This paper introduces the Movie Script Markup Language (MSML), a document specification for the structural representation of screenplay narratives for television and feature film drama production. Its definition was motivated by a lack of available structured and open formats that describe dramatic narrative but also support IT-based production methods of audiovisual drama. The MSML specification fully supports contemporary screenplay templates in a structured fashion, and adds provisions for drama manufacturing methods that allow drama crew to define how narrative can be translated to audiovisual material. A timing model based on timed petri nets is included to enable fine-grained event synchronization. Finally, MSML comprises an animation module through which narrative events can drive production elements like 3-D previsualization, content repurposing or studio automation. MSML is currently serialized into XML documents and is formally described by a complement of an XML Schema and ISO Schematron schema. The specification has been developed in close collaboration with actual drama production crew and has been implemented in a number of proof-of-concept demonstrators.

A multitude of platforms with widely varying capabilities is available today for the consumption of broadcasted audiovisual content. Each class of media consumption devices should receive a product not only adapted to its capabilities, but also in a manner that fully conveys the cinematic narrative and hence provides true universal media experiences. This paper presents semantic adaptation processes that integrate with other drama media manufacturing processes and allow directors and other creative staff to naturally carry over cinematic decision making into the content adaptation domain, thereby using narrative story elements already available from other production processes. We discuss how the adaptation process interacts with other processes and what parameters influence the adaptations applied to audiovisual material, followed by an evaluation of our current implementation.

Cross-fertilization of media and information technologies is causing pressure on traditional broadcasting facilities to re-engineer their production processes and embrace file-based approaches in favor of conventional methods. Traditionally, the production of television and feature film drama is usually supported by a paper information flow and consists of a rather ad hoc production workflow. This paper introduces a data model that thoroughly supports the production processes and workflows of drama programs in a file-based and integrated media architecture. The presented data model is fully compliant with the P/Meta metadata exchange scheme and, as a proof of concept, its validity was verified by the successful development of a centralized drama production application.

Although pixel shaders were designed for the creation of programmable rendering effects, they can also be used as generic processing units for vector data. In this paper, attention is paid to an implementation of the YCoCg-R to RGB color space transform, as defined in the H.264/AVC Fidelity Range Extensions, by making use of pixel shaders. Our results show that a significant speedup can be achieved by relying on the processing power of the GPU, relative to the CPU. To be more specific, high definition video (1080p), represented in the YCoCg-R color space, could be decoded to RGB at 30 Hz on a PC with an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ CPU, an AGP bus and an NVIDIA GeForce 6800 graphics card, an effort that could not be realized in real-time by the CPU.