Tag Archives: NAB

CinemaCon/NAB 2106 – Perfect Dates

Most often NAB leads, and there is a week in between. This week is usually filled with the best hundred-twenty bucks in showbiz, as it buys you a bus seat on the EDCF tour of LA manufacturers and exhibitors and post houses. Who knows what will happen to this event this year since there is no such week in between. The week before? the week after? If only the ISCWest.com event were on the 8-10 of April, then true happiness would reign, but the merging of the two main events is good enough.

This article will be updated as news of the 3 events meanders in, but for now it is trending towards a Panglossian Best of All Possible Worlds Weeks. 

CinemaCon banner    SMPTE logo

CinemaCon/NAB 2106 – Perfect Dates

Most often NAB leads, and there is a week in between. This week is usually filled with the best hundred-twenty bucks in showbiz, as it buys you a bus seat on the EDCF tour of LA manufacturers and exhibitors and post houses. Who knows what will happen to this event this year since there is no such week in between. The week before? the week after? If only the ISCWest.com event were on the 8-10 of April, then true happiness would reign, but the merging of the two main events is good enough.

This article will be updated as news of the 3 events meanders in, but for now it is trending towards a Panglossian Best of All Possible Worlds Weeks. 

CinemaCon banner    SMPTE logo

CinemaCon/NAB 2106 – Perfect Dates

Most often NAB leads, and there is a week in between. This week is usually filled with the best hundred-twenty bucks in showbiz, as it buys you a bus seat on the EDCF tour of LA manufacturers and exhibitors and post houses. Who knows what will happen to this event this year since there is no such week in between. The week before? the week after? If only the ISCWest.com event were on the 8-10 of April, then true happiness would reign, but the merging of the two main events is good enough.

This article will be updated as news of the 3 events meanders in, but for now it is trending towards a Panglossian Best of All Possible Worlds Weeks. 

CinemaCon banner    SMPTE logo

Technology Summit on Cinema | SMPTE/NAB2015

Technology Summit on Cinema | SMPTE/NAB2015Kicking off the yearly SMPTE program at NAB is a symposium with Bill Mead and featuring Tim Reed of Alamo Drafthouse, David Pflegl of Carmike, Steven Tsai or Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sean Romano of Deluxe Digital and Wendy Aylsworth.

Covering the entire breadth of the history and ending with, “Has the Industry done a good job?”, Digidia has presented all the YouTube videos on their site at:

Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and

NAB sponsored Technology Summit on Cinema

Technology Summit on Cinema | SMPTE/NAB2015

Technology Summit on Cinema | SMPTE/NAB2015Kicking off the yearly SMPTE program at NAB is a symposium with Bill Mead and featuring Tim Reed of Alamo Drafthouse, David Pflegl of Carmike, Steven Tsai or Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sean Romano of Deluxe Digital and Wendy Aylsworth.

Covering the entire breadth of the history and ending with, “Has the Industry done a good job?”, Digidia has presented all the YouTube videos on their site at:

Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and

NAB sponsored Technology Summit on Cinema

Gone and Back Again–Return of The Hobbitses

 

Film is dead and badly done CGI is dead and it is about time that badly done 3D be dead too. In the future, that will mean 24fps shown as 96fps (triple flashing the same picture) is dead and it won’t mean replacing it with 48fps double-flashing. 

As we learned at the 2012 SMPTE/NAB DCinema Days event (or whatever they are called now), there are problems with 48fps that are alleviated at somewhere above 52fps. Jackson’s representative (Phil Oatley, the post group head of technology from Park Road Post) said that 48 was chosen because they didn’t know if 60fps was achievable in the exhibition field, so they stuck with what seemed do-able: 2X the frames and the data rate. 

Even at that, Warner Bros. wasn’t sure enough of the field changes to trust that audio tracks for the blind or visually impaired wouldn’t negatively affect the movie, so were left out of the HFR mix. (Captions with 3D are still a different Pandora’s Box.)

