San Francisco
Home to many of the early developments in television, the San Francisco Bay area continues to innovate and enable the creation, production and dissemination of rich media.
The San Francisco section of SMPTE offers a local forum for membership to be informed and educated on the rapidly emerging developments in the technology of our industry.
The San Francisco section welcomes everyone to our meetings. Please check below for details of the next event.
The section thanks our local sponsors
nVIDIA
Blackmagic Designs
Bug ID
GPUs in Media and Entertainment
The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), a high speed-parallel floating point processor, is the engine that powers many media and entertainment applications from pre-visualization, acquisition and post production to distribution for live to air, over the top, and consumption. And since its inception in 1999 NVIDIA has shipped over a billion units.
Location
Media Archiving at the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress serves as both a reference source for our legislators, and the official keeper of our nation’s history. This history comes in many forms including printed, photographic, audio and video recordings, and digital files. And while each of these forms require different techniques for their archiving, it is the electronic formats which seems to require the most ongoing attention.
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Holiday Social
This is one you won’t want to miss!
Mark your calendar for Thursday December 12th and join the SMPTE San Francisco section for a chance of one of the best views in the South Bay as we go to the top of the Fairmont Plaza building in downtown San Jose for our Holiday Social at the Silicon Valley Capital Club.
Food and Beverages, mix and mingle – there might even be a speaker!
Spouses, partners and friends are invited.
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The Challenges and Rewards of Drone Aerial Videography
The advent of small, lightweight, HD quality cameras such as the Go-Pro have opened the field for remotely controlled aerial platforms. While the concept seems very attractive to a number of video producers (realtors spring to mind) the risks, liabilities, and local ordinances often prevent the project from happening.
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Reliability and Cost Considerations for Building a Video Archive System
For media companies large and small, digitizing and archiving an entire library of video assets can be a daunting task.
Archive solutions currently in use run from video tapes to spinning disks to external drives on shelves to computer tape systems. Determining the best solution for your needs can be confusing.
Finding the right solution is important. These video assets are at the core of a company's business, so taking care of them and providing a suitable long-term storage solution is critical.
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Does Convenience Trump Quality?
Today’s generation, bought up on iTunes, MP3 players, You Tube and satellite television may never have experienced the full fidelity of an uncompressed audio recording; but how can you get 3,000 songs in a smartphone without some compromise?
Join us for the July meeting of the San Francisco section of SMPTE, in conjunction with our colleagues from the local AES chapter, when, with a panel of audio experts, we debate the pros and cons of compression schemes for audio.
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Here comes ethernet AVB
TOPIC:
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Multi-Scopic Systems for Immersive Entertainment Experiences
I think it was ABC that coined the phrase ‘Up Close and Personal’ for their Olympic Games broadcasts, which seemingly defines the viewer’s experience of watching a live event on TV. By the nature of the television screen’s size and single point of focus of a lens, live event coverage is more of a point of view and less of the experience of being immersed into the event when attending.
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Amazon Web Services for Media & Entertainment
The cloud is everywhere! From e-commerce to storage, cloud services are becoming commonplace, driving businesses like Amazon and Netflix. Amazon Web Services is a leader in providing global cloud services for many different industry segments, including Media and Entertainment..
Bhavik Vyas will discuss current cloud services for Media and Entertainment and how a number of companies are using the cloud in their media business. Amazon Web Services will be announcing a number of new product offerings at NAB in April, and Bhavik will discuss these in detail as well.
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OLED Technology Update
Not every OLED is created equal
Everyone has been hearing about the new OLED TVs and monitors that are coming out or that are already in the market. But are they all the same? When you talk about OLED, are all of the manufacturers actually using the same technology? Actually no. OLED has a number of different implementations and can be used for a variety of applications beyond displays.
The talk will review the different OLED technologies and their uses. It will describe how these work and how they differ.
Location
HFR - What's new in the Visual Realm
San Francisco Section Meeting:
Tuesday 2/19/13 – 6:30PM to 9:30PM
Last December Warner Bros. released ‘The Hobbit: An unexpected Journey’, and almost immediately reports of viewers being made sick from the 48 fps used were being reported in the media. What followed seemed to be a debate on the use of ‘High Frame Rates’ by the movie industry, and Peter Jackson needing to defend its’ use for the movie.
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Holiday Social & "A brief history of the Second"
The San Francisco section presents
The 2012 Holiday Social
Our thanks go to Dolby for the use of their facilities in Sunnyvale for the 2012 Holiday Social.
They will also be showing off their Innovation Theatre, featuring 4K projection and Atmos sound system.
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Considerations in Cinema Sound Systems
Our Meeting this month follows on the heels of the SMPTE and AES conferences with a discussion of acoustical characteristics and calibration of cinema sound reproduction systems.
Together our speakers, Pete Soper of Meyer Sound and Brian Long of Skywalker Sound will present investigations into the interactions between cinema loudspeakers and screens.
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Are we CALM yet? - Audio Loudness and its Side Effects
Broadcasters and Content Providers alike are now painfully aware of the presence of the U.S. Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act (CALM Act) of 2010.
What may not be clear, however, is the impact of that Act, and the FCC Rules it spawned, on the daily operations of both content providers and their "downstream" customers, the TV stations and MVPDs. We will also discuss ad creation and handling of those by operators.
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Display Technologies for Film & Video Production
This is a joint meeting with SMPTE and the Bay Area chapter of SID
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Leave No Story Untold
The digital motion picture camera industry was turned upside down by yet another disruptive technology when the Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR camera hit the market in 2008. Featuring 24p HD recording with audio and the wide selection of Canon lenses, indie filmmakers could get a complete system for less than $5,000 with 35mm large sensor performance (for cinema like depth of field).
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Enhancing the Home Experience
There's good news for a television industry that's supposedly been dying since the 1950s. Despite the fact we can view videos on our desktops, laptops, iPads, iPhones, smart phones, most TV watching is still done at home. And, it's running at an all-time high, according to the Huffington Post. In total, a humongous 44 billion hours of television is watched per month! And that doesn’t even count the video games usage, the photos and expanded TV apps.
Location
Motion: Displays and Perception
This month's meeting is held in conjunction with the Bay Area chapter of SID and will be given by Scott Daly of Dolby Laboratories.
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