WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) has unveiled the program for this year’s virtual SMPTE 2021 Annual Technical Conference (ATC) with six days of half-day sessions, Nov. 9-11 and Nov. 16-18.
SMPTE 2021 ATC will offer technical sessions, networking and social events, interactive discussions and keynote presentations.
"As you delve into this year's program, you get a powerful sense of the radical and rapid change taking place across our industry," said Michael Zink, education vice president at SMPTE. "Not so many years ago, some of these session topics simply didn't exist. We're exploring exciting new ways of storytelling and new ways of working — and it's a rare opportunity to see, through the eyes of industry leaders, where we'll go next."
The virtual event will begin Nov. 9 with a keynote presentation by Andreas “Andi” Gall, founder and CEO of Human-Centric-Innovators and former CIO of Red Bull Media House. Among the topics to be covered during technical sessions will be proxy workflows for secure remote production, multicamera live production in a virtual environment, generalized psychovisual preprocessing for video encoding, a use case examining ATSC 3.0 for public safety communications, calibrating LED fixtures and video walls to the camera’s chroma signal and 360 8K viewport-independent VR, the society said.
A midday break with a brief session on networking and the day will end with a social event, SMPTE said.
Day 2 begins with a focus on sustainability. The program will examine steps and technology solutions that address climate change and how to integrate them into media workflows. Next up will be a skills-oriented presentation on lighting accurately for people of color in movies and TV.
Michelle Munson will discuss nonfungible tokens (NFTs), the implications for video engineers, and how a new content blockchain protocol is expected to back premium video experiences minted as NFTs. She also will discuss her experience launching a gamified video NFT marketplace for a consumer audience. The day wraps with an induction ceremony for the new class of SMPTE Fellows, it said.
Day 3 begins at 6 p.m. EST on Nov. 11 –an APAC-friendly time which is 8 a.m. JST on Nov. 12. First up is a networking opportunity. The day’s topics include infrastructure as code at CBC/Radio-Canada’s media-over-IP data center, 5G streaming and broadcast delivery of DASH/HLS services, an 8K camera system with multiplane phase-detection autofocus and a production system for content with varying aspect ratios, SMPTE said.
The conference will resume Nov. 16 with a focus on:
- Software-defined, an ultra-low-latency video-over-IP system with compression
- Performance of low-latency DASH/CMAF and low-latency HLS streaming systems
- Real-time conversational virtual characters
- Using biometric signals to improve storytelling
- A new 2/3-inch CMOS imager with 9.5Mpix that combines charge-domain global shutter operation with exceptional high-speed capability
- Motion picture print stock design in the post-film era
- SMPTE Section mixer
The schedule Nov. 17 calls for two sessions that focus first on virtual production best practices and workflows and then on how to tackle remaining technical challenges from merging game and film culture to solving complex spatialization and image processing. The SMPTE+ Media in the Cloud panel will reconvene, and the SMPTE Annual Membership Meeting will be held the last hour of the day.
The final day of the event will include three technical sessions with topics addressing the impact of tighter NIC/GPU integration on media processing performance, the RTP payload format for JPEG XS, the problem with timecode, dynamic resource allocation of live video compression on a Kubernetes cluster, perceptual modeling and machine learning approaches for banding detection and hue-preserving color transforms for LED wall virtual production workflows. The day will end with a virtual Oktoberfest.
The full conference schedule and registration is available on the SMPTE website.
