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TODAY'S TOP STORIES - 10.27.16

SMPTE's Centennial Hall Offers View of Past, Present and Future
Centennial Hall highlights the organization's continued focus on innovation and collaboration. 
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SMPTE: Conjuring the Virtual Media Facility
To cloud or not to cloud… live 
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SMPTE: How Can You Ensure an Effective VR/AR Experience?
VR/AR sessions focused primarily on strategies to ensure end users a high-quality consumer experience 
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TODAY'S TOP STORIES - 10.26.16 

SMPTE Keynote Explores the Past and Promising Future of Film and Television
Trumbull and Seidel's opening keynote offered perspective, a look at processes and archival video of many pivotal moments in imaging innovation. 
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IP Standards, APIs and Moore’s Law 
Media transport infrastructure standards are mashing up the best of the old and the new
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Color Management: Is What You See What You Get?
Color management sessions examined some of the challenges content creators will face, both from technical and creative perspectives
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TODAY'S TOP STORIES - 10.25.16

The Digital Archive of the Future: What Will Be Involved?
Monday's opening sessions began with a challenging keynote from Daniel Teruggi.
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SMPTE: Victoria Alonso —Stopping Traffic, Stepping Up, Speaking Out
Alonso spoke during the Women in Technology Luncheon about the challenges of being a female working in Hollywood.
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SMPTE Bestowed Honors and Awards
With a Roaring ’20s theme, a speakeasy and a cabaret, SMPTE presented the 2016 Honors & Awards after its red carpet and dinner reception last night. 
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Annie Chang of Walt Disney moderated a broad panel on this hot button topic. For many attendees HDR and wide-color gamut are more important than 4K resolution to image quality -- but they have received much less attention in the media and from consumers. Matthew Goldman, from Ericsson, started us off by defining HDR -- first as one of the five key technologies of UltraHD. However, he said many people use HDR (or HDR+) to mean High Dynamic Range plus Wide Color Gamut (WGC), and 10-bit sampling. Whichever of these definitions is used, he wanted to make it clear that it was not resolution dependent, and specifically does not require 4K resolution. That's particularly important in mobile where small screens might still be able to take advantage of HDR. While it might go without saying, Goldman also reiterated that HDR doesn't mean a brighter display -- it means more contrast. Using charts of color gamuts for both HD (Rec 709) & UltraHD (Rec. 2020) Goldman demonstrated that the combination of HDR & WGC were closely-linked in creating a better image.

Michael Zink, from Warner Bros., walked us through an analysis of the movie LEGO in HDR, and showed that high light levels were only used ina small number of frames, and only for certain highlights. So the HDR version of the movie wasn't overall significantly brighter than the SDR version.

Steven Robertson, Google software engineer, pointed out that content streamed to computers and devices have some major advantages in adapting to new technologies. As devices happen to come with higher-resolution or wider-gamut displays the content can be automatically adapted as it is delivered. This is particularly relevant since many of the latest phones have very similar quality displays to the high-end TVs. Robin Atkins, from Dolby Labs, agreed with Roberson, and said they have found that Vudu and other OTT services were able to incorporate new technologies very rapidly since they had end to end control over their content delivery.

Panelists agreed that another challenge was viewing conditions, both optimizing them, and using metadata to adapt the content stream to adapt to them where it is possible to determine what they are. Atkins also walked us through how dynamic (content-dependent) metadata can be used to assist in mapping the color volume (gamut and tone) of the input scene to particular displays. For example, some scenes might be designed to be dark (perhaps a night-time scene), and shouldn't be mapped into a more typical rendering, while others (perhaps a discussion between characters where facial expressions are important) might be designed to always be easily viewable and should be remapped. There are already over 50 titles available for streaming that use Dolby Vision's "Smart Content" dynamic metadata.

Switching from video to audio, Sunil Bharitkar from HP led a panel on the challenges and future direction of audio as part of entertainment. Underlying the changes is a massive upgrade in the delivery technologies for audio, from VHS to DVD and now potentially very-high-bandwidth internet connections. The devices used to play the content has also improved in general, from mono to stereo, to mutlichannel. Mobile devices were a step backwards in many cases, but even those now have access to fairly-high quality audio reproduction. VR represents the next frontier, as spatial audio is a key component of realistic immersive experiences. 

