Program For SMPTE 2021 ATC Unveiled

SMPTE® has introduced the program for the SMPTE 2021 Annual Technical Conference (SMPTE 2021 ATC), a virtual event with half-day sessions running over six days from 9-11 November and 16-18 November.

Through technical sessions, networking and social events, interactive discussions, and keynote presentations, SMPTE 2021 ATC participants will gain access to the people, knowledge, and perspectives driving the ongoing evolution of media and entertainment.

"As you delve into this year's program, you get a powerful sense of the radical and rapid change taking place across our industry," said Michael Zink, education vice president at SMPTE. "Not so many years ago, some of these session topics simply didn't exist. We're exploring exciting new ways of storytelling and new ways of working — and it's a rare opportunity to see, through the eyes of industry leaders, where we'll go next."

SMPTE 2021 ATC will launch on Nov. 9 with a keynote presentation by Andreas "Andi" Gall, founder and CEO of Human-Centric-Innovators GmbH. Renowned for his passion for bringing new technological concepts to life during his time as CIO at Red Bull Media House, he will be the first of several notable experts presenting their groundbreaking work in the technologies shaping the media and entertainment industry. The day will also include a series of technical sessions on proxy workflows for secure remote production, multicamera live production in a virtual environment, generalized psychovisual preprocessing for video encoding, ATSC 3.0 as a use case for public safety communications, calibrating LED fixtures and video walls to the camera's chroma signal, and 360 8K viewport-independent VR. A brief networking session will provide a break midway through the sessions, and the day will conclude with a social event.

Day two will start with a program on sustainability — concrete actions and technology solutions addressing climate change and how to implement them within media workflows — and then shift to a skills-oriented presentation on lighting accurately for people of color in movies and TV. During a featured session, Michelle Munson will share her knowledge on the emergence of nonfungible tokens (NFTs), what it means for video engineers in particular, and how a new content blockchain protocol is expected to back premium video experiences minted as NFTs. Munson will also relate her experience launching a gamified video NFT marketplace for a mainstream consumer audience. The day will conclude with the annual induction ceremony of the new class of SMPTE Fellows, which is open to all attendees.

On the third day of SMPTE 2021 ATC, sessions will be hosted on an APAC-friendly schedule starting at 8 a.m. JST on Nov. 12 (6 p.m. EST on Nov. 11), with a networking break halfway through. Session topics include infrastructure as code at CBC/Radio-Canada's media-over-IP data center, 5G streaming and broadcast for delivery of DASH/HLS services, an 8K camera system with multiplane phase-detection autofocus, and a production system for content with varying aspect ratios.

After a long weekend break, SMPTE 2021 ATC will get rolling once again on Tuesday, Nov. 16. The day's sessions will focus on topics including a software-defined, ultra-low-latency video-over-IP system with compression; the performance of low-latency DASH/CMAF and low-latency HLS streaming systems; real-time conversational virtual characters; using biometric signals to improve storytelling; a new 2/3-inch CMOS imager with 9.5Mpix that combines charge-domain global shutter operation with exceptional high-speed capability; and motion picture print stock design in the post-film era. The day will close with a SMPTE Section mixer.

The next day, Nov. 17, will feature two sessions that focus first on virtual production best practices and workflows, and then how to tackle remaining technical challenges from merging games culture and film culture to solving complex spatialization and image processing. In the following hour, the panel assembled in August for the SMPTE+ Media in the Cloud event will reconvene to offer a no-nonsense look at technical challenges faced by those moving to the cloud and everything that implies and continue the discussion from the SMPTE+ session. The SMPTE Annual Membership Meeting will take place during the final hour of the day's programming.

The final day of SMPTE 2021 ATC will feature three technical sessions, which will address topics including the impact of tighter NIC/GPU integration on media processing performance, the RTP payload format for JPEG XS, the problem with timecode, dynamic resource allocation of live video compression on a Kubernetes cluster, perceptual modeling and machine learning approaches for banding detection, and hue-preserving color transforms for LED wall virtual production workflows. The event will conclude with a virtual Oktoberfest!

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