WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) today published its initial release of the Rapid Industry Solutions (RIS) On-Set Virtual Production Camera and Lens Metadata project.
The goal of the overall initiative is achieving interoperability of all on-set equipment, and improving consistency of camera and lens metadata is an important step, SMPTE said.
“This release is the first of many free, open documents SMPTE will offer through the work of our RIS initiative,” said David Grindle, executive director of the society. “Through the combined effort of our RIS team, and the community as a whole, we are working to refine these new tools for storytelling.”
The initial release targets traditional VFX—a step toward future releases coving camera and lens metadata for on-set virtual production and camera tracking metadata. Hosted in a public repository for SMPTE members and the public to provide comments and feedback, the work includes reference code that converts the output of camera makers’ tools into a normalized JSON format, it said.
Additional releases are planned to advance towards the goal of covering camera and lens metadata for on-set virtual production and camera tracking.
“SMPTE RIS was able to bring together key experts from the major camera and lens makers with cinematographers and VFX experts to define the metadata parameters that are most important for downstream use in traditional VFX,” said Jim Helman, chair of SMPTE’s Camera and Lens Metadata group and CTO of MovieLabs.
“For years at MovieLabs, we’ve been hearing from our studio members about how important metadata from on-set doesn’t make it downstream in a usable and trusted form, resulting in wasted time in finding, reconstructing or back engineering that metadata. These metadata tables and code are an important step toward improving that situation and fit well with our own work on metadata and ontology in the MovieLabs 2030 Vision for media creation.”
David Hoffman, business development manager of the Americas at Blackmagic Design, co-chairs the RIS Interoperability Workstream along with Jim Geduldick and Ritchie Argue. The project director for RIS is Ryan Hendricks, the society said.
SMPTE RIS is also working toward several other deliverables for 2023. The Interactive Virtual Production Wall Chart will become available by the end of the year and will showcase how virtual production works from start to end. SMPTE RIS and the On-Set Virtual Production (OSVP) initiative were created to address technical challenges, it said.
More information is available on SMPTE RIS is available online.
More information on the Camera and Lens Metadata project is available here.
