I’d like to recap what was my point of view on ClipID durng the last VWG, when the island connection went nuts and nobody could hear me any longer.
It seems there is an agreement about <clipID> element being optional. If there is none, the AMF is soft-linked to the footage that comes and goes in the same folder. Two use-cases for this:
- On-set: DIT has a pre-determined AMF prepared where the camera magazine’s footage is going to be off-loaded.
- Automated transcoders, where AMF can be prepared into a watchfolder together with any footage to be rendered into --say-- the AMF Output Transform’s colorimetry (or the AMF is just embedded into a larger XML from the transcoder’s own XSD).
The arguments for letting other files (ALE, EDL, etc.) do the binding between AMF and footage is good only for as long as such files use XML as well and an AMF’s <aces:colorPipeline> element can be fully embedded (along with its “namespace”) as an XML extension.
I’m thinking of IMF SCM and ISXD files, to Apple Final Cut fcpxml files, ARRI’s ARC XML workflows, and so on.
Otherwise, for non-XML files we need to have something like:
- an AMF file (or more than one?)
- footage/content file(s), and
- one EDL/ALE file, binding the two
That looks a bit of too much old-style thing, isn’t it?.