“If you can’t find it, it’s not worth a damn thing”

Thus spoke Darryl Jefferson, responsible for the incredibly successful US Olympics coverage at NBCUniversal, at the SMPTE industry lunch on 23 October 2012.    His reference was to the need for meticulous metadata labelling of all the material they had – something absolutely symptomatic of the new age of file based programme production.

We didn’t really need the statistics from Darryl because everyone knows that the Olympic Games in summer 2012 were the most successful television event in the history of mankind – but we got them.   

What can you say about 82 million television viewers (just in the US)?  Maybe even more phenomenal than the television audience, which we might expect to be high, was the huge US Internet audience.  There were 57 million unique visitors, and at times the Olympic streams were consuming 35-50% of the entire US internet bandwidth.    3000 highlight packages were produced.   

There was 2500 staff working in London, with 200 cameras providing pictures in addition to those from the IOC OBS. 

Part of the production success was the use of a Media Access management system, which allowed the NBCU teams in New York, Florida (for the Spanish services), and elsewhere to find and call up items instantly from the available material.  

Darryl claimed that the event showed ‘Television is not dead’.  Maybe so, but it appears to have an ever growing large room-mate. 

Any video content from the dawn of time at the touch of a button?

Anthony Wood, CEO of ROKU, gave the opening keynote on the first day of the SMPTE conference (23 October 2012).   Anthony is a successful and charming Silicon Valley entrepreneur, complete with the handyman uniform of sneakers, worn jeans, and suspenders (see photo).  The term ROKU comes from ‘six’ in Japanese, by the way.  It was Anthony’s sixth company.

His basic point was that the future of television will be via Internet streaming, rather other delivery means.   This is the service that the ROKU player or set top box provides at an equipment retail cost of just 50 USD.  It provides a ‘gateway’ to the services of other content providers such as Netflix.  It is a competitor of other gateway boxes from Apple TV and others. 

The ROKU service will also be available via a ‘dongle’ for insertion into the USB port of a TV set.  This will be a disposable dongle, which can be updated with new and more sophisticated software as time goes by, without the viewer having to wait for his next TC set.  

ROKU offers access to a large number of services, which fall into popularity bands like a ‘long tail’.   Top gun at the moment is Netflix. 

Anthony was asked what broadcaster stations should be doing to continue to be successful in a future age of Internet gateways like ROKU.  He suggested they should be working out how to gain the rights to include premium content in their Internet services, which should also be offered via an Internet gateway as well as broadcast.  It seems that much the right to much premium content today resides with the networks, rather than the broadcasters who use network content for broadcasting.    

So what is the ‘end point’ of the current trend?  For Anthony it will be a world where “any video content in history is available via Internet”.  

Do you think he is right?

David Wood. 

SMPTE Planning to Create HFR Test Material

CineCert’s John Hurst, co-chair of SMPTE 21DC, kicked off an update of the technology committee’s work by reporting that the bulk of DCI standards have now been published but this current platform is “just beginning of what is possible” in cinema.

MKPE Consulting’s founder Michael Karagosian—who co-chairs 21DC’s HFR study group with Kommer Kleijn and David Stump—said the group is focusing on HFR mastering and distribution through exhibition.

He reported that 428-7 is a subtitling spec that the group aims to finalize for 3D applications—though it is not clear how HFR subtitles will be accomplished. Karagosian added that the The Hobbit (which opens Dec. 14) is not expected to offer subtitles on its HFR versions.

The study group is also planning a shoot to create HFR test material, which would be made available to all vendors to test developing HFR technology for production, postproduction and exhibition.

Director of photography David Stump is creating a shot list for this production.

HFRs Challenge Postproduction

Paul Chapman, senior vp of technology at Burbank-based postproduction facility Fotokem, led a discussion of some of the challenges that high frame rates bring to post, during SMPTE’s symposium on high frame rates for digital cinema.

For starters, he asserted that support from creative editorial is lacking and needed. This was a sentiment echoed by additional speakers, including Disney’s Howard Lukk, who did however single out Adobe’s Premiere Pro as offering HFR support.

Chapman reported that he conducted an informal survey of dailies vendors, and his findings suggest that all are now testing high frame rates. He expects to see quite a lot of development in this area during the next 12 months. He reported that Fotokem’s NEXTlab near-set dailies system is already working on a HFR project.

Nico Recagno of SGO (the maker of the Mistika postproduction system, which is in use at Park Road Post on The Hobbit) said that managing dailies at HFRs is “horrifically difficult,” citing challenges including time code, methods of viewing and QC, and sound sync.

Recagno added that the biggest concern that he is hearing from colorists is getting proper calibration during color grading.

He and Chapman both urged the community to create HFR standards in some of the discussed areas, including time code.

The Trumbull campaign for quality.

