Copyright © 2026, Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced, by any means whatsoever, without the prior written permission of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.
The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) is an internationally-recognized standards developing organization. Headquartered and incorporated in the United States of America, SMPTE has members in over 80 countries on six continents. SMPTE’s Engineering Documents, including Standards, Recommended Practices, and Engineering Guidelines, are prepared by SMPTE’s Technology Committees. Participation in these Committees is open to all with a bona fide interest in their work. SMPTE cooperates closely with other standards-developing organizations, including ISO, IEC and ITU. SMPTE Engineering Documents are drafted in accordance with the rules given in its Standards Operations Manual.
For more information, please visit www.smpte.org.
This Standards Administrative Guideline forms an adjunct to the use and interpretation of the SMPTE Standards Operations Manual. In the event of a conflict, the Operations Manual shall prevail.
This Administrative Guideline specifies the principles and rules for the structure and formatting of documents.
The following keywords have a specific meaning in the context of this document:
The following documents are referred to in the text in such a way that some or all of their content constitutes requirements of this document. For dated references, only the edition cited applies. For undated references, the latest edition of the referenced document (including any amendments) applies.
For the purposes of this document, the terms and definitions given in the following documents apply:
Engineering Documents shall conform to ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2 and ISO 80000 (all parts), with the following exceptions, which shall take precedence:
In the event of a conflict with the provisions of ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2, the SMPTE Standards Operations Manual and Administrative Guidelines shall take precedence.
NOTE — The Director of Engineering or the Standards Vice President can approve variances on a case-by-case basis. Modifying variances specified in this Administrative Guideline requires the approval of the Standards Committee.
An Engineering Document shall utilize the HTML template at SMPTE AG-27 as specified in SMPTE AG-04.
pubType, as defined by SMPTE AG-26NOTE — Modifying the structure and formatting of a document can change the numbering of elements, potentially invalidating references made to the document by other documents, published papers and books.
The Foreword contains fixed text generated by the tooling at SMPTE AG-26 based on the Document Type.
In addition to the information listed in ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2, the Foreword includes the statement referred to at subclause 9.1.7 of the SMPTE Standards Operations Manual (if applicable). The Foreword is an informative element, and shall not contain requirements, permissions or recommendations. It may contain additional author-supplied prose, as described in SMPTE AG-26.
In addition to the information listed in ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2, the Introduction is an informative element. If present, it shall only contain author-supplied prose, as described in SMPTE AG-26. It shall not contain requirements, and as such shall include a statement that the clause is entirely informative and does not form an integral part of the Engineering Document.
NOTE — The Introduction is a optional element in Engineering Documents, immediately following the Foreword, and shall be an unnumbered clause.
The Scope immediately preceeds the Conformance, and includes author-supplied prose, as described in SMPTE AG-26.
The Conformance immediately follows the Scope, and includes a definition of conformance terms, as specified in the SMPTE Standards Operations Manual. This sectoin is generated by the tooling at SMPTE AG-26 based on the Document Type, and may include additional author-supplied, conformance-related prose as described in SMPTE AG-26.
The SMPTE Standards Operations Manual and SMPTE AG-03 specify requirements for normatively referenced documents.
Documents should be listed and referred to as recommended by their respective publishers.
Otherwise, the provisions of ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2 apply.
The following forms should be used to make references to a document, a part of a document or a non-prose element:
NOTE 1 — Imperative forms are not used in informative parts of the document, such as Bibliography, examples, notes, and footnotes.
NOTE 2 — The terms clause and subclause, instead of the term "section", are used to refer to the subdivisions of a document.
Only references cited informatively in the document shall be listed in the Bibliography clause.
A reference to a non-prose element shall be made using the form element x where x is the letter of the non-prose element, as defined in SMPTE AG-02.
EXAMPLE — "...as defined in element a of this document."
The introductory text to the Terms and Definitions clause is auto generated by the tooling at SMPTE AG-26 based on what is present or absent in this section:
NOTE — The introductory text is not a hanging paragraph, as the Terms and Definitions clause consists of a list of terminological entries and not subclauses.
Symbols and abbreviated terms should remain consistent within a document or a family of documents
NOTE — Consistency is particularly important when revising a document or adding a document to existing multipart documents or established families of documents, e.g. MXF documents.
The term bit shall not be abbreviated.
The unit of length inch shall not be abbreviated.
All non-prose elements of the Engineering Document, as defined in SMPTE AG-02, shall be explicitly referred to within the prose element as defined by SMPTE AG-26.
All non-prose elements of the Engineering Document shall be listed in an informative annex titled Additional elements, which shall be the final annex of the document.
This annex shall be introduced by the following sentence:
The following are the non-prose elements of this document:
The list shall include the letter designator, a brief description of the non-prose element, and an indication of whether the non-prose element is normative or informative.
SMPTE AG-26 shows an example of non-prose element and further description.
The SMPTE Standards Operations Manual specifies the conformance language used in Engineering Documents.
All Engineering documents shall be written in United States English.
Translations into other languages by SMPTE (or by parties authorized by SMPTE) are encouraged but not required. In the event of a discrepancy, the original English language document shall be authoritative.
The following reference works for spelling should be used:
The following reference works for style should be used:
Machine-readable languages, including programming and markup languages, may be used by Engineering Documents, in which case they shall be defined either within the Engineering Document or via a reference.
Engineering Documents shall use US number formats.
The decimal separator is a U+002E FULL STOP (.).
There shall not be any seperation character(s) for each group of three digits above the decimal point.
0.01 1234.56
Numbers shall not use the E-notation, where a multiplication by powers of 10 is replaced by the letter e.
EXAMPLE — The number 0.0003 can be written 3 × 10−4 but is never written 3e−4.
NOTE — Number forms are specified in ISO 80000-1.
Numbers expressed in base 16 (hexadecimal numbers) should be written in the following form:
0xdd...dd
where each character d belongs to the set {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, a, b, c, d, e, f}.
Dates shall:
YYYY-MM-DD, e.g. 2009-04-23 to indicate April 23, 2009; orTimes shall:
hh:mm, hh:mm:ss, where hh is the hour (in a 24-hour day), mm are the minutes and ss are the seconds; or The above only apply to calendar dates and time, and do not apply to timecode and other forms of media time. The latter can, for example, include an ff suffix to denote a frame count.
Data that consist of human-language text should be encoded using UTF-8, as specified in ISO/IEC 10646.
The terms listed in Table 1, when used in the specified context(s), shall not be present in a document, unless the term is necessary to interpret a normative reference, in which case the use of the term shall be minimized. Table 1 also provides example alternative terms. Terminology should be consistent across documents of the same domain.
NOTE — Minimizing the use of a term can be achieved by defining an alias in the Terms and definitions clause.
| Term | Applicable context(s) | Example alternative terms |
|---|---|---|
| master | As a noun, when used to indicate control, dominion or ownership of one party over another party | leader, publisher, source, primary, dispatcher, reader/writer, server, active, coordinator, parent |
| slave | As a noun, when used to indicate control, dominion or ownership of one party over another party | follower, subscriber, sink, secondary, worker, reader/writer, client, standby, helper, replica |
| blacklist | any | blocklist, deny, droplist, drop, block |
| whitelist | any | allowlist, allow, accesslist, permit |
| sub-black | any | below black, below nominal black, below‑reference black, negative luminance level |
| super-white | any | above white, above nominal white, above‑reference white, extended‑range white |