For one day, Universitat Pompeu Fabra became the ideal place to talk about metadata and the future of the postproduction industry.

But not only for the partners of the iMP project who, on June 30, came to Barcelona for the Workshop organized by UPF as part of the dissemination of the project. A total of 35 workshop attendees, included professionals, students and researchers from Spain and throughout Europe, all agreed about the quality of the presentations and the rich exchange of ideas that took place in the panel sessions and tech demos organized in the facilities of both UPF and Barcelona Media.

Participants could share their experiences in professional or academic environments related with the impact of the use and management of metadata in postproduction and distribution of audiovisual media.

The discussion featured two main thematic blocks, the first dedicated to using metadata in post-production, and the second dedicated to stereoscopic 3D (with considerable contribution from iMP’s fellow FP7 project, 20203DMedia).

Wolfgang Lempp: “This represents a major gating technology for the future of post-production”

The keynote speaker of the Workshop was Wolfgang Lempp, Filmlight, whose talk was titled “Using Metadata to Improve the Cyclical Post-production Workflow”.
Mr Lempp (Scientific and Technical award winner in 2010 for the development of the Northlight film scanner), pointed out that the research in the framework of the iMP project is showing new ways of leading the post-production and distribution process in the film industry, particularly in regard to storage and metadata.
“Far from being just a bit of added functionality, this represents a major gating technology for the future of post production”, he said.

At the end of the day a 3D Audio Demo was held in Barcelona Media Audio Lab. The session showed the differences between the classical Stereo audio, the Dolby Audio system, and the 3D Audio System being developed in BM. Conceptually, the idea of having one speaker that can be identified disappears, and the user can be immerged in the sound as if s/he were in a real space.

It provided a spectacular end to an interesting and motivating day.

Room 309, Edifici Tanger, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.

Directions: Calle Tanger 122-140, 08018 Barcelona. Map.

Registration: Please contact alun.evans@upf.edu

Keynote speaker: Wolfgang Lempp (Filmlight)
Winner of four academy awards this year.

Abstract: As film-based post-production gives way to digital, the production and post-production industries now face a potentially more interesting and challenging issue: have we finally reached the limits of the traditional, linear, model of information flow? Digital media has several well-known benefits, primarily related to ease of use, replication and storage. However, it is possible that the biggest benefit is only now beginning to be used in anger: the presence of metadata. In a traditional, linear workflow (whether in audiovisual post-production, or with any digital data), if a file is altered it is usually saved under a different name and in a different location. Thus, the next step in a typical pipeline cannot be started before the previous step has finished. This leads to natural bottlenecks in the flow of data, which may lead to frustrating (and costly) delays. To combat this, the post-production industry is now looking at a more cyclical workflow, which makes heavy use of metadata to track the flow and modification of data files. One project that is furthering the state-of-the-art in this field is iMP, an FP7 EC-funded collaborative research project.

In order to promote discussions of these ideas within the community, iMP is hosting a one day workshop and series of panel sessions, with speakers and panel invited from within and outside the project. The goal of the workshop is discuss and debate the challenges facing the audiovisual production and post-production industries, particularly regarding the flow of data and use of metadata. The workshop is open to any interested parties.

Agenda:

10.00: Arrival

10.15: Introduction and welcome

10.30: Keynote: Using Metadata to improve the cyclical post-production workflow (Wolfgang Lempp, Filmlight)

11.30: Coffee Break and informal discussion

11.50: Panel Session: Semantics and Metadata in Post-production (Chair: Michael Hausenblas, DERI)

13.00: Lunch, demos

14.00: Presentations: The fall and rise of stereo 3D (Santi Fort, Barcelona Media; Toni Mateos, Barcelona Media)

15.00: Panel Session: The Future of Post-Production workflow (Chair: Alun Evans, UPF)

16.00: Closing session

16.15: 3D Audio Demo (Transfer to Barcelona Media audio lab)

17.30+: Workshop end.

The first part describes the novel post-production tools for 3D soundtracks that make use of the metadatabase. This prototype allows to author soundtracks in 3D audio by giving the engineer the capability of linking audio tracks of an Audio Workstation to a 3D scene representation.

The second part describes the research done in algorithms capable of generating and filling some of the most important metadata of the metadatabase that are relevant to 3D audio post-production (i.e. realistic reverberations by inferring the room/scene from existing wet audio).

The third part discusses in detail the integration with the medatabase layer. Finally, we discuss future work that will be done in order to finalize the novel audible applications and integrate them into the “Virtual Film Factory”.

Metadata employed in the postproduction processes is made available downstream, during pre-processing or at runtime, to optimize the audio-visual experience. This document covers modelling of the playout characteristics of audiovisual equipment at distribution end-points, so content metadata from postproduction can be used to optimize playout.

Traditional metadata describes technical features of the video and audio and covers the viewing environment, platform and content characterization, and consumer requirements.

Four metadata languages are described: RDF, RDFS, OWL and SPARQL. For each one of them the report will describe available libraries that employ these standards. Note that the list of available libraries is not exhaustive, there are others available.

Furthermore, this report presents two use-cases based on the Digital Cinema current architecture and proposes a decision support system.

We list several ontologies for the iMP project and explain how digital cinema relationships can be expressed in RDF.

This document proposes important points of communication among the various technical processes involved in a complete virtual audiovisual production, and describes the requirements for articulating metadata between the various states of media in a Virtual Film Factory.