But 48fps was shown to the SMPTE/NAB attendees to be the wrong choice by Dr. Marty Banks (of the Visual Space Perception Laboratory at the University of California – my tax dollars at work~!) Presumably Jackson is in too deep to change from 48. But there is no news that anyone else is going to follow. The next announced HFR (besides Hobbit II) will be Avatar II’s 60fps, and the script isn’t written for that. 

So film is unwatchable and thankfully dead. HFR as announced will be a rare jewel – though wouldn’t it be nice if Disney/Pixar/Lucas were to surprise us. Katzenberg announced at CinemaCon 2011 that we should expect new chips from them that will dramatically change computation time in production and post…maybe that will bring more/better as well.

That leaves exhibition. It was relatively painless to get to 48fps. 60fps is a different story. Will a doubling of the datarate to 500mb/s suffice? Testing remains, but at least there is time to do it. Perhaps now there will be some backing for the www.image.matters.pro road show. Image Matters Powers High Frame Rate Digital Cinema Quality

Gone and Back Again–Return of The Hobbitses

 

Film is dead and badly done CGI is dead and it is about time that badly done 3D be dead too. In the future, that will mean 24fps shown as 96fps (triple flashing the same picture) is dead and it won’t mean replacing it with 48fps double-flashing. 

As we learned at the 2012 SMPTE/NAB DCinema Days event (or whatever they are called now), there are problems with 48fps that are alleviated at somewhere above 52fps. Jackson’s representative (Phil Oatley, the post group head of technology from Park Road Post) said that 48 was chosen because they didn’t know if 60fps was achievable in the exhibition field, so they stuck with what seemed do-able: 2X the frames and the data rate. 

Even at that, Warner Bros. wasn’t sure enough of the field changes to trust that audio tracks for the blind or visually impaired wouldn’t negatively affect the movie, so were left out of the HFR mix. (Captions with 3D are still a different Pandora’s Box.)

But 48fps was shown to the SMPTE/NAB attendees to be the wrong choice by Dr. Marty Banks (of the Visual Space Perception Laboratory at the University of California – my tax dollars at work~!) Presumably Jackson is in too deep to change from 48. But there is no news that anyone else is going to follow. The next announced HFR (besides Hobbit II) will be Avatar II’s 60fps, and the script isn’t written for that. 

So film is unwatchable and thankfully dead. HFR as announced will be a rare jewel – though wouldn’t it be nice if Disney/Pixar/Lucas were to surprise us. Katzenberg announced at CinemaCon 2011 that we should expect new chips from them that will dramatically change computation time in production and post…maybe that will bring more/better as well.

That leaves exhibition. It was relatively painless to get to 48fps. 60fps is a different story. Will a doubling of the datarate to 500mb/s suffice? Testing remains, but at least there is time to do it. Perhaps now there will be some backing for the www.image.matters.pro road show. Image Matters Powers High Frame Rate Digital Cinema Quality

Vegas 2013 SMPTE/NAB CinemaCon

Calendar dates of SMPTE during NAB and CinemaCon

It happens again this year before switching back next year…CinemaCon immediately follows NAB in Vegas. This means that those who want to attend the SMTPE weekend, filled with more data than one can predict, but not NAB, and also attend CinemaCon, that there is a week in the middle.

Last year this was filled with a near-perfect EDCF bus tour arranged by Thomas MacCalla. From sound systems to important post houses (and who’ll forget being the first riders on the Universal Studios Transformers ride, or equally exciting, spending time talking with Laser Light Engines’ Bill Beck after the successful SMPTE showing of a laser driven Sony projector, and exchanging ideas with all the other european experts), the yearly bustour was yet again perhaps the highlight of the two weeks.

So what will it be in 2013? Can SMPTE out-do themselves…Can Nick Mitchell of Technicolor take the Marvin Hall Award for Telling Us What We Don’t Want to Hear again? Will there be another mis-named presentation that everyone complains for missing (what is white, really?) Will RealD demonstrat what they merely talk about at this coming SMPTE Hollywood Expo?

