New ASC-MHL Guidelines and Our Role

What are the ASC’s New MHL Guidelines? 

The ASC (American Society of Cinematographers) updated their MHL (Media Hash List) guidelines. The new MHL guidelines assure that the media transfer process is standardized. Currently, there are multiple verification types, and different companies use varying types. This has led to confusion and complications. In order to simplify these processes, the ASC decided that implementing a form of standardization to MHL would be beneficial. This helped decrease the amount of time and number of complications that occur when transferring media.

Previously, the guidelines were there to assure simplicity and speed. However, because speed was being prioritized, the collision space was made smaller. This led to an increase in collisions, meaning multiple files had the same checksum value. This caused many problems because checksum values are supposed to be a unique identifier. Under these new guidelines, the ASC has decided that although a smaller collision space leads to quicker results, it is better to sacrifice a slight amount of time rather than risking complications. Therefore, under these new protocols, the ASC details its desire to create a larger collision space.

The innovative products and updates created as a result of the new MHL protocols will be more powerful than ever before. They will track your data over time, meaning they have snapshot recordings of every interaction that has taken place so far. This prevents data loss, which is one of the main issues our products help entertainment and media professionals overcome. 

Imagine Products’ Role

The new ASC MHL guidelines may seem fairly simple; the space is becoming larger and more powerful, right? Well… not quite. Although these new protocols may seem simple, these adjustments have prompted our team to get to work implementing them immediately.

The ASC may give us the outline to follow, but companies like ours are in charge of modifying our products in order to abide by those guidelines. Imagine Products Inc.® has worked in close collaboration with Pomfort, the creators of SilverStack. We have put in extensive time and effort into the implementation of these new guidelines within our products’ reporting features. Through sample coding, our team has ensured the application of the new protocols and the creation of adjusted products.

Here at Imagine Products, our customers and the public can view the newly improved result of these guidelines through a part of our newly revealed ShotPut Pro® 22 for Mac, as well as in TrueCheck® and myLTO®.

Want to learn more about what MHL is? Here’s a link to a previous blog post detailing everything you need to know: Checksums and Verification Part 4: What is MHL?