The key–note presentation for the ‘higher frame rate’ symposium was given by the respected Douglas Trumbull – filmmaker, visionary, and more.  Douglas explained that his father was an Engineer and his mother was an Artist.  (You blogger wonders if that makes him an Artineer?).  He argued that cinema had to become a more immersive experience, if audiences were to be held and regained.   Brighter screens and more are needed, so the audience becomes ‘part of the movie’. 

Douglas’ revealed his personal history – his triumphs such as the cinematography for the movie 2001, and his disappointments – the fallout from the death of actress Nathalie Wood while making his movie ‘Brainstorm’.   

One of his achievements was the idea for the system ‘Showscan’ which offered 70mm film shot at 60 pictures/second.   It was this, he explained, that led to his lifelong commitments to raising the quality bar for movies.

He had a basic concept to offer.  This was that different types of scene, and different components of a scene, need different picture rates.  A future system should allow individual elements or segments of pictures to run at different picture rates.   In other words, the picture rate becomes a component of the production grammar, like colouring or contrast.   This would create the most efficient and highest quality delivery system.   To make this work, the movie could all be shot originally at, say, 120 pictures per second, and individually elements could be ‘sub-sampled’ to their optimum rate.   It’s an intriguing concept if it can be made to work.  

Douglas has also being working on using higher picture rates for 3D movies – apparently a 3D movie shot at 120 pictures per second is a great experience.

His keynote was a very thoughtful one, and his commitment to high quality is a breath of fresh air.  Outside the meeting room, your blogger asked him if he might work with the 33 Megapixel ‘Super Hi Vision system’ (ITU UHD-2), at the 120 pictures/second it may offer in future.    Could we ever see a Super HiVision Trumball remake of his 2001 or Brainstorm movies?  Wouldn't that be something.

David Wood

SMPTE Conference day 1; “Less like film – more like nature”

The 2012 SMPTE opened on Monday 22 October 20 with its pre-conference symposium on ‘high frame rates for digital cinema’.   Saying that higher frame rates is a ‘good thing’ is, at first sight, like extolling the virtues of apple pie – of course it’s a benefit.   It can become even more beneficial for 3D, where motion artefacts can be even more annoying than for 2D.  But the critical questions could be how much improvement do they bring, and what is the trade off of higher frame rates compared to static picture detail.    

The speakers, and the material they showed, said that a lot of homework has been done on these matters.  James Cameron’s study (a seriously long video) showed that higher frame rates open up new options for 3D movie production grammar – essentially allowing panning across the scene, or lateral movement.  Since movie production began movie makers have been restricted by motion judder to use tracking shots.   With electronic cameras, and with some digital cinemas allowing higher frame rates, we may be entering a new age and a new vocabulary for film making.  Futhermore, if you shoot with a high rate, it is always possible to do temporal down-sampling for 24 Hz use.

Another advantage of shooting at higher frame rates is the resulting elegance of slow motion.  

Taken just on the evidence of the presenters, it seems that higher frames rates -  48, 60, and 120 frames/second - are  one of digital technology’s great gift to the movie industry.

Your blogger however believes it may not be that easy a sale.  Higher frame rates do, as James Cameron says, take us closer to realism.  But is that what the creative community and the public wants?  There is a legacy 100 years of ‘film look’ to overcome.  The old low frame rates give movies a sense of detachment from the real world.  In television, many creative’s like ‘interlace scanning’ because they see it as ‘real television’ – television they are used to looking at – not because it is high quality.  Will the movie industry also cling to its familiarity with 24ps, because they think its very sense of ‘unrealness’ is an advantage in the world of creating dreams?

What do you think?

I was a teenage SMPTE Conference blogger!

There's so much happening in the broadcasting and cinema business right now, its no surprise that attendance at the SMPTE Conference has risen again this year.    If you can’t be here and want to follow some of the insights, why not check out our SMPTE blogs?   They’ll be appearing here on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (22, 23, 25 October 2012) of this week.   

Carolyn Giardina and moi (David Wood) will be there in Hollywood for you, trying to pick out the nuggets.  

 I really look forward to gleaning where our business is in the march for 3D, and the new Ultra-HD (or 4k).  Ultra-HD will make even the most brazen starlets double their make-up time.   Will it become the new 3D?    How will the movie industry react?   Darned if I know (yet). 

Douglas Trumball will be there at the Conference too.  Was there ever a Director who understood as well as he does the value of high technical quality?   The great combination of a man of art and science.    He has made a lifelong campaign for higher technical quality.    

Also does every (media storage) ‘cloud’ have a silver lining, or will the risks of letting someone else a long way away store your precious content be too great for our somewhat paranoid industry?  

So be back here on Tuesday.  If you are not there, we’ll be pacing the Hollywood Boulevard waiting.