IMF in Film Preservation

Innovative approaches to employ SMPTE Interoperable Master Format (IMF) for long-time preservation, archival and commercial re-use/exploitation of both photochemical film and digitally sourced movies are presented. IMF helps solve three paramount problems in the field: 1) IMF allows for storing a broad number of metadata (both technical metadata, tied to film, scenes or individual frames) along with the content, in an open and interoperable way. 2) IMF allows open-source, quality-preserving codecs to be used for audio\video essences, both visually-lossess compressed (e.g. JPEG2000, HEVC) and uncompressed ones (e.g. FFPV1, camera-native raws). 3) Supplemental packaging in IMF allows for complex film restoration/preservation project to store several versions of the same content without significant audio\video essences overlaps (and storage waste). For metadata in particular, SCM (Sidecar Composition Map) and ISXD (Isochronous Stream of XML Documents) components can be used to store metadata like: script, restoration/DI workflow, scanner/monitor calibration, color looks (CDLs, ACES Metadata Files, other 1D/3D LUTs), running TimeCode/KeyKode, vector-based frame stabilization, vector-based film-frmae geometry inconsistencies, vector-based per-frame defects or areas-of-interest, per-frame characters-vs-actors names and bios, etc