As Celluloid Junkie gets its nomination list on for this years Top Women in Global Cinema 2019 recognition fest, (https://celluloidjunkie.com/wire/nominations-open-for-celluloid-junkies-top-women-in-global-cinema-2019/), and coming off of another year that SMPTE pushes hard on the technical side of Women in Cinema, we note an interesting article on the subject.

If you think women in tech is just a pipeline problem, you haven’t been paying attention comes in strong with data data data about ‘natural bias’ (among other problems) and some good news in the end. …and things that can be done more better in the future.

As Celluloid Junkie gets its nomination list on for this years Top Women in Global Cinema 2019 recognition fest, (https://celluloidjunkie.com/wire/nominations-open-for-celluloid-junkies-top-women-in-global-cinema-2019/), and coming off of another year that SMPTE pushes hard on the technical side of Women in Cinema, we note an interesting article on the subject.

If you think women in tech is just a pipeline problem, you haven’t been paying attention comes in strong with data data data about ‘natural bias’ (among other problems) and some good news in the end. …and things that can be done more better in the future.

Originally Posted at: Celluloid Junkie: Tech Potential and Promise of CinemaCon 2017

And to complete the system implications for the other 50% of the movie experience, it hadn’t yet become obvious to everyone that harmonizing and making interoperable 3 companies worth of Higher Definition Object-based sound formats – under the clever phrase of Immersive Audio – wasn’t going to make the Single Master Dreams of the Studios at all simple or quick either.

So it isn’t surprising that there would be no easy decisions for the modern exhibitor who wants to create the Absolute best of all Premium Experiences for their audience, then or even now. They were given to believe that laser-lit projectors would not only save money but possibly even look appreciably better, but neither of those potentials had really been proven and wouldn’t be for a couple of years. The obvious choice of “absolutely better” – DolbyVision – was still a year from being announced. Even now it isn’t broadly available – there are 86 installations as of this CinemaCon opening – nor is everyone invited to participate if it were. It seems difficult to believe that it was only 2 years ago, at CinemaCon 2015, that Dolby launched the dual technology Dolby Cinema presentation system that drew actual gasps from the jaded and appreciative crowds when that circle went brighter and everything else went 6 decimal places to the left.

Even knowing what we know now, there is no clear answer in cinema exhibition for off-the-rack, non-proprietary systems that give discernible methods and reasons to upgrade. If we presume that it will be years before there are multiple hundreds of DolbyVision systems and that IMAX maintains their numbers, that leaves 165,000 other cinema screens with a choice…and are left to define the higher quality niche that they need to fill and to market.

That is Part One, the background of the search that CinemaCon 2017 highest tech brings us. We know that DolbyVision and IMAX are special, but what else is demonstrably special? Dolby brings the million to one contrast ratio in comparison to the 1700:1 that the 4K DLP system reach on their best day, or the 2000:1 that the SMTPE/ISO specs have determined as the minimum. What can the other players bring that is beyond the DCI/SMPTE/ISO spec?

What else is special enough to be marketed as special without diluting the still undefined name of Next Generation Cinema? For example, Cinema Arcadia in a village outside of Milan has put in the EU’s largest screen, a Harkness 30 x 16 meter Perlux White screen, a Dolby Atmos system using the largest permanently installed Meyer Sound system with Leopard and Galileo Processors and a Dual 4K Christie 4230 system, both with the new Cinemeccanica Lux Laser system, each putting out 50K lumens.

Does this PLF deserve a special niche in the cinema high end eco-system? Of course. They have done everything possible. Do their efforts deserve to be diluted because a well defined nomenclature hasn’t been established and protected? Where does one draw the line for that designation and protection given what we have now and for the foreseeable future?

Does this PLF deserve a special niche in the cinema high end eco-system? Of course. They have done everything possible. Do their efforts deserve to be diluted because a well defined nomenclature hasn’t been established and protected? Where does one draw the line for that designation and protection given what we have now and for the foreseeable future?

Part Two of the CinemaCon 2017 search is the technical future of Next Gen, for both audio and picture. Audio is being sorted out by several SMPTE study and standards groups, but in the interim there are many jostlings.

