SMPTE Conference To Feature In-Depth Sessions

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), has announced that the SMPTE 2014 Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition (SMPTE 2014), Oct. 20-23 in Hollywood, California, will feature in-depth sessions including "Networked Media in the Facility", "File-Based Workflows", "Cloud Case Studies", and "Asset Management".

Presented in multiple parts, each session will provide an exceptionally rich perspective on how specific technical advances are influencing the motion-imaging industries.
"Engineering leaders and high-level business professionals from broadcast, cinema, and IT view the SMPTE annual conference as a unique opportunity to examine and discuss the technologies and trends shaping our industries," said Paul Chapman, SMPTE 2014 program chair and senior vice president of technology at FotoKem. "While SMPTE 2014 sessions address a wide range of important topics, we've created in-depth sessions that apply a tremendous wealth of expertise to specific topic areas that are making a profound impact on how content is created."
"We are excited to launch the SMPTE 2014 program with an opening keynote by Chris Fetner, director of global content partners operations at Netflix," added Pat Griffis, SMPTE education vice president and executive director of technology strategy in the office of the CTO at Dolby Laboratories. "Clearly, Netflix has been a disrupter in the industry, and we hope to learn what is shaping the company's technology decision-making during Chris' talk."
Following Fetner's keynote, "Networked Media in the Facility" will focus on the use of packetized methods to move media and metadata in real-time over networks. The first part of this session will address audio video bridging (AVB) standards, along with Internet protocol (IP) networks in the live broadcast plant, in live production, and in contribution broadcasting. The second part will cover level-setting concepts of the networked media ecosystem, the suitability of commodity Ethernet switches for uncompressed video, and the workflows and infrastructure enabling next-generation postproduction. The session's final part will include insight about network-delivered references, the generation of SMPTE standards-based synchronous video signals using just current time, and ensuring optimal precision time protocol (PTP) design and performance across large networks.
"File-Based Workflows" will report on the findings of the Joint Task Force on File Formats and Media Interoperability in addressing issues associated with the exchange of professional media between organizations.— The Joint Task Force is sponsored by the North American Broadcasters Association (NABA), Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA), SMPTE, International Association of Broadcast Manufacturers (IABM), American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A's), and Association of National Advertisers (ANA), with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) participating as an observer.
The session will continue with a presentation summarizing the business benefits of frame-rate manipulation and the automation of closed-captioning, timing, and language verification, concluding with a summary of specific bandwidth savings and quality improvements offered by High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) compared with other means used for contribution of interlaced content. Part two of the session picks up with a discussion on media identity and how important it is to maintain when content exists simultaneously within multiple domains, followed by presentations covering the challenges associated with asset management and delivery of assets to any platform and all devices utilizing a single workflow. This session wraps up with a presentation outlining the impact of remote content access on both production and delivery to the second screen.
"Cloud Case Studies" will explore a wide range of real-world implementations of cloud-based services, investigating the important topics of integration, deployment, and security. The session launches with a look at the benefits now being realized with the use of purpose-built private cloud solutions, and then moves on to the practical use of the cloud — in this case for a high-profile sports event — to enable end-to-end live streaming to the second screen. Two further panelists will discuss, from different perspectives, concerns over and strategies for securing media content and applications in the cloud.
The "Asset Management" session begins with the results from an industry survey of digital storage in professional media and entertainment and continues with a presentation on how the use of linear tape-open (LTO) tape with linear tape file system (LTFS) technology may accelerate 4K workflows. Experts from Fraunhofer IIS will introduce the concept of a file-delivery ecosystem that builds on the scalability of certain media formats and the "substitution strategy" that was introduced at SMPTE 2012, and a subsequent presentation will describe a holistic approach to digital preservation, from writing and storage to retrieval of digital data. The second part of this session begins with a presentation on media archiving, standards, and the Library of Congress. A subsequent presentation will examine tools based on SMPTE's recently published standard Archive eXchange Format (AXF) and application from the set through production workflows, followed by a presentation that explores significant advances in film and video digitization and open standards-based solutions for long-term archiving and preservation.

www.smpte.org

(CD)