Digital Workflow and Something Called FIMS

Fortunately the market has spotted the opportunity and there are now a significant number of products available that will manage your workflows – anything from a drop folder into your favourite transcoder, to a multi-stage system with many components doing hundreds of transactions every minute.

The one thing all the systems have in common is that they package bits of kit made by other vendors and present them to you as part of a co-ordinated workflow. To make this happen each of the applications or bits of kit – transcoders, QC boxes, loudness normalisers, that sort of thing – provide a software interface to the workflow system that allows them to talk to each other. The problem is that all of these interfaces are proprietary and different, so every time you need to add a new box, or a new feature to an existing box, code in your system needs to be rewritten. As the systems get more complex – as they will for many of us – so the problem gets worse.

Doing software integration – because that’s what it is – takes time and costs money, sometimes a lot of money. As an industry, this is an issue we have to solve if we are to keep reducing the costs of making and delivering content to the consumer. So here’s an interesting development that all ‘workflow-ers’ should check out: Every year at the IBC Innovation Awards the Judges’ Prize recognises a project for its outstanding ‘creative, technical or commercial imagination’. In previous years it’s gone to a big DTT project and to 3D coverage of the FIFA World Cup, so it’s a prestigious thing. This year it was awarded to a software project called FIMS.

FIMS – Framework for Interoperable Media Services – is a joint project being run by the EBU and AMWA. It sounds rather dull but it is one of those pieces of techy ‘standards’ work that could have far reaching implications. It provides a common framework for file-based media services so they can be connected together using a ‘service oriented approach’ (SOA). SOA is an architectural technique that has been used in other industries for many years but has only recently gained traction in our sector where files can be very large and workflows can last a few milliseconds or take weeks. Some organisations, us included, already use SOA to manage our workflows but until now there hasn’t been a standard way of connecting everything together – the proprietary interfaces issue already mentioned. In the FIMS world however, the vendors will provide an interface to their product in a standard way, so we should be able to swap our services between vendors, or add new ones with less effort, lower cost and greater speed.

It has excellent support from the vendor community (the big names are there – check out the URL below) who give their effort free and without royalty. But most importantly there is lots of input from users around the world who tell the project what they need; making sure it is focussed on the things that are required to make our life easier and less expensive. To my mind anything that has that objective has to be applauded, which is why we contribute to the effort – let’s hope it succeeds. After all, if you buy a VTR you simply plug it into your existing infrastructure and expect it to work – why shouldn’t we be able to do the same with software products – at least the ones that are now commodity?

You can find the latest documentation here – access is free: www.amwa.tv/ebu

Ian Wimsett, Senior Technologist