Never heard of FIMS? Can’t blame you, it’s so new. If you care about media workflow, design and architectures you should care about FIMS.
As the logo above hints, FIMS is about media services. The idea of services is not new. Google, Twitter, YouTube and 1000s of other web sites offer service interfaces to remotely initiate an action, export data, import a file, query for something, and other you-name-it things. FIMS specs how media services should operate and cooperate in a professional, multi-vendor, IT environment -- not just through a web site interface.
FIMS is an effort sponsored by the Advanced Media Workflow Association and the European Broadcast Union -- http://wiki.amwa.tv/ebu/index.php/Main_Page. Avid is a major supporter of FIMS and other AMWA activities.
FIMS is a vendor-neutral, common framework for implementing interoperable media workflows using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). FIMS applies SOA principles to create solutions for broadcast, production, post production, media distribution, and media archive applications. The framework supports interoperability, interchangeability and reusability of media specific services across vendors and networks. Yeah, it's a mouthful so a demo might help to decode it.
At NAB 2011, Avid is participating in a joint technology demo along with Sony, IBM, Cinegy, Radiant Grid and Cube-Tec. These six vendors are working cooperatively and showing file-based camera capture, ingest, transcoding, audio processing and final display in a Media Composer timeline. This is the world’s first demo of FIMS and promises to be the start of a new way to build efficient media workflows.
The demo will be shown at the FIMS booth N3134, a booth dedicated for this purpose.
So, you are pondering, is FIMS firm? Think crawl, walk, run and the NAB demo is the crawling phase. The current state of FIMS has the framework and a few key services defined (media transfer, transcode, ingest). The next phases will add lots more services and test over a broader range of vendors and products.
When will Avid products be FIMS enabled? No announcements at present but we are enthusiastic about FIMS so stay tuned.
I will be presenting on the values/benefits of FIMS at the FIMS booth. Come hear what all the buzz is about;
· Monday 4/11/11 @ 2:00 (20 min)
· Tues/Wed 12:30 and 1:00
Al