The future of the Next Gen picture has a number of questions. Do the early decisions that were determined by technology obtainable 15 years ago apply today? For example, separate processors with HD-SDI were restricted to 12 bit per channel and 250Mbit/sec interfaces. In this era of IMBs sitting directly on the projector bus, can 16bits per channel be a better choice with benefits?

Will implementing tech buzzwords like changing the DCDM color space from the 2.6 EOTF (PQ anyone?) give benefits that will kick up the professional cinema game against a home cinema market that bleats HDR and 20 times the brightness?

Do the new 6,000:1 to 10,000:1 cinema systems need a differently color-timed master and is there way to get that without the studios taking a stand against any new defeats of their single-master dream?

Are there lessons learned from many of the same engineers working on ACES and IMF for the last few years able to bring an expanding palette that would help the elite compete with the incursions of narrowing release windows and a 100 billion dollar gaming industry?

From the press releases and the pre-convention interviews it seems like this year – with more new IMBs and laser and speaker and other offerings, along with a more matured vision of the challenges and potentials – we’ll get some answers to these issues and more.

And that will be the subject of Part 2 of the CinemaCon 2017 Tech Search.

Originally Posted at: Celluloid Junkie: Tech Potential and Promise of CinemaCon 2017

And to complete the system implications for the other 50% of the movie experience, it hadn’t yet become obvious to everyone that harmonizing and making interoperable 3 companies worth of Higher Definition Object-based sound formats – under the clever phrase of Immersive Audio – wasn’t going to make the Single Master Dreams of the Studios at all simple or quick either.

So it isn’t surprising that there would be no easy decisions for the modern exhibitor who wants to create the Absolute best of all Premium Experiences for their audience, then or even now. They were given to believe that laser-lit projectors would not only save money but possibly even look appreciably better, but neither of those potentials had really been proven and wouldn’t be for a couple of years. The obvious choice of “absolutely better” – DolbyVision – was still a year from being announced. Even now it isn’t broadly available – there are 86 installations as of this CinemaCon opening – nor is everyone invited to participate if it were. It seems difficult to believe that it was only 2 years ago, at CinemaCon 2015, that Dolby launched the dual technology Dolby Cinema presentation system that drew actual gasps from the jaded and appreciative crowds when that circle went brighter and everything else went 6 decimal places to the left.

Even knowing what we know now, there is no clear answer in cinema exhibition for off-the-rack, non-proprietary systems that give discernible methods and reasons to upgrade. If we presume that it will be years before there are multiple hundreds of DolbyVision systems and that IMAX maintains their numbers, that leaves 165,000 other cinema screens with a choice…and are left to define the higher quality niche that they need to fill and to market.

That is Part One, the background of the search that CinemaCon 2017 highest tech brings us. We know that DolbyVision and IMAX are special, but what else is demonstrably special? Dolby brings the million to one contrast ratio in comparison to the 1700:1 that the 4K DLP system reach on their best day, or the 2000:1 that the SMTPE/ISO specs have determined as the minimum. What can the other players bring that is beyond the DCI/SMPTE/ISO spec?

What else is special enough to be marketed as special without diluting the still undefined name of Next Generation Cinema? For example, Cinema Arcadia in a village outside of Milan has put in the EU’s largest screen, a Harkness 30 x 16 meter Perlux White screen, a Dolby Atmos system using the largest permanently installed Meyer Sound system with Leopard and Galileo Processors and a Dual 4K Christie 4230 system, both with the new Cinemeccanica Lux Laser system, each putting out 50K lumens.

Does this PLF deserve a special niche in the cinema high end eco-system? Of course. They have done everything possible. Do their efforts deserve to be diluted because a well defined nomenclature hasn’t been established and protected? Where does one draw the line for that designation and protection given what we have now and for the foreseeable future?

Does this PLF deserve a special niche in the cinema high end eco-system? Of course. They have done everything possible. Do their efforts deserve to be diluted because a well defined nomenclature hasn’t been established and protected? Where does one draw the line for that designation and protection given what we have now and for the foreseeable future?

