Roughly 400 attendees are expected at the Fall SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) Conference and Exhibition, which returns to the Big Apple, Nov. 9-12 at the New York Hilton, with seminars and exhibitions designed to help members make important decisions as the industry proceeds forward into the digital realm.
The event will include a keynote with a New York state of mind, which will be delivered by Louis Madigan, executive VP of Steiner Studios, Brooklyn.
New Yorker Madigan started a computer networking and Internet access company in ’96 at the Navy Yard with a group of friends he made while attending Brooklyn College. Soon after, he embarked on the mission of transforming the Navy Yard into a film and television production facility.
Later, as then president of New York Studios, Madigan raised more than $2.4 million to transform a preliminary idea into a business plan. In ’99, Madigan closed a $120 million dollar development deal with Douglas C. Steiner to build the studio at the Navy Yard. Working as part of the Steiner’s development team, he worked to realize Steiner Studios, which opened for business in November ’04 and has since been the home for such productions as The Producers, Inside Man, Fur, The Hoax, and Across the Universe. The Steiner Studio’s 300,000-square-foot building sits on 15 acres at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and was recently awarded the 2005 Building Brooklyn Award for best new industrial building.
During his SMPTE keynote, Madigan plans to discuss the transformation of the New York production industry, addressing topics such as new infrastructure and tax incentives.
DIGITAL CINEMA
SMPTE will also include significant participation from the Hollywood community. The conference kicks off with an all-day seminar on digital cinema, prepared in light of the accelerating advances in technology and toward standardization in the space.
The day will begin with a presentation on the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) specification, which is a recommendation based on a consensus of the major studios on all that should constitute an end-to-end digital cinema system. Broader exploration of the topic will include the impact on postproduction and business, with featured speakers such as John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO), who will outline NATO’s present thinking on a rollout model for digital cinema; and Glenn Kennel of Texas Instruments, who will discuss color processing and postproduction.
SMPTE president Ed Hobson, who is VP of bicoastal National TeleConsultants, noted that this program ties in with the efforts of SMPTE’s DC28 committee, which is “well on its way” to setting SMPTE standards for digital cnema–something he believes will help a transition to move forward.
“This will be the first opportunity [for the Society] to discuss the current state of digital cinema since the DCI completed its work [last July],” said SMPTE VP of conferences Ken Fuller, who is VP of technology at Santa Monica-headquartered Ascent Media Group (parent of such entities as Company 3, Santa Monica and New York; and R!OT, Santa Monica, New York and Atlanta). “It will also be the beginning of discussions on proposed theatre roll-out plans. Management of color processing and postproduction as well as security systems will be discussed.”
While DCI-participants have been presenting their specification at recent industry events such as IBC (Amsterdam) and Showeast (Orlando, Fla.), this time the New York community can get a first-hand look. “I will be attending the digital cinema seminar,” said Bill Topazio, director of engineering at R!OT Manhattan. “This is a perfect time to see it on the East Coast.”
Topazio shared other points of interest. “I will be focusing on papers devoted to digital cinema acquisition,” he related. “We are just starting to see some interest in using digital acquisition such as [Thomson’s Grass Valley] Viper and Dalsa [Origin].”
In fact, SMPTE will offer a half-day track on “Digital Imaging Production–New Large Sensor Systems,” which will examine a variety of larger 35mm single-sensor digital systems that have recently arrived. The proposed workflow of some of these systems will be examined. Presenters will include speakers from Thomson’s Grass Valley, ARRI, Dalsa and Panavision–the latter’s John Galt will pose the question “If Film is Dead, is Video Far Behind?”
“At the other end of the chain, I’d like to see what new display technology has to offer and what the trends are,” Topazio related. “Of all areas of production, this one seems to stir up the most emotion. How will home displays compare to cinema displays and how do we evolve our postproduction plants to accommodate and accurately reflect these?”
To this end, another half-day track is devoted to “Display Technologies,” and will feature speakers from the likes of Sony, Panasonic and JVC.
It should also be noted that for more on the technology behind Avid’s new Unity ISIS system (see story, p. 1), one can attend “The Future of Shared Storage”, delivered by Tewksbury, Mass.–based Avid Technology’s CTO Mike Rockwell.
The exhibition floor will include product from Sony, Thomson’s Grass Valley, SGI and Snell & Wilcox. “At the exhibits I’ll be looking primarily at displays and monitoring tools,” Topazio said. “The classic monitoring devices used in post are no longer adequate for the variety of formats we encounter.”