Vegas 2013 SMPTE/NAB CinemaCon

Calendar dates of SMPTE during NAB and CinemaCon

It happens again this year before switching back next year…CinemaCon immediately follows NAB in Vegas. This means that those who want to attend the SMTPE weekend, filled with more data than one can predict, but not NAB, and also attend CinemaCon, that there is a week in the middle.

Last year this was filled with a near-perfect EDCF bus tour arranged by Thomas MacCalla. From sound systems to important post houses (and who’ll forget being the first riders on the Universal Studios Transformers ride, or equally exciting, spending time talking with Laser Light Engines’ Bill Beck after the successful SMPTE showing of a laser driven Sony projector, and exchanging ideas with all the other european experts), the yearly bustour was yet again perhaps the highlight of the two weeks.

So what will it be in 2013? Can SMPTE out-do themselves…Can Nick Mitchell of Technicolor take the Marvin Hall Award for Telling Us What We Don’t Want to Hear again? Will there be another mis-named presentation that everyone complains for missing (what is white, really?) Will RealD demonstrat what they merely talk about at this coming SMPTE Hollywood Expo?

[Update] LLE, Sony, NAB and CinemaCon

Since Bill Beck will be on the EDCF Bus Trip for the various sound system demos and visit to the Academy, we’ll hopefully get enough info to fill a new article on the current state of the technology and politics of laser. For example, the LIPA group’s lawyer [Laser Illuminated Projectors, Laser Illuminated Projector Association] gave an excellent slide presentation and talk on the legal aspects of public use lasers.


[Original Article] The Art of Reading Press Releases Kit includes chicken bones and Roman dice. But what are we to make of the first paragraph of LLE’s fresh press release issued days in front of the SMPTE/NAB Technology Symposium on Cinema on April 14th?

Laser Light Engines, Inc. (LLE), a venture-backed, laser-illumination developer today announced the world’s first public demonstration of fully-despeckled, high brightness 3D, high frame rate (HFR), wide color gamut (WCG) laser projection on a silver 3D screen at the upcoming NAB Technology Symposium on Cinema (TSC), on April 14, 2012 from 4:14pm-5:45pm PDT in Room #S222.

Bill Beck, founder and EVP of Business Development for LLE will be presenting an invited talk on Laser Illumination Systems for 2D and 3D Digital Cinema. “We appreciate the opportunity to educate and update the NAB Digital Cinema community with both a tutorial and a live demonstration of laser 3D on a silver screen in conjunction with SONY,” Beck said. “Since its founding, LLE has been committed to laser-driven light sources that exceed the requirements of digital cinema”. LLE was the first to achieve full laser despeckling on a white screen in 2010, but with the rapid proliferation of 3D, and other advancements to be discussed at this year’s TSC, had to develop additional technology to meet new, more challenging requirements.

Venture-backed: Well, we know that LLE has had a number of interesting investors over the last few years. All laser technologies have been money consumers as obvious and thrilling ideas need a extraordinary effort to get past the vagaries of such precision.

Laser-Illumination developer: There are many, of course. Polaroid Kodak used the engines of a California company rather than LLE’s system for their one-off, pre-prototype projector system. Sony R&D has had releases in the past about their engines, so the fact that this Technology Symposium exhibition is with Sony is interesting…though both companies are careful to point out that this is a technology showing (nothing more, nothing less.) Barco has had some great demonstrations in the recent past, and RED is promising to blow everyone out of the water with their offering. Christie’s mother company Ushio is known to have laser technology, but ‘focused’ more in the IR region.

“world’s first public demonstration of fully-despeckled, high brightness 3D, high frame rate (HFR), wide color gamut (WCG) laser projection on a silver 3D screen”: To parse this, it may appear that the “silver 3D screen” portion that modifies enough to make the “world’s first public demonstration” be valid. But it also may be the “fully-despeckled” phrase. Other companies give their buzz-words that indicate that they have gotten the speckles down to a responsible level, currently an unmeasurable quantity since there is no agreed-upon way to compare one to one. An industry group has been set up to change this, but until then we only know that getting the speckle out of green is the most difficult, and we know that LLE says: Fully-despeckled. One presumes: Zero doesn’t need an industry standard.

