We’re Open-Sourcing Our Patents

Blowball II by M.C. Escher, 1943

We’re open-sourcing our patents to accelerate adoption of our upcoming Delta Timeline Assembly (DELTA) standard. Anyone implementing DELTA is free to use our patents under the Merlin Cinematic Patent Agreement.

Merlin is busy working with the video post-production community to design the DELTA specification. When DELTA is ready we want everyone to use it and we don’t want patents to stand in the way.

The DELTA standard is not a timeline interchange format like AAF or FCPXML. DELTA is designed to make it easy for post-production applications to express changes to a timeline – either for pulling a change into an application or pushing a change out.