This project was proposed by John Andrews, Vice President of the Institute of Broadcast Sound (IBS), UK. It was approved under our rules by Subcommittee SC-03 and assigned to the SC-03-06 Working Group on Audio-File Transfer and Exchange.
The core of this project started life as an industry collaboration among manufacturers and users of hard-disk based location recording equipment. The forum for the substantive discussion was hosted by the IBS, a broadcast-oriented audio group. The format was termed by them "iXML", and this name is in current use by a number of manufacturers who have implemented the proposal over the past two years.
TITLE | AES-X155, Production recording metadata set (iXML) |
SCOPE | to specify an XML-based metadata set to communicate file-based and project-based metadata between various stages of audio workflow in production, telecine, editorial, and post production. Production may include recordings made in studios and on location. |
OUTPUT INTENT | Standard |
RATIONALE |
Fragmentation within the industry means that production sound recordists now have little opportunity to communicate with post-production editors and mixers working on the same project. At the same time, the complexity of the work is increasing to handle stereo and surround-sound projects while time and resources for traditional documentation are vanishing. Items that need documenting include: scene, take, slate, channel allocation, stereo and multi-channel groupings, channel status, etc. An agreed metadata set - automatically generated wherever possible - will help to pass consistent information through the production chain. An XML-based structure is chosen to be widely compatible with other metadata systems. Such an agreed metadata set will also complement the metadata embedded within Broadcast Wave files (see also AES31-2) |
WHO BENEFITS? |
Directly: production sound recordists, postproduction editors and mixers. Indirectly: producers of audio, television or film material, manufacturers of equipment, librarians and archivists. |
WHY AES? | AES members have the necessary expertise to understand and develop the use of metadata in an audio production and post-production environment, and to encourage its use worldwide. |