Short for Advanced Authoring Format, a multimediafile format introduced by Microsoft in 1998. The goal of AAF is to provide a common file format that multimedia authoring applications can use so that it's possible to develop a multimedia presentation in one application and then edit it in a second application. This will allow designers to use a variety of different tools when creating multimedia content without needing to worry about converting files from one format to another. Whether AAF ultimately achieves this goal will depend on whether the software companies that develop authoring tools adopt AAF.
