As we enter the mid-year months of 2021, life is slowly returning to “normal,” at least here in the northeast United States. Many mask mandates have been lifted, and people are starting to meet with family and friends in social settings that we could never have imagined just a few months ago. I am thrilled that we can now go to restaurants and the movies.
This year of pandemic living has presented many things to us—first, the notion of a contract with your network, a contract for social well-being. We wore masks and kept our social distance to protect each other from this ravaging virus. As a result, we learned to consider others, perhaps much more than we would have done in “normal” times. Read more from Barbara Lange.
Call for Papers
2021 ATC Now Open!
The virtual conference, which begins 9 Nov., will feature technical paper presentations as well as SMPTE Storytellers, roundtables, and networking events. Make your mark at the world's premier peer-reviewed forum for the exploration of media and entertainment technology! See Submission Guidelines
Draft Manuscripts due 23 August
Final Manuscripts and Presentations due 4 October
A panel of experts will discuss the critical importance of standards in the motion picture and television industry.
SMPTE Hollywood will host a panel of experts for a discussion on the critical importance of standards in the motion picture and television industry. Providing the technical framework upon which the industry depends, standards are central to SMPTE’s mission—and yet people are often unsure of what the term means. Register now
Update from the Standards Vice President
Is my IP network working? Although this seems to be a simple question, it is really difficult to define what working actually means. One approach is to build a model for a working system and then make measurements on the real system to see whether it behaves as expected. In a new technology area like SMPTE ST 2110 and ST 2059 (PTP—Precision Time Protocol), there are likely to be differences between reality and the model.
Pierre-Anthony Lemieux (Sandflow Consulting), and Valentin Noël and Marc-Antoine Arnaud (MediaIO) are collaborating on an open source effort to add SMPTE's own Interoperable Master Format (IMF) as an input format to FFMPEG. The idea is to make it easy to transcode from IMF to other formats like MP4/HLS/DASH/MXF/Quicktime etc. While the repo is currently organized as a fork, the objective is to ultimately merge the work back into FFMPEG mainline sometime in fall 2021
Precision Time Protocol for Synchronization in Broadcast-Over-IP
In every broadcasting application, all devices must exchange media data continuously while remaining tightly synchronized with each other at all times. That’s why, as broadcasting facilities worldwide make the transition from serial digital interface (SDI) to partial or complete reliance on IP technology, accurate and reliable time transfer over Ethernet has become key. In the July issue of the SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal, authors Nikolaus Kerö and Thomas Kernen present an in-depth discussion of the challenges in their paper, “A Multipronged Approach to Effectively Secure SMPTE ST 2059 Time Transfer.” Read the July issue