SMPTE Members Honored

SMPTE Fellow Andy Setos received the Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award, Wednesday night during the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ 2011 Engineering Awards.

He received a standing ovation as he accepted the award, appropriately named after one of SMPTE’s founders. Setos thanked the Academy, its Engineering Committee, friends and colleagues.

He summed up: “Recently I had a couple of reporters ask me, of all the things I did, which one was my favorite. Was it doing MTV? Giving reality to David Hill’s desire to put the score on the screen? Was it HDTV, or Blu-ray, or Digital Cinema? No, none of those. My most favorite are the things that I will be doing next.”

This week during SMPTE, Setos shared his views on several conference topics:

“Doing live sports with 3D is awfully challenging. I think a lot of good work has been done. But it is very hard; I don’t think anybody has really got the magic formula that is going to make it universal, yet.”

“I think from a home standpoint, until 3D becomes glasses free—which is technical practical and there is work going on, but it has not matured yet to be a product for group viewing—there is going to be a limit to how much (3D) content people can watch.

"Once we get past glasses, I think things will get more prolific.”

"I think second screen is going to become very interesting. We tried to do this a long time ago, the challenge was inventing the second screen. … But now, second screens are practical. And that is an opportunity. The Internet can do some things really well, but it can’t do real time, high value content—not when it’s popular. It was never intended for that.

“The strength of Internet protocol is breath and choice. The strength of reserve bandwidth systems is that they can provide rich, high value imagery and sound to as many people as are out there connected.

Thursday evening, SMPTE will present its Honors and Awards ceremony.

Dr. Edwin Catmull will receive the SMPTE Progress Medal, Graeme Ferguson and Roman Kroitor will be awarded the John Grierson International Gold Medal, Joshua Pines will receive the Technicolor/Herbert T. Kalmus Medal, Max Bell will accept the Samuel L. Warner Memorial Medal, Bruce Devlin will be awarded the David Sarnoff Medal, Linda J. Brown will receive the Kodak Educational Award, and Douglas Trumbull will accept the SMPTE Presidential Proclamation.

The SMPTE Journal Award will be presented to Regunathan Radhakrishnan and Kent B. Terry for their article, "Detection and Correction of Lip-Sync Errors Using Audio and Video Fingerprints.” The SMPTE Journal Certificate of Merit will be awarded to Sean McCarthy for the article, "A Biological Framework for Perceptual Video Processing and Compression” and to David Wood for the article "Understanding Stereoscopic Television and Its Challenges.”

David Horowitz will receive a Citation for Outstanding Service to the Society, and Michael A. Dolan has earned the Excellence in Standards Award.

Catmull, Todd Brunhoff, Gary Demos, Michael Karagosian  and Paul Michael Stechly were named SMPTE Fellows.

Alexander Michael Pagliaro, a senior at Rochester Institute of Technology, was awarded the Louis Wolf Memorial Scholarship.