The initiation of the development of this CRC proposal came from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation during 1993.

There are a number of driving forces within the ABC which have led to the generation of this proposal including:

The proposed title of the CRC has varied a little during the development of the concepts to date, the currently proposed title being indicated above.

Commitments have been required for the participants to put up $10,000 in cash and up to $5,000 in kind for the preparation of the CRC bid.

It has been agreed that, for an organisation to remain a principal partner in the CRC a commitment of $600,000 - $700,000 in cash and kind for the seven years is required. The definition of this commitment is causing some concern to some of the prospective partners at present.

The CRC Bid group has appointed a bid coordinator, Dr Roger Buckeridge of Cutler & Company Pty Ltd to prepare and coordinate the required work for the CRC bid.

The driving force for the CRC is an industrial one.

The three industrial partners (ABC, Telecom & DEC) all clearly see major market potential arising out of the CRC developments. Indeed, the EBC has indicated that even if the CRC bid is not successful it will pursue the development anyway - some behind the scenes consideration is being given to prospective sources of funding in this contingency.

The ABC sees the technology to be developed as critical for its future operations, with an imperative for operation being the year 2000 Olympic Games.

Telecom sees the outcome as being a major business area for the future. The operation of the technology will depend heavily on Telecom broadband networks, which are currently in the experimental stage.

DEC is already a major developer and provider of video servers and very closely involved with the development of video on demand technologies (in association, inter alia, with Telecom). That technology is essentially a ‘one way’ service. The concepts proposed within the CRC are interactive and clearly DEC sees massive world wide markets in the development.

The Australian government has clearly enunciated that it is placing a high level of emphasis on audio visual technology for export earnings in the future. The proposal has, apparently, been outlined to at least two federal ministers who have received it with great enthusiasm.

Through the Victorian Department of Employment and Industry the proposal also appears to be receiving strong support. It is understood that the Victorian government sees the development of the Arts precinct in Melbourne as a major growth area, and one which would be very closely associated with this development.

Unlike most previously existing / funded CRC’s this proposal is very clearly market driven.

The current partner group for the proposed CRC is:

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation. (Ms Rosemary Sinclair, Director Strategic Development. It is understood that Mr Wal Lyneham, Director IT is also supportive of the CRC bid.)

Telecom Australia (Mr David Havyatt - General Manager..... Operating group in the CRC expected to be Telecom Research Laboratories.)

Swinburne University of Technology (discussions about the area between the ABC - Geoff Heriot & Dilip Jedja - and John Bird led to the formation of the CRC bid group . Internal bid leader designated by the Vice Chancellor to be Professor Greg Egan:
Participating groups - Laboratory for Concurrent Computing Systems, National Centre for New Media Arts and Technologies / SCAIM, Swinburne Laboratory for Telecommunications research, Swinburne Computer Human Interaction Laboratory, Swinburne Media and Telecommunications Centre.)

University of Technology Sydney (School of Electrical Engineering (Prof Warren Yates), and School of Computing Sciences (Assoc Prof Michael Fry)

Digital Equipment Corporation: (represented by Mr Brian Lehner, Account Manager, Media. Digital is the primary computing systems supplier to the ABC.)

‘Second level’ associations / involvement are also projected. Following approval from the partners meeting, the Chair of the bid team and a request from the bid coordinator, a meeting has been held with Ms Jenifer Hooks from Film Victoria who indicated strong support for the project, and a desire to be involved at whatever level is possible or appropriate. Involvement of Film Victoria is regarded as significant from the bid coordinators perspective as it introduces an industry user sector not otherwise included, thereby overcoming the possible interpretation that the CRC is simply a development project to satisfy a need within the ABC.

The initial proposal is that Film Victoria participation would become part of the Swinburne contribution - a valuable resource / contribution which Swinburne is able to bring into the CRC group.

At the request of Dilip Jedja and Roger Buckeridge contact has been made with CITRI as to the prospect of that organisation, with its links to the University of Melbourne and RMIT, joining the CRC bid as a ‘second level’-participant. Professor Peter Gerrand has indicated a willingness to participate in the CRC bid.

Consultations have been held between Dilip Jedja, Roger Buckeridge and Dr J. O’Callaghan, Chief Scientist of CSIRO-DIT and leader of the CRC for Advanced Computational Systems within which there is a project known as "Distributed Interactive Multi-Media Information Service (DIMMIS). It is understood that Dr O’Callaghan has indicated his support for the CRC proposal.

Consultations are also being undertaken with the research director for the CRC in Distributed System Technology (DSTC) about prospective links with the activities of that CRC in the areas of resource discovery and navigation and quality of service topics. Telecom, Digital and UTS are already participants in this CRC.

The generic concept for the CRC is to develop an intelligent audio-visual production system for utilisation within a broadcast production environment. The system may eventually be expanded to be available to the wider community.

