The marquee at the El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood said it all–with top billing going to the Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) and the Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers (SMPTE), marking in a sense the coming out party for the recently struck partnership between the two organizations as they teamed on the “Making Do With More” symposium, a day-long event (Monday, 10/20) held at the historic Hollywood cinema palace. The symposium came a day in advance of the SMPTE 2014 Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition and featured a mix of technology experts, filmmakers and post artists who delved into enriched image and sound technologies’ impact on content creation.
In a mini-keynote kicking off the SMPTE/HPA event, Leon Silverman, president of the HPA and general manager of the Digital Studio for the Walt Disney Studios, noted that it’s an exciting time for the post and engineering communities which have already ushered in a “new era of entertainment” across different platforms but there are still plenty of challenges, including continuing to evolve workflow in order to accommodate different image technologies and requirements.
Silverman quipped, “How many Ks are okay?” He then answered his own question, noting that 4K seems to be the current answer with 8K looming in the future.
However, a panel discussion later that morning–moderated by journalist Carolyn Giardina, a founder of the HPA Awards–underscored that while 4K is okay, it might not always be feasible. Director Joseph Kosinski noted that his sci-fi thriller Oblivion was shot on a Sony F65 at 4K but they didn’t have the time or money to finish the movie in 4K.
Fellow panelist, Steven Poster, ASC, chimed in that what we can do and what producers will pay for are two entirely different things. Poster is president of the International Cinematographers Guild.
Acknowledging that the audience in the El Capitan was largely comprised of engineers, Giardina asked her artisan panelists–which also included Steve Scott, VP of theatrical imaging and supervising digital colorist at Technicolor, and Ben Grossmann, a VFX Oscar winner for Hugo–what would top their wish lists in terms of the technological innovations the engineering community could create for them. Scott related that he is a painter and that when he paints, he can be intuitive and free flowing. He’d love to see improvement in input devices which would enable him to work the same way as a colorist instead of the current norm which has him having to paint red, then waiting a beat, then blue and so on. Waiting for technology to process is the barrier separating him from color grading as if he were painting.
Scott won an Emmy for his Visual Effects work, four HPA awards for his Digital Intermediate Color work, and an HPA Creativity and Innovation award for his work in advancing DI technology. His Digital Intermediate credits include: Gravity, Ironman (1, 2 & 3), Tree of Life, The Avengers, The Help, Men in Black 3, Julie & Julia, Captain America, Children of Men, Burn after Reading, Wanted, Sex & the City, The Illusionist, Hairspray, Night at the Museum 2, Finding Neverland, Jarhead, Lemony Snicket and The Wedding Crashers. Scott’s TV credits include: Angels in America, The Life & Death of Peter Sellers, Star Trek, The X-Files, The Simpsons, Roseanne and That 70s Show. And his compositing endeavors span Titanic, Apollo 13, True Lies, Interview with a Vampire, Independence Day, and numerous commercials and music videos.
Director Kosinski said his technological wish list is topped by a compact 3D camera. On his movie Tron: Legacy, Kosinski noted that the 3D camera deployed weighed 250 pounds and could not be carried by an operator.
Netflix POV
As for the SMPTE Technical Conference and Exhibition, which got underway Tuesday and runs through today (10/23), the keynote was delivered by Chris Fetner, Netflix’s director of global content partners operations.
Introducing and later interviewing Fetner on stage was Pat Griffis, SMPTE’s Education VP. Griffis said that SMPTE has ongoing efforts to connect Hollywood and Silicon Valley, a prime example of this being its Forum on Entertainment Technology in the Internet Age scheduled for May 2015 in Germany. In that vein, Griffis and Fetner noted that Netflix itself represents a marriage of Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
According to Fetner, Netflix now has some 50 million subscribers in more than 40 countries spanning 11 languages. This translates into a wide range of deliverables from content partners. And Fetner shared that seven percent of those files are problematic enough to yield a negative subscriber experience, far greater than when HDCAM Sr tapes were the norm with the local redelivery rate being a mere one percent.
To help rectify a redelivery rate of seven percent, Netflix has embraced SMPTE’s IMF file standard. “We hold our own vault in the IMF standard, he said, adding that the miniseries Marco Polo is slated to be the first delivered with IMF 2+ extended format. Content partners of Netflix are also starting to go the IMF route. Sony delivered its UHF version of Breaking Bad as IMF files, for example. Fetner noted that such shops as Technicolor, Deluxe, re:fine, Visual Data Media Services and Fotokem are all ready to provide these files in short order.
