In pre-digital days, life was a great deal easier. A familiar reel of two-inch analog tape holding 24 tracks of sounds could be played back in virtually any studio in the world. These days, manufacturers are free to explore more creative ideas about data-transfer speeds and capacities, the end result being a profusion of storage formats and media choices. This is okay if we live on a mountain top with little need to exchange digitized tracks or entire projects with other fellow collaborators. But, as we saw in the last installment of this erudite series, few of us operate in a vacuum; passing material from one studio to another is becoming the order of the day.

Have we created a digital version of this?

If one brand of digital audio workstation dominated the market, we wouldn’t be facing this Digital Tower of Babel. But with a wide choice of computer platforms and/or propriety operating systems, we have ended up with several competing disk formats (including .WAV for, primarily, Windows systems and .AIFF/.SDII for Mac-based DAWs) plus a cornucopia of media types, most of which are completely incompatible. Add to that scenario the major difference between the way in which DAWs process data at the project level – in other words, how they sequence discrete mono/stereo sound files to produce an edited, mixed and processed master mix – and we might begin to reach for that giant bottle of Tylenol.

There are several potential solutions. A number of years ago Avid Technology developed OMFI, or Open Media Framework Interchange, a format now offered by a number of workstation vendors.It was obviously in Avid’s interest, as owners of Digidesign’s Pro Tools and developers of its own Media and Film Composer nonlinear video editing systems, to enable projects to move freely from one DAW to another, and maybe allow non-Avid systems to offload audio files and project data that could be finished in ProTools and other Avid-branded products. Conceptually, OMFI provides an open digital-media interchange format between applications and across different computer platforms, supporting video, audio, graphics, animation and effects.

Audio elements, for example, can go their separate ways through the myriad sound-editing and sound-design stages but remain in perfect frame-accurate synchronization when re-assembled on the dubbing stage. In OMFI vernacular, digital media files become “Ingredients” for a designated project, while the program descriptions – how the various sound files, etc., are edited, mixed and otherwise processed – are referred to as “Recipes.” OMFI “Recipes” also support EDL-style information, allowing timecode-based data relating to edit points, crossfade profiles, multitrack source/destination assignments and signal-processing data to be standardized. OMFI Media can also be interchanged through specified OMFI-compliant formats, in addition to optional software modules that exchange media with other digital audio-storage formats.

It goes without saying that a keeping a sound project within an OMFI-compatible environment makes life a whole lot easier for everyone involved. Having transferred an OMFI file with source audio, edit-list information and processed effects from the editing system into the master playback DAW, for example, a sound editor can add effects, Foley, music, ADR, etc. When these various audio tracks have been cut and sweetened, the final sequence can be easily transferred to another workstation on, let’s say, the dubbing stage with all sound edits in place for the final rerecording session. Similarly for the more traditional tracking, overdubs and remix scenario.