Production Technology

Interoperable Workflows

Interoperability in Media Creation

The MovieLabs “Evolution of Media Creation” (aka The 2030 Vision) white paper lays out a vision for media production workflows that can be more easily assembled, managed, changed, and secured than the current rigid and brittle workflows. The goal is to provide production teams both a greater choice of tools and infrastructure and better capabilities for collaboration, turnovers, and iteration. The former gives teams more creative options in how they work; the latter gives them the ability to spend more of their valuable time on creative tasks and less on mundane ones. Interoperability is the foundation for both.

Without improved interoperability, each new workflow or vendor choice made by a production team will be unnecessarily costly in terms of time, risk, and engineering effort.

Collaboration Starts with Interoperability

Benefits of Interoperable Workflows

Used by Creative Teams, Production Companies, Studios and Vendors (Software and Services)

Choose the Right Tools, Faster

Empower teams to try out and adopt the best-fit tools with minimal setup or integration overhead.

Streamline Workflow, Stay in Sync

Automated asset progression and real-time notifications keep teams aligned and moving.

Adopt Innovation at Speed

Accelerate the rollout of new and emerging technologies across teams and projects.

Plan for the Unexpected

Strengthen disaster recovery and ensure business continuity with smarter systems.

Secure Access, Seamless Experience

Improve both security and usability with unified authorization and authentication.

Lower Barriers, Broaden Choices

Open up access to more vendors, tools, and infrastructure with fewer roadblocks.

Automate the Busywork, Collaborate Better

Free up human brainpower by automating routine tasks and handoffs.

Learn more about Software-Defined Workflows

Watch Jim Helman Introduce the Concepts Behind Software-Defined Workflows

Supporting the Creative Process with Software-Defined Workflows

Part of the 2030 Vision is to remove burdensome, repetitive and mundane tasks by automating and delegating them to software processes. There are several benefit to this. Most notably it frees up times for storytellers to do what they love – being creative, and also cuts out unnecessary complications often found in moving files or metadata, checking transfers occurred correctly, calling other departments for status reports or vendors to check orders. Our objectives with our Software-Defined Workflow (SDW) projects are to enable flexible, dynamic workflows that can be changed and modified whilst making productions dramatically more efficient. These are some of the most complex problems we’re solving because they require a number of pre-requisites. We’ve explained many of these in our paper explaining Software-Defined Workflows.

Building Interoperability into Media Creation Workflows

In the MovieLabs Interoperability in Media Creation whitepaper we define these types as well as other foundational concepts such as the Data Planes Vs Control Plane, Security, and Workflow Control Functions. We have defined 8 principles for Interoperability in Media Creation and explain how software developers and service vendors can collaborate and work better together to deliver on the myriad benefits for creative teams.

The MovieLabs Industry Forum hosts a number of working sessions and ad-hoc groups to define, share and implement best practices and processes in workflow interoperability. Join now if you want your organization to be leading and not following the future of workflow innovation.

MovieLabs Interoperability Projects

If Software is to ever have a chance of understanding our workflows then first we need to teach it to understand and communicate the nuanced language of production. Realizing these new workflow systems requires improved communication and interoperability. MovieLabs has other related projects to help get there.

MovieLabs is running these projects to help deliver on a more interoperable media future:

An Ontology for better communications among people and machines We have released and will continue to develop our common Ontology for Media Creation that provides clearly defined terms for the concepts and elements that describe production workflows and assets. These can be used for better communication between people and departments who use different or vague terminology. And for SDW, it provides a foundation for designing data models, schemas and APIs.
2030 Greenlight, which takes interoperable concepts and best practices and applies them to actual media workflows, using real tools and real assets. 2030 Greenlight [link] works with creative teams to address sticking points in the workflow and builds interoperability into tools and systems using reference implementations that others can build into full solutions.
Visual Language for diagramming workflows. We have released a visual language that can be used in workflow design and user interfaces to aid in human communication of sometimes complex and nuanced workflows.
File naming for better exchange of assets. Filenames are often an important point of interoperability and used to convey metadata. The elements that go into a file name are conceptual and benefit from formal definitions, which is one of the goals of our Ontology for Media Creation. As an interim solution to more robust metadata storage and transfer