Bruce’s Shorts | 4.13 - Does IMF Alter Your Visual Quality Metrics?
Master once and use forever should strike fear in the heart of anyone why hasn’t got their quality pipeline correct. What does this mean for IMF?
There has been much talk recently about optimizing IMF version workflows, and the associated cost savings, in order to achieve the holy grail of master once, use forever.
In this episode Bruce Devlin looks at the mastering process. Some of the first adopters of IMF workflows have been the Hollywood studios. But what of other content owners? IMF present a big opportunity to get the master version right first time and lift the overall quality of a title forever.
Maintaining visual quality involves many things:
- maintaining spatial fidelity
- rescaling and aspect ration adjustment
- high quality de-interlacing
- noise, wanted like film grain, v. unwanted
- changing frame rate
As IMF rolls out it is up the masters of the mastering process to show than high quality done once can lead to a long tail of commercial success. SO don't stamp your master with the 2017 look of inferior technology.
You might also like...
SMPTE Education Launches Summer 2026 Lineup Of IP And ST 2110 Courses
Boasting two standalone courses, an intensive boot camp, and a hands-on practical lab, SMPTE Education has launched its summer 2026 Lineup of IP and ST 2110 Courses.
Standards: Video - Advanced Video Coding (AVC)
AVC remains one of the most widely deployed video codecs in the world, but navigating its profiles, levels and signaling mechanisms is far from straightforward.
Network Traffic Engineering: RIST & SRT - The Success Of ARQ Based Protocols
IP networks are inherently unreliable. We kick off this series on IP Network Traffic Engineering with a look at how RIST and SRT give broadcast engineers user-configurable control over the latency-versus-reliability trade-off for real-time media streaming.
Standards: Video - Standards For Video Coding
From 4K to 32K, the demand for ever-larger video formats is pushing codec technology to its limits. This guide surveys the landscape of video coding standards – from legacy MPEG formats to AI-driven neural network compression – to help navigate the choices sha…
Broadcast Standards 2026 – Video Coding
Video coding was developed to deliver video conferencing services over low-bandwidth modem connections, but modern demands for ever-larger video formats are pushing codec technology to its limits.