Introduction
The MovieLabs white paper, The Evolution of Media Creation, i.e., 2030 Vision, laid out a future where significant media creation processes happen across multi-cloud infrastructures1, redundant tasks are eliminated, non-creative repetitive tasks are automated, and workflows and applications move to assets for efficiency and security reasons. That future will necessitate several changes in areas big and small, including how assets are created and managed and how identifiers are assigned to a variety of media elements, tasks, and participants2. In this blog series of three articles, we examine the world of identifiers and practices that can help enable the 2030 Vision.
In the Ontology for Media Creation (OMC), an identifier is a unique label, often an alphanumeric string, associated with an entity, such as an asset, a task, a person, or a collection, within a particular scope. An entity’s identifier is bound to the entity for as long as the entity is relevant, even if the properties of the entity change. For instance, the identifier of a person, per OMC, would remain the same even if the person changes their name. Identifiers can be used to reference entities and find (information about) the entities. For example, Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR) identifiers are used for tracking audiovisual content throughout the supply chain. This three-part blog series covers how to create identifiers for entities within our industry, especially within media productions, and how to consume and manage such identifiers.
Universal Linking and Asset Management Systems
Principle 8 from the 2030 Vision talks about the future of individual media elements being referenced, accessed, and tracked using a linking system. In another blog article Through the Looking Glass, we explored why file paths and environment specific references are inadequate for keeping track of assets. In that article, we examine the file system centric view of assets and see that it is inadequate in multi-participant, multi-cloud workflows, and that assets should be referenced using well-designed unique identifiers. To that end, asset management systems will have to significantly share the responsibility of creating and managing identifiers for assets in order to enable future-looking workloads.
Identifiers and the Ontology for Media Creation (OMC)
But the scope of identifiers goes beyond that of assets and asset management systems. In workflow management systems, unique identifiers are necessary for tracking tasks, participants, and workflow information. Likewise, Principle 6 from the 2030 Vision and Zero Trust security requires every user’s identity to be authenticated and authorized; identifiers therefore are also at the center of user management.
While the above statements might have motivated the need and role of identifiers, they lack the detail to fully capture their significance. As work progresses through media creation processes, different aspects of the shooting script get broken down first into narrative elements, then tasks and decisions that associate narrative elements with production locations, then actors that portray different characters, etc. All of these stages result in information that conceptually connects back to the narrative elements. As the different stages of media creation proceed, more tasks are created, and many participants will work on them, resulting in more information and more assets, then some more tasks, and some more assets, more participants, and so on. All these various pieces of information can benefit from being effectively identified, tracked, and connected.
The Script to Data blog series, especially the third article, explored how the Ontology for Media Creation (OMC) helps establish meaningful connections between the different elements within a production.
While all the information from such a graph need not live in the same system, the connections still exist and maintaining that linkage across systems and clouds through well-designed identifiers and practices makes all the difference for workflow efficiency. For example, a VFX supervisor could send an email to get clarification on the creative intent behind a task and wait hours for a response or use an integrated data system which automatically offers real-time information and clarity on their request on their screen when they are ready to work on the task. Common identifiers enable such integration between systems and minimize wasteful human interactions and accelerate progress on a project.
Now that we have established why we need identifiers, let’s look at how they should be designed and implemented. The next two articles in this blog series will explore the identifier space further. In particular,
- Part 2 covers necessary concepts related to identifiers and OMC to establish some common ground before we discuss identifier best practices.
- Part 3 will examine the practices that asset management systems, workflow designers, and OMC data producers and consumers should follow to participate fully in the future the 2030 Vision laid out.
[2] The word Participant is used throughout the blog series. It is defined in the Ontology for Media Creation (OMC) as people, organizations, and services involved in a production.
[3] The ontology has evolved since we wrote the Script to Data blog series. Refer to the latest ontology documentation.
