The weather outside is cloudy … and so is the main topic of conversation in Salon 1. There is a lot of talk of IT infrastructure and of the future at this year’s conference. Amazon gave an excellent introduction to the components of their cloud offering and other’s gave viewpoints from both the cloud provider’s and the customer’s perspective:
The general view was one of IT inevitability, but also a little concern on the security and cost implications. The state of the art in technology and in pricing models still seems to favour the low-bandwidth applications and the cost-cast for high bandwidth, high computer applications like transcoding did not seem to be proven despite an excellent presentation from Jeff Malkin, CEO of Encoding.com.
4k and UHDTV were also big ticket items with an intellectual debate of the merits of high resolution vs. high frame rate vs. high dynamic range being heard in all the corridors throughout the show. Again, there was an air of inevitability about the direction of the technology. The displays will arrive and we will create content to illuminated them. A complex presentation from Gary Demos pointed out that many of the current practises, such as directly filtering the pixels in an XDCAM file won’t cut-it in a high dynamic range environment. To get the pixels right in an HDR environment, you need to de-gamma first, filter and then re-gamma for the destination display characteristics. It seems many transcode vendors will be caught out by these obvious, yet little understood facts.
My paper was on the new AmberFin standards conversion technique that we were launching at the show. I apologised at the start that the talk might degenerate into an angry rant about interlace. I got a big laugh and a round of applause. This was a great audience and the room was packed. I explained how we get into a mess with mixed film and video workflows for obvious reasons when you understand the underlying vision theory. I will be creating a webinar on the subject and you’ll get details on this blog before the webinar is given. The webinar will be for subscribers to Bruce’s shorts – so sign up now if you’re not already on the list. The webinar will be a good one – don’t miss it!
Overall the show was a good one. There seemed to be an air of optimism around the hall and in the salons. The future’s bright. The future’s cloudy!
‘till next time.
