SMPTE Announces Fellow Status For 12 Industry Leaders

SMPTE is to elevate 12 industry leaders to the status of SMPTE Fellow it has been announced.

The honour is conferred on individuals who have, through their proficiency and contributions to the industry, attained an outstanding rank among members of the Society. The new SMPTE Fellows will be honoured at the SMPTE 2017 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition (SMPTE 2017) at the Hollywood and Highland Center in Los Angeles in October.

The SMPTE 2017 Fellows are:

Daniel G. Baker, Chief Engineer at Tektronix
Daniel G. Baker was one of the key architects for the Tek 1700 Series Waveform Monitors as well as the digital signal and eye-pattern processing in Tektronix's WFM Series Serial-Digital Waveform Monitor products. In 1999, he received the Howard Vollum Award, Tektronix's highest engineering award, and became a Tektronix Fellow. He is a longtime member of both SMPTE and IEEE, providing technical support for numerous video standards including DVB and EBU.

David George Brooks, Senior Director of Technology Strategy in the Office of the CTO at Dolby Laboratories
David George Brooks has spent 40 years working on imaging for consumer electronics and professional broadcast, including managing the research programs for Snell (now SAM) in the UK and Thomson (now Technicolor) in France and Germany. He has led projects ranging from the design of the first HD MPEG-2 chipset to the algorithms behind the Alchemist HD standards converter. Brooks has played an active role in standards from the early 1980s.

Jean-Pierre Evain, Principal Project Manager at the European Broadcasting Union (EBU)
Jean-Pierre Evain joined the EBU's technology department in 1992 following six years in the research and development laboratories of France-Telecom (CCETT) and Deutsche Telekom. He has worked on set-top-box middleware, such as the digital video broadcasting (DVB) specifications of Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) and copy protection signaling, and chaired metadata activities for the TV-Anytime consortium that actively maintains specifications on behalf of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI).

David Leitner, Director, Producer, and Cinematographer at Leitner Studio
David Leitner is an active director, producer, writer, speaker, industry consultant, and Emmy-nominated director of photography with more than 80 credits in feature-length dramas and documentaries, including eight Sundance Film Festival premieres. He has served on the board of managers of the SMPTE New York Section.

David Long, Associate Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology
David Long is also this year's recipient of the SMPTE Journal Certificate of Merit. He joined the faculty of the School of Film and Animation at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in 2007 and is currently program chair and associate professor for the Motion Picture Science bachelor's program.

Charles S. Meyer, Chief Technology Officer at Grass Valley, a Belden Brand
Charles S. Meyer is responsible for advanced technology development for live production and networking products. He began his technology career in 1979 at Atari Inc., working at the company's research and development laboratory, code-named Cyan Engineering. Meyer went on to become president and CEO of NVision Inc.

Arjun Ramamurthy, Senior Vice President of Technology at Twentieth Century Fox
With more than 25 years of experience in postproduction, Arjun Ramamurthy is responsible for outlining and defining the next-generation workflow and technology utilized for feature and TV postproduction, digital content processing and downstream distribution, and digital archiving at Twentieth Century Fox.

Bill Redmann, Director of Standards and Immersive Media Technologies at Technicolor
Bill Redmann is a creative technologist and inventor who has designed social, interactive, and new media technologies for Technicolor, where he is a fellow and senior software engineer. He has been granted some 50 patents, is an active member of SMPTE, and has a master's degree in engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Edward Reuss, Consulting Engineer
Edward Reuss specializes in video, audio, and Wi-Fi networks, particularly for very-low-latency applications. Recently, he has consulted for GoPro, Intel, Clair Global, TiVo, Comcast, and Socionext. He is a co-chair of the SMPTE Technical Committee for Coding of Essence (TC-10E). Reuss is also a senior member of the IEEE and is involved with the IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN Working Group.

Peter Storer Jr., Executive Vice President at MediAnswers.TV
Peter Storer Jr. was born into broadcasting – both his father, Peter Storer Sr. and grandfather, George B. Storer, were major players in the industry. After attending Harvard College, he began his career in the network sales department of CBS. In 1986, he founded his broadcast software firm, StorerTV, which was sold to SintecMedia in 2012 – at which time Storer joined SMPTE Fellow Chris Lennon to launch MediAnswers. Storer is the chairman of the George B. Storer Foundation and a board member and IT chair of the Cirrus Owners and Pilots Association.

Peter Weitzel
Peter Weitzel joined the BBC Studio Capital Projects Department in 1978, serving in the projects function for most of his career and, in that role, mentoring more than 250 trainees. In 2012, Weitzel became the secretary/treasurer of the newly reformed SMPTE UK Section and supported it to become the third largest SMPTE Section.

Leigh Alvin Myles Whitcomb, Architect at Imagine Communications
Leigh Whitcomb joined Imagine Communications in 1991. He participates in the SMPTE Standards Community, as well as the Video Services Forum (VSF), and the Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS) committees, including active involvement on the SMPTE ST 2110 committee for Professional Media Over Managed IP, the SMPTE ST 2022 family of standards, and SMPTE ST 2059 Genlock Over IP. Whitcomb is the chair of the SMPTE Toronto Section. His other professional affiliations include IEEE and Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO).

The new SMPTE Fellows will be elevated formally on 24 October during the Fellows Luncheon at SMPTE 2017. Fellows also will be recognised at the SMPTE Annual Awards Gala on Thursday, 26 October at the Loews Hollywood Hotel's Hollywood Ballroom.

Image: SMPTE 2017 Fellows.

www.smpte.org