The heart concept of the system is a repository for the production corporation’s (in this case the ABC’s) archive material. Archive in this sense means material stored for use and does not have a sense of non-current use. The archive therefore contains both historic material which may be in limited demand, recent material and current material.

The principal difference between this repository and a library concept is that the archive is a very dynamic and fluid animal. It is not a repository of published works in the way a library is, but a store-house of raw material with which production teams work, and to which reporters and collectors - and the producers of material using the archives - add.

The internal management of the archive will be very complex. There are, for example, major copyright, IP and privacy issues involved with the utilisation of the material. Copyright in material in the repository will rest with persons (to a significant degree) other than the repository owners / managers. Use of material within the production environment can be complex - stored sound may be used in, say, one, of many tracks of sound supporting a video image. The sound used may be a snatch from a copyright work, not the whole or even a major portion of it.

Speed is of the essence. Retrieval of images from the repository must be far faster than real time. A comparison is, for example, of a producer picking up a complete videotape from a shelf in a matter of seconds compared with the time it will take to down load the video images from the repository to the work station in order to work with them. If only real time can be achieved, a two hour video will take two hours to be with the producer.

The access to and transmission of material from the repository must preserve the material in ‘loss less’ form. The variety of transmission forms involved, however, make this a challenging task. Utilisation of the repository is perceived to be not simply from with a local area within production facilities, but to extend to reporters in the field, overseas and around Australia, to production facilities in other centres, and prospectively, to the public at large.

Material will be received into the repository from reporters locally and overseas in a variety of forms. Some material is transmitted via satellite, other material may be sent over the telephone system via a modem.

The long term perception is that the repository could be used for members of the public to store their own material in it for safe keeping and posterity (for a fee), and also that, rather than simply having the capability of Video on Demand (VoD) which is currently under consideration, but rather the public may actually ‘produce’ or create the images they view through the use of intelligent tools within the home finding the required material within the repository and compiling it to professional broadcast standards ‘on the fly’.

A substantial component of the CRC activity will have a direct impact upon the enhancement of modes of educational and training delivery services. It is anticipated that it will have a direct impact on a number of ABC activities such as Open Learning. It is noted that the ABC has a substantial history of provision of "education" services.

As with other R&D CRC activities, a significant part of the transfer will be the directly engagement of Masters and Doctoral students in associated research activities. The postgraduate research student path has long lead times (2-5 years commitment) before substantial gain is made by the industry. The very dynamic state of this emerging industry necessitates the development of other more direct information transfer processes, such as:

It is anticipated that a substantial component of the post-graduate research activities will be carried out within industry.

 Organisation

Initial considerations suggest the following organisational structure for the CRC:

The rapidly increasing channel capacity associated with broadband and other links creates a very large international demand for new broadcast program material. The emerging demands for interactive and narrowcast material serve to multiply this demand stretching conventional production methodologies to their limit.

This proposal is directed at the research required to develop production environments based on emerging broadband communication systems and very large distributed interactive repositories of audio-visual material.

While these repositories will initially contain a few thousand hours of material they must scale to hundreds of millions of hours of material. In the medium term (2-5 years) most of users will interact with the repositories over communication networks. The number of users will initially number in the hundreds but scale to thousands.

The users of the proposed production environments belong to the following broad categories:

Program material will come from a wide variety of sources in an almost as wide variety of formats sometimes dictated by communication channel limitations. A basic principal of the repository is that no further information is lost after the acquisition of material in that any digital storage compression schemes are lossless.

The most demanding usage patterns will come from the producers and directors. They need to first identify or navigate to candidate material for their program requirements; this material may come from several repositories. They then need to access this material which must arrive on demand at the editing stations synchronised in time and with response times sufficiently short not to disrupt creative interaction rates (1-2 seconds).

The interactions in very simple terms may be compared with those in cutting and splicing conventional materials and overdubbing sound track material. The process involved in producing interactive programs is significantly more complex involving amongst other things translation of video material on demand from widely varying input formats (e.g. cine film resolution) to the required target format (e.g. PAL).

The interaction requirements of repository managers, researchers and browsers is comparatively modest and their navigation requirements will largely be met by those required by the producers of programs. It is expected that autonomous production aids developed as part of this proposal will migrate over time to intelligent production systems in the home and as such may be relevant to other projects concerned with the delivery of material.

All transactions need to be recorded for the purposes of copyright and given the high interaction rates this in itself imposes large processing and storage demands.

The structure of the system proposed may be divided for convenience into the following broad elements:

The following figure shows the overall scheme in which these elements may operate.