Robert Fisher, Warner Brothers, traced the history of high-quality sound production from studio to cinema, and explained how they have been further extending their production pipeline to accommodate streaming and mobile devices. He stressed that WB wants to ensure that the tradition of excellent sound capture and production is maintained going forward, and called on the industry to help make that happen. As part of this effort, WB has been working with Dolby and others to create the right tools to create a high-quality remix for binaural headphones. Fisher reported that the early results of the new binaural re-mixing technology have been very impressive.

Tim Carroll, Dolby Labs, said there has been great progress in codec quality over the last year, but end-to-end system reproduction remains a problem, as distribution pipelines and players have such a wide range. Just because something sounds good in multi-channel theater audio doesn't automatically mean that it is the right mix for a pair of mobile headphones. This tied-in well with Fisher's call for doing binaural-specific remixes of content.

Deep Sen, Qualcomm, took the audience through how scene-based audio works, and why it is particularly important for VR. In particular, VR drives both a requirement for a true 3D sound field, and to be able to rotate that sound field in response to head movements. Object-based capture is very difficult in these environments, as there can be many sound sources, and they can also be moving. Scene-based Audio is a little like light field capture for video -- it includes sound pressure measurements based on space and time. A specialized array of microphones that captures sound from every direction is used, and the result is mixed with any desired object-based audio sources. Qualcomm helps support the production of scene-based audio by providing plugins for ProTools. The output can be rendered in MPEG-H format for use with VR. To support head tracking the final result also has to be dynamically rotated in real time -- with less than 50ms latency -- to support motion and head tracking. That is in addition to the initial rendering through a standard or personalized HRTF (Head Response Transfer Function). 

Phil Hilmes, Amazon Lab 126, addressed the progress and challenges of playing content in a consumer environment. Those range from synchronization across multiple devices and rooms -- for both audio and video, as well as with sensor and camera data. While there are vendor-specific solutions like Sonos's sound synchronization, Hilmes called for an industry standards effort so that a variety of devices from different vendors can all be synchronized with the user's needs. Sensor input can also be used to help optimize and personalize the audio experience -- especially if it can be standardized and shared. 

The panel discussed that arrays of simple devices, like the Echo, that could be calibrated, synced, and used to render a sound field, might be an alternative to more-traditional fixed -- and often hard to setup correctly -- multi-channel speaker arrays. Multiple sound bars used in combination was also discussed as an option.

After opening remarks from SMPTE's Executive Director Barbara Lange and Pat Griffis, Tom Coughlin kicked off Day 2 of ETCA 2016 with an all-star panel focused on how media experiences can be truly personalized. Jim Burger started by educating us on the legal issues involved, especially the impact of FCC decisions. Burger presented the FCC's rulemaking as an attempt to apply facility-centric rules typically used to regulate cable providers to the new, non-facility-based, OTT (Over The Top -- e.g. Internet-based) providers. This would give OTT providers access to content, like over the air broadcasts, they don't have currently. However, Burger explained that key OTT players like Netflix and those represented by the CTA believe the obligations outweigh any possible benefits. Separately, the FCC has proposed rules that would open up the STB (Set Top Box) market to provide more competition and more choice for consumers. This has been a long time coming, starting with 1994 legislation that called for consumer options. Burger lauded the goals of the effort, but relayed industry skepticism that the actual rules would achieve the desired result without excessive or inappropriate government regulations. He concluded with a quick update on the recent cable industry counter-proposal for HTML5-based video apps, although keeping full control over the interface, and potentially not allowing the recording of content. Erik Ramberg of Ericsson said that outside the US, open standards were very common for set top boxes, and speculated that the STB rental model common in the US was partially responsible. Mike Dolan, consultant to the entertainment industry, spoke about how future versions of ATSC would be able to incorporate various content streams, including all of OTT, OTA, STB-baed, and potentially even wireless delivery integrated into one consumer device for the home.

Milo Medin from Google stressed the importance of open standards, and said he was pleased to see at least some movement on this topic from the cable industry -- and felt that opening up the set top boxes would be good over the long term for the cable industry. He also echoed what we have heard throughout the conference -- that the wide-availability of consumer-friendly content creation tools and user-contributed content platforms like YouTube and Facebook has democratized entertainment content (although ironically, those platforms themselves become well-compensated gatekeepers, as we've seen recently with concerns over Facebook's possibly playing favorites). Tim Baharin brought a tech industry perspective to the discussion, stressing the potential for both 360-video and Virtual Reality to up-end the entire personal entertainment experience. He also pointed out that from his research with Millenials they are using a streaming box plus a simple OTA antenna to replace more-traditional, and more-expensive, cable plans.