As you are probably aware, OMF stands for 'Open Media Framework' and was developed by Avid a few years ago in order to obtain some degree of compatibility between the plethora of hard disk-based sound and picture editing systems that have sprung up in recent times. Briefly what it is designed to do is to allow system X to import picture/sound files from system Y and export them back again; in theory anyway. When I say export/import I mean actually transferring data from one system to another as opposed to physically rerecording the material which of course is a slower process and would not, in the case of a sound tracklay, give you all the cuts in-place.
OMF has turned into a sort of club for interested hard-disk manufacturers. Most significant players in this game have already signed-up with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Evidently OMF from the user point of view can only be a good thing, manufacturers however, always tend to keep one eye on commercial advantage which is how they stay in business. Another minor sticking point is the fact that OMF currently relies on a nifty bit of software from Microsoft called 'wave' - OMF files for export bear the .wav file extension. Needless to say Microsoft is DOS-based which is fine for manufacturers using an IBM platform for their operating system but somewhat more tricky for those using Apple Macintosh-based systems. Considerable sums are currently being spent on writing DOS - Mac translation programs for this very reason.
There is also a considerable amount of head scratching going on to do with slightly more esoteric forms of OMF data transfer such as EQ parameters, gain, fades and suchlike. The main problem here is that these rely on sophisticated DSP functions which may not be resident on the system trying to import the file in question. From a dubbing editors point of view these are largely an irrelevance anyway since what we are actually after is an exact copy, with built-in extensions, of the picture editors cutting copy soundtrack .
So where are we at this moment ? Avid and the AMS AudioFile currently have virtually full OMF compatibility. Lightworks and DAR have a proprietary non-OMF compatibility system although DAR now has OMF capability. I personally have never used OMF but have no reason to doubt its efficacy. Essentially if it works as claimed, it will vastly speed up the whole dialogue editing process on productions where the picture is cut on hard-disk. Currently synch on the married video rolls that are to be digitised is achieved in one of two ways.
In either case the next step from a dialogue editors point of view is to 'auto-conform' the cutting copy sound from an Edit Decision List supplied by the picture department. This can be a fairly long-winded process, depending on the number of edits, and it is not uncommon to get lists that are frankly nonsense. The other problem is that synch on the cutting copy can be very iffy for a variety of reasons. Telecine mag followers do not always ramp up nicely from start-marks, they can be incorrectly laced up, synching to mute videotape is frequently performed by people inexperienced in rushes synching and so on. OMF gives us the possibility to achieve the same kind of synch that we all take for granted on film; using this method, the action would be digitised mute, the floor sound loaded into the workstation (obviously at the highest possible resolution) and synched to picture by experienced assistant editors. Once the cut is complete, the cutting copy sound would be exported to the sound department on MO disk or some other suitable medium. An added advantage would be that any bits of sound the picture editor had stitched in that did not originate from floor material would appear on the OMF export . Obviously a lot of the latter would be dumped immediately as it would be replaced by the music and FX departments anyway, but any useful ADR would turn up.
In some ways OMF might be regarded as the 'Philosophers stone', the medium by which base metals would supposedly be turned to gold. It is possible that we are at last in a position to truthfully claim that digital post-production can save money .
NICK LOWE