The project’s commencement point will be the outcome of an existing collaborative arrangement between several of the partners who are developing a prototype digital repository production facility based essentially on existing technology. This will not only allow the CRC researchers to have an initial research platform, but will be invaluable as a research testbed for characterising the current and projected requirements of the production community. The facility will be a single user device. It will seek to store between 10 and 100 hours of text, audio and visual information.

By the end of the first year to eighteen months of the CRC it is projected that the initial facility will be to have developed an extended repository facility, some transcoding capability, and to have extended the facility access through limited ADSL based access. This step will require a significant amount of basic research activity into data traffic patterns generated by the system, user work and access patterns, aggregate information flows.

The initial stage will seek to store into the thousands of hours of material, but will provide little in the way of navigation tools. The extension is regarded as a vital development for the investigation of user requirements. It will be the primary research tool and a demonstrator for the system concepts.

This first stage will restrict the genre of the user communities to the News and Current Affairs and the advertising industry areas.

The next stage of the research project will seek to extend the functionality of the system through development of navigation tools and structures, linking distributed repositories through broadband networks, and extending the genre of user communities to more demanding production environments.

Research efforts will focus on the implications of multiple repositories, the larger scale, remote production capability and possible extension to a ‘browser’ community. Issues of navigation and control of the temporal issues of providing required sequences to the producer from dispirit repositories at the correct time and in the appropriate form will be major areas of research.

Later stages of the research program will extend the size, nature and forms of the repositories, synchronization issues, quality of service, navigation, integration with external networks, ever more demanding genres of users.

An issue of significance through all stages of the research will be matters related to copyright control. It is not currently intended to seek to develop copyright control tools but rather to integrate tools developed elsewhere into the structures.

Transcoding issues addressed will become ever more complex as the range of formats required within the different production genres is expanded.

Overall systems management issues will become increasingly more complex in the later research, with research concentrating on the scaling issues arising from repository extension to handle massive amounts of information, for expanded network access and great expansion in user numbers.

The production of motion picture and interactive multimedia programs from source material is an intensely interactive task often involving large teams working in concert on elements of the production. The product is the outcome of a highly complex set of dynamic interactions between the production elements (script, audio, visual) and the individuals involved in the production.

The techniques adopted vary widely depending on whether the production is directed at say a fictional work, a documentary or news. A production based on a work of fiction is largely based on a script and new material. A historical documentary may be based primarily based on archived material with comparatively little new material. News is based almost entirely on new material often arising as news does in an unpredictable way from disparate sources.

The techniques adopted vary widely depending on whether the production is directed at say a fictional work, a documentary or news. A production based on a work of fiction is largely based on a script and new material. A historical documentary may be based primarily based on archived material with comparatively little new material. News is based almost entirely on new material often arising as news does in an unpredictable way from disparate sources.

Considerable interaction with producers and directors working in the field will be required to identify underlying commonality in procedures and techniques and to sift out the ‘creative’ activities from the system interactions and more ‘routine’ aspects which may be effectively handled automatically, or which will be assisted through the development of specialist tools.

Many early 2D computer animation systems failed because they attempted to design for the perceived labour-intensive craft of drawing the images, rather than the process tasks of ink, paint, trace and shoot.(the boring and mundane)'. Some of the preliminary research for this CRC indicates, that very substantial gains in efficiency could be gained across all genres and stages of production (script-to-screen) if a more systematic study were made of the human interaction issues. eg A management system to help deal with issues of copy right, intellectual property and legals would liberate many from boring tasks which work against the spirit of creative and innovative program development.

The production systems will be client system resident. Other prospective elements relating to this stream are:

The project will seek to provide the capability to take broadcast audio-visual production from a "cottage industry" to a manufacturing industry:

It will seek scientific characterisation of material and processes and to develop effective interfaces to the repository. A longer term objective will be the development of extensive personal access tools.

Characterise techniques and produce intelligent aids, particularly for the professional broadcast production environment. environment ( radio, film, television, interactive multimedia).

Identification and characterisation of

Expert production group:

The research will investigate the implications for the proposed development within a range of production types and environments. It will canvass and identify the production culture and producer and user needs for the design of intelligent aids/tools/instruments integrated into a networked production environment (global).

This research will study the existing production cultures and methodologies in order to design and produce new environments - instruments and tools which maximise the individual and personalised access to production with particular emphasis upon the enhancement of creative and innovative input into program origination and production.

With special emphasis upon the understanding the "collaborative" production environments which typify the creation, production and performance (exhibition) of motion-picture, multimedia and interactive media programs. eg. the dynamics and interactions of "An orchestra model" in the creation, performance of music.

Producer-User:

The primary emphasis of the research and the outcomes is directed towards professional producers, content originators and providers, it is recognised that these roles are arbitrary and that a producer may at the same time be a "user" (ie. researching and acquiring resource material from the existing library archive database and or actively and dynamically contributing new information into the store by the very nature of their interaction eg usage patterns.)