But is there a downside to being fully despeckled? Despeckling must, to some degree, be as simple as broadening the Q of the light since it is the narrowness that causes the effect of speckling. But that would have a negative effect as the light approaches the mirrors perhaps. We’ll see if anyone can phrase a question that makes Bill speak to their secret sauce. I suspect 4th and 5th dimension activity.

But what about “wide gamut”? The DCI spec does the opposite of constrict the gamut. It invites manufacturers to get as broad as possible in the XYZ space. But there are limits and distortions with every light. Going “negative” on one or more points to get better effects along the line of purples will have effects in the greens, where the eye is most sensitive. Hopefully Bill Beck will give details here too.

But it is that “silver 3D screen” part that is the rub. Silver implies aluminum and high-gain. Aluminum holds the photon polarity of the RealD and MasterImage systems, so even if the laser light engine were to give them full brightness at the screen with a low gain screen, they would still have to use the silver screen to keep their left-right effect working. Some would say that it is the high-gain problem, giving much of the auditorium less than responsible light levels as the window of ‘gain’ decreases…and they would be right. 23 degrees off the horizontal and/or vertical center and the viewer typically has half the light or less.

But the aluminum also distorts the screen’s image, usually making it impossible to get the 70-90% luminosity level at the sides (as measured from the center), or to get a responsible white point anywhere. This is much of the reason that France’s CNC has banned the silver screen for cinemas showing 2D films and will probably force them out completely as time goes on.

Notwithstanding, this is an interesting release and an interesting step for both technical and political reasons. It will be interesting to see if LLE can parlay this into interesting motion at CinemaCon the following week.

Also interesting is that both parties, Sony and LLE, are being careful in their press releases to say that this joint project is only for this demo. No way to tell how to parse that for absolute truth.

[Update] LLE, Sony, NAB and CinemaCon

Since Bill Beck will be on the EDCF Bus Trip for the various sound system demos and visit to the Academy, we’ll hopefully get enough info to fill a new article on the current state of the technology and politics of laser. For example, the LIPA group’s lawyer [Laser Illuminated Projectors, Laser Illuminated Projector Association] gave an excellent slide presentation and talk on the legal aspects of public use lasers.


[Original Article] The Art of Reading Press Releases Kit includes chicken bones and Roman dice. But what are we to make of the first paragraph of LLE’s fresh press release issued days in front of the SMPTE/NAB Technology Symposium on Cinema on April 14th?

Laser Light Engines, Inc. (LLE), a venture-backed, laser-illumination developer today announced the world’s first public demonstration of fully-despeckled, high brightness 3D, high frame rate (HFR), wide color gamut (WCG) laser projection on a silver 3D screen at the upcoming NAB Technology Symposium on Cinema (TSC), on April 14, 2012 from 4:14pm-5:45pm PDT in Room #S222.

Bill Beck, founder and EVP of Business Development for LLE will be presenting an invited talk on Laser Illumination Systems for 2D and 3D Digital Cinema. “We appreciate the opportunity to educate and update the NAB Digital Cinema community with both a tutorial and a live demonstration of laser 3D on a silver screen in conjunction with SONY,” Beck said. “Since its founding, LLE has been committed to laser-driven light sources that exceed the requirements of digital cinema”. LLE was the first to achieve full laser despeckling on a white screen in 2010, but with the rapid proliferation of 3D, and other advancements to be discussed at this year’s TSC, had to develop additional technology to meet new, more challenging requirements.

Venture-backed: Well, we know that LLE has had a number of interesting investors over the last few years. All laser technologies have been money consumers as obvious and thrilling ideas need a extraordinary effort to get past the vagaries of such precision.