Part Two of the CinemaCon 2017 search is the technical future of Next Gen, for both audio and picture. Audio is being sorted out by several SMPTE study and standards groups, but in the interim there are many jostlings.

The future of the Next Gen picture has a number of questions. Do the early decisions that were determined by technology obtainable 15 years ago apply today? For example, separate processors with HD-SDI were restricted to 12 bit per channel and 250Mbit/sec interfaces. In this era of IMBs sitting directly on the projector bus, can 16bits per channel be a better choice with benefits?

Will implementing tech buzzwords like changing the DCDM color space from the 2.6 EOTF (PQ anyone?) give benefits that will kick up the professional cinema game against a home cinema market that bleats HDR and 20 times the brightness?

Do the new 6,000:1 to 10,000:1 cinema systems need a differently color-timed master and is there way to get that without the studios taking a stand against any new defeats of their single-master dream?

Are there lessons learned from many of the same engineers working on ACES and IMF for the last few years able to bring an expanding palette that would help the elite compete with the incursions of narrowing release windows and a 100 billion dollar gaming industry?

From the press releases and the pre-convention interviews it seems like this year – with more new IMBs and laser and speaker and other offerings, along with a more matured vision of the challenges and potentials – we’ll get some answers to these issues and more.

And that will be the subject of Part 2 of the CinemaCon 2017 Tech Search.

The Quality Active Cinema site has an article on Loudness that points out the absolute – Sound is relative. dBs are relative in a hundred different ways. Different frequencies react in different ways in an auditorium and experts can argue details for hours.

Beginner’s prep on a complicated subjet, Part 1: IT’S LIKE, TOO LOUD~!

The Quality Active Cinema site has an article on Loudness that points out the absolute – Sound is relative. dBs are relative in a hundred different ways. Different frequencies react in different ways in an auditorium and experts can argue details for hours.

Beginner’s prep on a complicated subjet, Part 1: IT’S LIKE, TOO LOUD~!

Here is the opening snippet:

In 2004, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) started an Ethernet study group for AV streaming. This became the Audio Video Bridging (AVB) Task Group that now serves four industries – professional AV, consumer electronics, automotive, and most recently the industrial control industry. At the end of 2012 this task group was renamed Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) to reflect a more accurate focus for the expanded scope of their work.

To understand why TSN is important to pro AV, we have to take a step back and look at key companies – like Intel, Cisco, General Electric (GE), and National Instruments (NI) – whose job it is to support the development of products belonging to IoT (Internet of Things), and understand that TSN is viewed as enabling the technology that will be part of the ‘next big thing’ or the technological evolution for IoT.

Here is the opening snippet:

In 2004, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) started an Ethernet study group for AV streaming. This became the Audio Video Bridging (AVB) Task Group that now serves four industries – professional AV, consumer electronics, automotive, and most recently the industrial control industry. At the end of 2012 this task group was renamed Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) to reflect a more accurate focus for the expanded scope of their work.

To understand why TSN is important to pro AV, we have to take a step back and look at key companies – like Intel, Cisco, General Electric (GE), and National Instruments (NI) – whose job it is to support the development of products belonging to IoT (Internet of Things), and understand that TSN is viewed as enabling the technology that will be part of the ‘next big thing’ or the technological evolution for IoT.

And now he shows up in a video of the Cine Tech Geek [CinemaCon 2014 – X-Curve Update with Barry Ferrel of QSC] making a point that may be surprising to people:

Good Speakers – so the engineer doesn’t get trapped trying to EQ badly designed speakers (or a badly designed room, one presumes)

Placed Behind Screen – the sound is transmitted (hopefully) through little holes in a membrane stretched tight as a drum from speakers (hopefully) built into a wall that is not to distant from said screen

Subtract the function of sound in air – if you’re thinking inverse-square, you are right… play with the numbers at Inverse Square Law for Sound

Something like the X-Curve appears on the RTA as a ‘result’, not a target – give or take a few dB, and with variations in the size of the room, which was requirement to allow for in Ioan Allen’s (of Dolby) original X-Curve paper and in the SMPTE 202M

James Gardiner makes the point that SMPTE is working on this topic, which is an understatement. A lot of hype has been spilt on the need for the emerging immersive sound techniques to find a common distribution package, but now that the difficult Film To File transition has largely taken place, many more engineers are spending a great deal of time reviewing the basics, going through specifications and recommended practices that evolved but now appear contradictory or merely confusing, and not to be forgotten, how are settled techniques in the analog world different in the digital world.

