DEAR EDITOR
Acrimonious Acronyms
There are so many acronyms and technical jargon in our work now that many paragraphs of Editors Guild Magazine articles are completely indecipherable. The most confusing terms are the new hardware and software items that are identified by letters and numbers with no hint as to their function.
Please publish a glossary along with the articles to help those
of us who are used to terms like "mag" and "sync."
Irvin Paik, Assistant Editor
The thought occurs to me: Why does the Guild insist on referring to itself as "MPEG?"
Does anyone else think this a little bizarre? Isn't there another
well-known industry organization that comes to mind with the mention
of this acronym? I would think that this fundamental question of branding
should be worthy of a bit of careful thought.
Ron Diamond, Picture Editor
"MPEG" has been used only casually as an unofficial abbreviation for Motion Picture Editors Guild ever since the union dropped the words "and Videotape" from its moniker in 1993.
Officially, "MPEG" (pronounced em-peg) stands for the Moving Picture
Experts Group, an ISO/IEC (International Organization of Standardization/International
Electrotechnical Commission) committee formed in 1988 with the mission
to establish standards for digital audio and video. "MPEG" is also
the name of a family of standards the group uses for coding audio-visual
information (movies, video, music) in a digital compressed format,
as in MPEG-1, MPEG-2, etc. But yes, they used the acronym first.
—Editor