Year-over-year attendance gains at the 2009 Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) Annual Tech Conference & Expo held October 27-29, 2009 in Hollywood, Calif. underscored the alignment and timeliness of the event’s general and technical session content with broadcasters’, filmmakers’, and new media ventures’ pursuit of more immersive entertainment approaches and new creative and revenue-generating opportunities.
In a year when tough global economic conditions impacted attendance at many industry events and tradeshows, overall registration for the 2009 SMPTE Conference — one of the premier events in the media content and motion-imaging industries — was up by approximately 7 percent over the 2008 event.
“The feedback we have received regarding this year’s Conference was extremely positive – attendees appreciated our focus on practical application of advanced technologies to help drive more revenue and productivity while reducing capital expenses,” said Ken Fuller, SMPTE President. “It was the best SMPTE Conference in years – and we look forward to exceeding this standard in 2010.”
Event Focused on 3D, Securing New Opportunities in the New Media Era
The 2009 SMPTE conference exemplified SMPTE’s ongoing leadership in providing education and information about technologies – such as high definition (HD) and increasingly 3D — that are critical to expanding industry revenue-generating opportunities and also are enhancing the viewer experience.
This year’s event featured a strong line up of expert speakers and rich content, ranging from the accelerated evolution and practical application of 3D in movies and home entertainment, HD news gathering, and file-based production to service-oriented architecture. Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) is an IT-based technology that integrates services such as transcoding, editing, moving files through a storage hierarchy, and back-office systems – and that interoperates through messaging middleware. . For more information about SMPTE, please visit www.smpte.org.
SMPTE also made 3D a main focus at the Conference, including 3D-related technical sessions and panel discussions led by experts from media leaders such as Dolby Labs, FOX Network, DTS, and RealD – and one focused on the multi-view 3D technology required to support glasses-free displays and viewing.
In 2009, as many films were released in 3D as in the combined prior five years – and two times the number of 2009 releases are expected in 2010, according to Rob Engle, Sony Pictures Imageworks’ award-winning 3D artist and technical expert.
Noting that a critical convergence of good digital content creation and 3D projection systems has occurred, Engle said “we don’t want another wave of 3D – we want to nurture this medium and see how far we can take it.” He commented that the next significant opportunity associated with rapidly evolving 3D technologies will be driven by TV services to the home, including video gaming and live sports events.
2009 SMPTE Conference Garners Broad Motion Imaging Industry Support
The 2009 Conference and Expo also included a special reception and a screening of Martin Scorsese’s remarkable restoration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) sponsored by Warner Bros. on the studio’s lot.
“We were honored and very appreciative to have the generous support of Warner Bros., Sony, and the other media and entertainment technology leaders involved with this year’s Conference,” said Fuller.
Other sponsors of the 2009 SMPTE Conference included Aja Video Systems, AZCAR, Cinegy, Deluxe, Disney, Ensemble, For-A Corporation of America, FOX, Into.Pix, Mann Theatres, Miranda Technology, MultiDyne Video & Fiber Optic Systems, myeyemedia Technical Services, Photo Research, Inc., RealD, Sarnoff Corporation, Snell & Wilcox, Sony, Verance, and Video Clarity.
The SMPTE Conference also featured a special seminar – Advanced Media Workflows and MXF – produced by the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA). .
About the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers
The Oscar® Award-winning and Emmy® Award-winning Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) is the leading technical society for the motion-imaging industry. As an internationally recognized and accredited standards-setting body, SMPTE develops standards, recommended practices and guidelines, and spearheads educational activities to advance engineering and moving imagery. Since its founding in 1916, the Society has established close to 600 standards, including the physical dimensions of 35mm film and the SMPTE-time code. More recently, it crafted the Digital Cinema Standards, which paved the way for digital movie theaters. Underscoring SMPTE’s leadership in technology and standards development, the Society received a prestigious technical Emmy® Award in January of 2009 for its work in the development of the MXF and GXF file formats. Headquartered in New York, SMPTE is comprised of engineers and other technical specialists, IT, and new media professionals, filmmakers, manufacturers, educators, and consultants in more than 65 countries. They are joined at SMPTE by more than 200 sponsoring corporations, principal players in content creation, production, and delivery for all platforms and in entertainment hardware and software. www.smpte.org.
About the Advanced Media Workflow Association
The Advanced Media Workflow Association is an open, community-driven forum focused on the creation of timely, innovative, business-driven specifications and technologies for networked media workflows. www.amwa.tv