Laser-Illumination developer: There are many, of course. Polaroid Kodak used the engines of a California company rather than LLE’s system for their one-off, pre-prototype projector system. Sony R&D has had releases in the past about their engines, so the fact that this Technology Symposium exhibition is with Sony is interesting…though both companies are careful to point out that this is a technology showing (nothing more, nothing less.) Barco has had some great demonstrations in the recent past, and RED is promising to blow everyone out of the water with their offering. Christie’s mother company Ushio is known to have laser technology, but ‘focused’ more in the IR region.

“world’s first public demonstration of fully-despeckled, high brightness 3D, high frame rate (HFR), wide color gamut (WCG) laser projection on a silver 3D screen”: To parse this, it may appear that the “silver 3D screen” portion that modifies enough to make the “world’s first public demonstration” be valid. But it also may be the “fully-despeckled” phrase. Other companies give their buzz-words that indicate that they have gotten the speckles down to a responsible level, currently an unmeasurable quantity since there is no agreed-upon way to compare one to one. An industry group has been set up to change this, but until then we only know that getting the speckle out of green is the most difficult, and we know that LLE says: Fully-despeckled. One presumes: Zero doesn’t need an industry standard.

But is there a downside to being fully despeckled? Despeckling must, to some degree, be as simple as broadening the Q of the light since it is the narrowness that causes the effect of speckling. But that would have a negative effect as the light approaches the mirrors perhaps. We’ll see if anyone can phrase a question that makes Bill speak to their secret sauce. I suspect 4th and 5th dimension activity.

But what about “wide gamut”? The DCI spec does the opposite of constrict the gamut. It invites manufacturers to get as broad as possible in the XYZ space. But there are limits and distortions with every light. Going “negative” on one or more points to get better effects along the line of purples will have effects in the greens, where the eye is most sensitive. Hopefully Bill Beck will give details here too.

But it is that “silver 3D screen” part that is the rub. Silver implies aluminum and high-gain. Aluminum holds the photon polarity of the RealD and MasterImage systems, so even if the laser light engine were to give them full brightness at the screen with a low gain screen, they would still have to use the silver screen to keep their left-right effect working. Some would say that it is the high-gain problem, giving much of the auditorium less than responsible light levels as the window of ‘gain’ decreases…and they would be right. 23 degrees off the horizontal and/or vertical center and the viewer typically has half the light or less.

But the aluminum also distorts the screen’s image, usually making it impossible to get the 70-90% luminosity level at the sides (as measured from the center), or to get a responsible white point anywhere. This is much of the reason that France’s CNC has banned the silver screen for cinemas showing 2D films and will probably force them out completely as time goes on.

Notwithstanding, this is an interesting release and an interesting step for both technical and political reasons. It will be interesting to see if LLE can parlay this into interesting motion at CinemaCon the following week.

Also interesting is that both parties, Sony and LLE, are being careful in their press releases to say that this joint project is only for this demo. No way to tell how to parse that for absolute truth.

NAB / CinemaCon Future Space.Time Conjunctions

The schedule for the NATO convention now known as CinemaCon* and the NAB Convention has taken on interesting time intersection. They both occur in Las Vegas. 

In the past the NATO convention (then known as ShoWest) was 4 or 5 weeks before NAB. With the first CinemaCon this year (2011) there was a 9 day difference between the end of CinemaCon and the beginning of NAB (if you consider the SMPTE/NATO “DCienmaDays” as the beginning of NAB…the weekend before the NAB Exhibits open.

In 2012 this takes an interesting twist. NAB begins on the 14th and closes on the 19th of April, with CinemaCon beginning just a few days later on the 23rd (and closing on Thursday the 26th.

2013 brings NAB on 6-11 April with CinemaCon on 15-18.

2014 switches them; first CinemaCon on 24-27 March and NAB on 5-10 April. (Perhaps these dates were chosen because Passover is on the 15th and Easter that year is on the 20th. There is no conflicts with these floating holidays the other years.)

Now if only the Hollywood Post Alliance festival in Palm Springs were moved from February to the week before CinemaCon us Europeans could schedule one trip and get our tech fix all in one long drip-fed dose. 

 

 

*It has been confirmed that the Con in CinemaCon has nothing to do with “Putting the Con back in Cinema” as has been suspected.