“The overall change in moving from traditional workflow to Dalet’s IMF component-based approach is more than a technical uplift, it's a change in the business value model,” claimed Matthieu Fasani, product manager, Dalet. “All too often a facility can be perceived as a provider of tapes and files that satisfy individual creative projects, but the real goal here is to move into a position of being able to fulfil a continuous business need by providing a technical back office and, potentially, a store-front for fulfilling the national and international distribution requirements.”

New features in Dalet include native IMF support for IMF assets, such as the Composition Play List (CPL) and the Output Profile List (OPL). These comes as default alongside objects like video, audio or images when you open Dalet Galaxy. Users can generate proxies for preview of track files and CPLs in Dalet WebSpace and automate the creation of new versions by leveraging the Workflow Orchestration platform capabilities.

“In a traditional workflow you need to re-render your entire project several times throughout its lifecycle including every version you need to distribute,” explains Arnaud Elnecave, vp, marketing. “The Dalet Galaxy model means you never render, you change only the specific elements that need to be modified or added supplements within a project or collection, eliminating the need to duplicate media files. This is a much more flexible approach that offers significant savings on time and resources for production and delivery.

In just one or two days you can set up sophisticated workflows to receive IMF packages, review the content, trigger export to Netflix or any distributor you wish, and simplify end-to-end IMF workflows for all of your team. We are replacing complexity with usability.”

New tools within Dalet WebSpace are specifically designed for preview, review and approval of all objects of an IMF package, including the CPL, with a glance at the Video Timeline available on any web client.

“There is no need for an extensive mastering tool. Simply import the package content into Galaxy, automatically generate proxies and extend collaborative review and approval workflows,” says Elnecave.

A ‘Bundle Object’ groups all the components that belong to the same title under one umbrella. Inside the Bundle Editor, users will find the lifecycle of component-based workflows presented in a simple, visual layout:

A Media Tab lists all the component track files (video, audio, subtitles/captions) while the Production Tab lists all the CPLs/OPLs, which describe how components have been assembled and should be transformed to an output deliverable.

An IMF eco-system of vendors, with Dalet, include mastering tools from Marquise Technologies, Rohde & Schwarz and ColorFront; QC tools from Netflix Photon, Interra Systems and IRT.