMF projects through the cloud from a Windows or Mac platform totally through software. Although when the drive for IMF started, there were only six production entities in the United States that were distributing internationally, Lemieux said the success of digital cinema has accelerated the need for its worldwide acceptance.

“What was originally intended for internal studio operation has now become a format of interest to multiple entities,” he said. “IMF is the only format that fits the need for truly international distribution. There are other attempts, such as AS-O2, but it has not kept up to date with the times and lacks, for example, high dynamic range. IMF is a close cousin to digital cinema, and benefits from all the development that has gone into specifying DCI [Digital Cinema Initiative] files.”

Sony has been involved with IMF since its inception at ETC. Bill Baggelaar, senior vice president of technology, production and post production technologies, Sony Pictures Entertainment, said that in the linear tape era there was no truly open videotape format.

“All the tape formats were proprietary,” he said, “so when we conceived of IMF we wanted a long-term view that meant its open format would still be relevant many years in the future. Its genesis lies in the conventional Edit Decision List [EDL], but that was only concerned with the source side. The real value of IMF is all the metadata it brings with it to create the output of the production.”

IMF MASTERING
Wanting to have as many of their home theater releases available in UHD as soon as possible in anticipation of eventual market demand, Baggelaar said Sony worked closely with Rohde & Schwarz, (previously DVS), whose Clipster mastering system has been at the forefront of creating IMF files for major Hollywood productions.

Introduced in 2003, Clipster became renowned for producing digital intermediates, and as Stephen Birdsong, product manager, post production solutions at Rohde & Schwarz DVS, said, this has evolved into IMF mastering. At the 2015 IBC Show, the company launched Clipster generation 6, a new hardware platform including a JPEG2000 video accelerator, according to Birdsong. “Most importantly, it can transform any color format into an IMF with Rec. 2020 color space specifications, far more than HD’s Rec. 709, along with HDR, and high frame rate,” he said.

But to make collaborative viewing of IMF files feasible from the four corners of the world, a shared viewing system is greatly needed. Fortunately, last month, Archimedia Technologies released a major upgrade to it Iris software suite that lets you collectively view IMF projects through the cloud from a Windows or Mac platform totally through software.

“This upgrade to Iris makes it the world’s first software media player for IMF complex files,” said Mark Gray, CEO of Archimedia Technology. “This includes file consistency through template matching, live caption extraction and display, and automated sidecar information transfer that can include program guides or external information related to the media file.”

Having the ability to play all of that in real time through a desktop software application, and keep it all absolutely frame accurate no matter in what part of the globe it is being viewed, will expand the viability of IMF as both a distribution and review format.

“Our Iris Desktop software suite comes in two flavors,” Gray said. “One is an Iris Reference Appliance that is available with its own hardware that is intended for hightech quality control suites. The other is called Iris Pro for the non-technical user with all of the viewing and annotating capabilities of its larger brother.”

Considering that a full 4K digital master for a complex feature release can easily take to 15 TB of data, we can all hope for the rapid standardization and universal adoption of IMF mastering files.

Jay Ankeney is a freelance editor and post-production consultant based in Los Angeles. Write him atJayAnkeney@mac.com.