Dialogue Editing

The OMF and a Brief History of Nonlinear Editing 55
a picture editor’s drive onto a digital audio workstation and start editing. Nor
was it possible to do part of a project on one type of machine and then move
to another.
It’s not that no one was paying attention. Standards setting groups—Society
of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), Audio Engineering
Society (AES), and European Broadcasting Union (EBU)—were looking for
ways to normalize the exchange of this rich and diverse picture and sound
data. Since such organizations are notorious for moving slowly, it was the
industry that made the fi rst meaningful foray into fi le transfer protocol. In
1992 Avid Technology, not yet in the audio business, introduced its Open
Media Framework Interchange (OMFI, commonly shortened to OMF),
designed specifi cally to allow Avid fi les and EDLs to be opened directly on
any number of audio workstations.
For a few years in the early 1990s, OMF was promising to be the Esperanto
in which all machines would seamlessly communicate, allowing transparent
postproduction. Once it became a standard, like SMPTE timecode or any
digital audio format, equipment choices would be based solely on desired
features and price rather than on embedded architecture, since it would be
painless to move between makes and models. Of course, reality eventually
reared its head.
Between manufacturers’ reluctance to expose their proprietary codes to competitors’
eavesdropping and Apple’s unwillingness to release into the public
domain the underlying container code, OMF never attained real “standard”
status. 4 Instead, it continued to be a product of Avid and later Avid/
Digidesign. This accidental ownership did nothing to make other manufacturers
either comfortable or cooperative beyond what was needed to make
their workstations accept an Avid project. The utopia of open exchange would
have to wait, although OMF did become the de facto standard for moving
fi les between workstations.
OMF-1 and OMF-2 Because OMF was complicated and its implementation
for each manufacturer required complex code-writing somersaults, Avid did
its best to keep the protocol available to developers. However, within a few
years, it was clear—given so many changes, bug fi xes, improvements, and
the culling of initial mistakes—that OMF needed to change, so OMF-2 was
released in 1996. OMF-1 and OMF-2 are not compatible formats.
4 A brief but outstanding history of OMFI is “Workstation File-Format Interchange” by
Ron Franklin, in Mix Magazine (vol. 1, October 2002).