A question for the propeller heads in the crowd:
Any ideas about how this announcement affects QT 3.0? Is this a competing product?
Thanks,
Michael
Microsoft and Leading Professional Media Companies Release Advanced Authoring Format Specification
09:16 a.m. Apr 03, 1998 Eastern
REDMOND, Wash., April 3 /PRNewswire/ -- Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE), Avid Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: AVID), Digidesign, Matrox Video Products Group, Pinnacle Systems Inc., Softimage Inc., Sonic Foundry Inc. and Truevision Inc., also known as The Multimedia Task Force (MMTF), today released the Advanced Authoring Format (AAF), a jointly authored specification. AAF is designed to boost productivity in the creation of television, motion picture and multimedia productions by enabling the easy exchange of rich media data among digital production tools and content-creation applications. The emergence of a standard for rich media interchange will simplify the increasingly digital process of media creation and will fuel industry growth.
"After we spoke with key players in the digital media production industry, it became clear that first-generation personal-computer-based multimedia file formats, such as AVI and WAV, were not capable of serving as interchange standards for professionally produced digital media," said David Cole, vice president of the Web client and consumer experience division at Microsoft. "With this feedback, Microsoft then set out to work with appropriate industry standards organizations and media industry companies to help forge a new, optimized standard for digital media production."
Members of the MMTF have been active participants in a comprehensive, long-term initiative by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU/SMPTE) to formalize standards for digital media production and transmission. AAF implements much of the preliminary work done by the EBU/SMPTE Wrappers and Metadata Subgroup and, as a design point, supports emerging SMPTE standards.
AAF will benefit professional film, video and audio production communities by allowing them to work with a broader range of tools and to focus their creative energies on the quality of their content without having to convert media file formats. Tools developers will be able to focus on a broadly accepted file format that works with a wide range of systems.
AAF Builds Upon Recognized Industry Formats
All the MMTF members contributed intellectual property, component technology and ideas in the development of this new format. AAF is a truly open format in that its specification is publicly available, it is not owned by any single company, and it has been submitted unencumbered to industry standards organizations. In addition, the specification builds on a number of recognized industry formats, including the Open Media Framework Interchange(R) (OMFI) format, licensed from Avid, and Structured Storage, an open container format by Microsoft, both of which have been submitted to standards organizations including SMPTE.
AAF Targets Drawbacks of Current Multimedia Formats
AAF is designed to address the interchange drawbacks of existing multimedia file formats, such as AVI and WAV, that are not cross-platform, cannot be edited without rewriting the entire file and cannot describe compositions with multiple layers or elements. This is a particularly difficult problem for high-end entertainment applications that must integrate multimedia of diverse types (e.g., video, audio, graphic elements, MIDI) and capture tools (e.g., cameras, keyboards, audio input, scanners) and then remix or edit those files while maintaining split-second synchronizations.
In contrast, AAF is a format that focuses exclusively on the needs of authoring, without the constraints associated with trying to meet the needs of consumer distribution. It allows true, comprehensive collaboration among digital artists and full use of the power of computer-based creative tools.
The AAF unified data model enables applications as different as audio editing and 3-D graphics animation to work together to produce a final presentation without the need for each to recognize and interpret the other's domain-specific data.
The new specification complements the Advanced Streaming Format (ASF) that Microsoft and industry leaders introduced last fall. ASF addresses the problems of media delivery and streaming over a network.
Availability
Microsoft plans to implement AAF in future versions of the Microsoft(R) Windows(R) operating system. The specification will be available for public review by free download from the Microsoft Web
site at microsoft.com (connect-time charges may apply). In addition, an Advanced Authoring Format Software Development Kit (AAF SDK) is scheduled to be available later in 1998. |