Examples of this fundamental research is showing up in hundreds of pages of documents generated while recently testing various rooms around the world, or testing dozens of algorithms of pink noise samples or developing techniques to find what a screen really is doing in the room, or figuring the best methods of consistently measuring luminance or audio in an auditorium. None of this is public since committee work is private until published, but it is easily obtained when one joins SMPTE and participates in the various working groups.

There are nuances in what Barry says here that could be the subject of 10 slides each, examples being how the ear can discern and ‘deal with’ reflections that microphones can’t account for, or how different frequencies in the transitions between speakers of an array will act different enough that they need to be measured properly, or how EQing to correct speakers (or the room) will make the ear ‘wince’…OK, he didn’t say wince… but using graphic EQs in the recording business came and went surprisingly quickly, before their digital transition in fact, and that lesson should have gotten to the exhibition world back then. We’re talking the late-70’s.

The desired point of this article is that there is a lot to know and do to make rooms consistently good, and keeping them that way. Putting time into SMPTE committee-work is an excellent way to pay-forward on the benefits received.

The side point is to make common certain information, such as the requirement to use FFT when setting up or monitoring components of your system. Testing for the level of a single tone is better than not testing at all, but doing real FFT work to find the THD in a component or your system is truly giving relevant and usable information.

And now he shows up in a video of the Cine Tech Geek [CinemaCon 2014 – X-Curve Update with Barry Ferrel of QSC] making a point that may be surprising to people:

Good Speakers – so the engineer doesn’t get trapped trying to EQ badly designed speakers (or a badly designed room, one presumes)

Placed Behind Screen – the sound is transmitted (hopefully) through little holes in a membrane stretched tight as a drum from speakers (hopefully) built into a wall that is not to distant from said screen

Subtract the function of sound in air – if you’re thinking inverse-square, you are right… play with the numbers at Inverse Square Law for Sound

Something like the X-Curve appears on the RTA as a ‘result’, not a target – give or take a few dB, and with variations in the size of the room, which was requirement to allow for in Ioan Allen’s (of Dolby) original X-Curve paper and in the SMPTE 202M

James Gardiner makes the point that SMPTE is working on this topic, which is an understatement. A lot of hype has been spilt on the need for the emerging immersive sound techniques to find a common distribution package, but now that the difficult Film To File transition has largely taken place, many more engineers are spending a great deal of time reviewing the basics, going through specifications and recommended practices that evolved but now appear contradictory or merely confusing, and not to be forgotten, how are settled techniques in the analog world different in the digital world.

Examples of this fundamental research is showing up in hundreds of pages of documents generated while recently testing various rooms around the world, or testing dozens of algorithms of pink noise samples or developing techniques to find what a screen really is doing in the room, or figuring the best methods of consistently measuring luminance or audio in an auditorium. None of this is public since committee work is private until published, but it is easily obtained when one joins SMPTE and participates in the various working groups.

There are nuances in what Barry says here that could be the subject of 10 slides each, examples being how the ear can discern and ‘deal with’ reflections that microphones can’t account for, or how different frequencies in the transitions between speakers of an array will act different enough that they need to be measured properly, or how EQing to correct speakers (or the room) will make the ear ‘wince’…OK, he didn’t say wince… but using graphic EQs in the recording business came and went surprisingly quickly, before their digital transition in fact, and that lesson should have gotten to the exhibition world back then. We’re talking the late-70’s.

The desired point of this article is that there is a lot to know and do to make rooms consistently good, and keeping them that way. Putting time into SMPTE committee-work is an excellent way to pay-forward on the benefits received.

The side point is to make common certain information, such as the requirement to use FFT when setting up or monitoring components of your system. Testing for the level of a single tone is better than not testing at all, but doing real FFT work to find the THD in a component or your system is truly giving relevant and usable information.