June 16, 2015, SMPTE Entertainment Technology in the Internet Age, Stanford, CA—Neil Hunt from Netflix talked about a bifurcation in trends that will affect all aspects of video content. Video is moving towards higher quality; bigger, brighter, and better, while also going to mobile devices, which are smaller, faster, and cheaper. Netflix is adding about100…
January 2015, The new Common Core guidelines for math and science seem to be flawed. At the middle school levels, the guidelines call for students to show mastery of the content by being able to prove that a digital representation is the best one. This contention might be true if you are talking bit-level accuracy…
October 10. 2014, Audio Engineering Society Convention, Los Angeles—A panel of experts from standards organizations and industry considered the issues of matching audio with the emerging 4k and 8k displays. Fred Willard from Univision moderated the panel, and panelists were Skip Pizzi from NAB, Robert Blerdt from Fraunhofer, Jeff Riedmiller from Dolby, Tim Carrol from…
October 9, 2014, Audio Engineering Society Convention, Los Angeles—Alan Parsons provided insights, from his experiences in producing and engineering records, on the current and future directions of the music and recording industries. The talk covered a wide range of topics. The sound engineers in AES can appreciate the increasing number of products that are available….
June 24, 2014, Creative Storage Conference, Culver City, CA—Alex Grossman from Quantum described the requirements for cloud-based workflows. The industry is one of constant change that is looking for consistent steps in production. new camera formats, collaboration, and more tools are all increasing workflow complexity and making the older file-based flows incompatible with the newest…
June 2014, Santa Clara, CA—Deepak Das from VisualOn provided background on the company and their products. They started with software codecs for device manufacturers and ODMs, focusing on H.264 type software. As mobile devices became media platforms, they found that the platforms were becoming highly fragmented across the devices and in the number of protocols…
April 8, 2013, National Association of Broadcasters, Las Vegas—Some film experts demonstrated some movie clips and explained why a film or digital style worked for that shot. Carol Littleton from Industrial Light and Magic showed the chase scene from “ET” where the boys and ET eventually fly away from the authorities. In ’82 when this…
April 9, 2013, National Association of Broadcasters, Las Vegas—We talked with Ian Valentine from Tektronix about their latest releases. Tek has been around the broadcast industry for a long time, so their announcements tend to be important technology statements. The evolving industry standards for interfaces and file formats need tool for checking infrastructure. At the…
April 6, 2013, National Association of Broadcasters, Las Vegas—A panel moderated by Tom Scott from OnStream Media considered the issues for more immersive audio. Panel members included Jeff Levison from Iosono, Stuart Bowling from Dolby Labs, Wilfried Van Baelen from Auro Technologies, John Kellogg from DTS, and Kimio Hamasaki from NHK. The audio industry has…
March 20, 2013, GPU Technology Conference, San Jose, CA—Sam Blackman from Elemental described the work involved that has changed sports content delivery. The evolution of hardware and software has enabled technology innovation. The major trends in video are towards proliferation of channels and platforms. The emergence of mobile platforms like phones and tablets draws more…