Year 1.

Identify characteristics and principal elements of the production process; production flows, times, distribution patterns, nature of interactions The script- to-screen production culture of linear and non-linear (interactive) program material.

Audit of: existing production and research into: tools, applications and hardware suitable for: 1st stage prototype trial systems-linear and non-linear production applications.

Audit of: existing user multi-media library database acquisition systems suitable to management and manipulation of resources in professional production environments. Suitable for 1st stage user/producer adopting trials.

Development of prototype: Systems integration of existing/hardware software into distributed networked production system.

Year 2.

Take significant elements suited to automation and network integration Develop specific model test bed: eg. single media format (audio/music production) for a networked & distributed environment.

Develop cross -media linkages to production resources from the above suitable for integration.

Year 3.

Development of specific tools/instruments/application software: Intelligent production aids/tools for linear and non-linear production situations. Distributed network integration of script-to-screen production.

The characteristics of telephonic communications after 100 years are well understood. Computer to computer communications is relatively well understood. Interactive systems of the type proposed while superficially having some similarities with computer to computer traffic, is at present poorly characterised.

Communication infrastructure is expensive and has long installation lead times. It is essential that the communication traffic mix and requirements are well understood if the most effective investments are to be made.

Integrated resource management to guarantee the required QoS will be a central issue.

To identify and characterise the communication requirements of very large scale interactive distributed audio visual repositories and production systems. To construct models allowing investigation of appropriate communication network scenarios that meet the repository to repository and repository to user requirements.

Identify the interaction patterns typical of the environment. To identify and characterise current and projected network technologies. To develop environments in which network scenarios appropriate to end user requirements and associated archival systems may be investigated.

Identify and characterise traffic generated by various user environments - broadcast, production, education, games.

Integration and interactions of this traffic with other network traffic - varying patterns of use - short term - daily - longer term .... etc.

It is anticipated that use of the Experimental Broadband Network will play a significant part in this study.

Translation between formats (transcoding) occurs at the user and repository ends of the communication network. By compressing video material dramatic reduction in communication traffic can be achieved. The de-compression transcoding process at the user end may usually be performed in software but the current compression strategies require substantial computational capacity. In production systems only limited opportunity exists to pre-compress material. This is significantly different to library systems where material may be stored in a compressed format or translated and cached if the material is in high demand e.g. a popular movie.

Preliminary research suggests that in the short term, as standard formats continue to evolve, that it is not effective to provide special purpose transcoders tailored to a particular translation. It is however anticipated that some common translations between the repositories digital intermediate formats and target requirements and vice versa will be identified permitting special purpose transcoders.

An important source of program material will be the existing cine and magnetic archives. Reconstruction of material damaged through physical or chemical degradation will be required prior to transcoding for storage in the repository. It is anticipated that this will be performed offline.

In the short term material may need to be re-archived or off-lined preferably in digital form.

Because of the nature of the systems contemplated, transcoding affects all systems and the repository:

The information management system will manage communications ‘from end to end’. It involves negotiation and cooperation to provide appropriate Quality of Service (QoS) across client and end systems and the repository.

Repositories of the size contemplated necessitate the development of intelligent aids to allow users to identify material relevant to current needs in an audio visual repository.

They must then provide this navigation and allow them to integrate this material for a particular end requirement. These agents will need to be knowledgeable. It is anticipated agents/ groups tailored to the communications network and associated translators.

Navigation systems will utilise retrieval actions.

Identify current schemes for the management of real time data systems.

Research to date by others has been directed at libraries containing largely finished works. The response times for access to these predominantly text based libraries are generally undemanding and usually involve access to a single stream of material of a completed work. Libraries containing collections of linear video materials e.g. movies accessible on-line are currently being planned or introduced.

It is accepted by the research community that such libraries will place considerable demands on the current generation storage systems both in terms of size and data rates. This proposal will address the significantly more challenging area of random access to individual frames in a video sequence or speech segments in an audio track with several channels of material with common access deadlines being delivered to the client. We anticipate that this will be further complicated by one or more repositories at different geographic locations co-operating to serve a single client.

A major objective is to transcribe and preserve existing archival material in a digital format which will enable it to be used without further degradation. This will involve a substantial amount of work in image reconstruction and restoration using techniques outside the scope of conventional image processing. It has been decided that the repository should use only lossless compression schemes for the master recordings. Appropriate standards are the subject of active international research and commercial debate. 

To develop a scaleable research testbed of linked repositories which will permit ongoing research into appropriate novel computer architectures including next generation storage devices and their associated control software. It is intended that these repositories will co-operate to provide access to several sources of material in time synchronised manner for integration by a user into a single audio /visual work.

To produce prototypes and research findings which have the prospect of commercialisation.