It is not surprising that active areas in the standards world reflect the buzz-worthy products and trends in the consumer electronics industry. And so it goes that mobility and connectivity are at the forefront of CEA's standards work; and television, despite the declining market, provides the eye candy and drives a large number of standards.
In March 2010, a SMPTE Study Group (SG) was formed to review cinema sound reproduction measurement methods and sound reproduction equipment improvements, as well as investigate possible updates or additions to the current electroacoustic response curve as standardized in B-Chain Electroacoustic Response (ST) 202:2010.
After the transition to file-based workflows, broadcasters and production companies are facing new technological challenges. New business opportunities encourage programmakers to tell their stories on multiple distribution platforms, but they typically lack tools and platforms to do so efficiently. Furthermore, production platforms should embrace the flexibility offered by consumerization and cloud paradigms. VRT-medialab proposes a cloud-hosted autonomous media production (CHAMP) platform that brings innovative production workflows to the cloud. CHAMP is a technology platform on which software and media infrastructure can be offered as a service. For programmakers the platform provides fit-for-purpose cloud web apps to collaborate on a multiplatform story, using consumer devices such as tablets. In this paper a set of innovative platform web apps are discussed that support a real-life documentary use case. To provide interoperability a flexible story-centric data model is defined. Also public and private cloud concepts are applied to enable high-resolution workflows.
Stereoscopic displays have become important for many applications, including operation of remote devices, medical imaging, surgery, scientific visualization, and computer-assisted design. But the most significant and exciting development is the incorporation of stereo technology into entertainment: specifically, cinema, television, and video games. In these applications for stereo, three-dimensional (3D) imagery should create a faithful impression of the 3D structure of the scene being portrayed. In addition, the viewer should be comfortable and not leave the experience with eye fatigue or a headache. Finally, the presentation of the stereo images should not create temporal artifacts like flicker or motion judder. This paper reviews current research on stereo human vision and how it informs us about how best to create and present stereo 3D imagery. The paper is divided into four parts: (1) getting the geometry right, (2) depth cue interactions in stereo 3D media, (3) focusing and fixating on stereo images, and (4) how temporal presentation protocols affect flicker, motion artifacts, and depth distortion.
The Image Interchange Framework (IIF), created by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with the goal of providing a unified post-production workflow, has seen increased interest in recent years. Central to the IIF is the red, green, and blue wide-gamut color space defined by the Academy of Color Encoding Specification (ACES). For output device viewing, the ACES data must first be rendered through the reference rendering transform (RRT) and the output device transform (ODT). Recently, a quasi-logarithmic 12-bit integer ACES encoding scheme was proposed, and initial results are presented on the direct display of integer ACES content on a Dolby PRM-4200 monitor. Frames were delivered directly to the monitor across a 12-bit dual-link serial digital interface, and the decoding RRT and device ODT were computed via one- and three-dimensional (3D) lookup tables (LUTs) resident on the monitor. Several LUT designs were considered, and the limitations of each, including failure modes, are discussed.
The SMPTE progress report summarizes the key activities in the Society's Technology Committees, as well as the Standards Committee itself and other subgroups. The rich contents of this 2013 report demonstrates the Society's efforts to revise and relaunch its committee structure already have borne fruit, enabling a significant increase in the standards work completed.
Stereo three-dimensional (3D) content that is shot for the cinema may go on to be displayed on a number of different types of display devices, from domestic televisions to mobile devices. Stereo 3D content is scaled appropriately for the display device, but this scaling process alters the stereo 3D properties of the scene. For instance, when scaling cinema screen content to be shown on a domestic television screen, disparities are reduced, and the perceived depth of objects in the scene are affected in a nonlinear way. This paper explores the case of displaying stereo 3D cinema content on screens of a different size, both larger and smaller. It then explores in more detail the issues of showing cinema content on a domestic television, which include nonlinear scaling of depth. Experiments presented here show that the effects of this depth distortion are mitigated by two-dimensional perspective cues within the 3D scene, thus limiting the perceived distortion. The effect can be further mitigated by introducing a positive planar shift (of around 1%), which also improves comfort by keeping the depth range in the center of the comfort zone, reducing the vergence-accommodation conflict.
The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE), now in its 42nd year of incorporation, is the largest cable-centric professional association in the U.S. SCTE's mission is to provide professional development, information, and standards to more than 13,000 individual members, over 160 standards-member organizations, and to the industry that it serves.
As technology improvements have been steadily implemented in both the Television and Cinema industries, one of the most neglected topics has been color. Still hampered by CRT-era color specifications and relatively simplistic color mapping methods, these industries are overdue for a change. Change is coming, in the form of new color spaces like ultra-high definition television (UHDTV) and Academy Color Encoding System (ACES). These new systems bring greater capabilities than the current spaces of Rec.709 and P3, but they also bring new challenges. Larger color spaces create trade-offs in precision and efficiency, and they bring added complexity as color encoding spaces are no longer rigidly tied to display color gamuts. Techniques for gamut mapping from one space to another become critical to the success of these new formats, and a greater understanding of human color perception is required to maximize the potential of these exciting new developments. This article will review the history and current status of color system developments.
The Future of Video Delivery is a story that's still unfolding—with so much on the line for both content owners, large and small, as well as the owners of the so called “last mile”—cable operators, local exchange carriers (LEC), and competitive access providers, the industry is likely to go through more than a few twists and turns before the content-hungry public is able to satisfy their thirst fo...
With the advent of so many display technologies, it is often difficult to develop a process in which two monitors may match. Understanding how the technology works, the design of the signal path, the differences in signal characteristics, and the reason for discrepancies when using probes are all part of getting the intended results. This paper discusses the technologies as they relate to alignment and details the considerations used to implement the best procedure.
For years, advances in professional video displays trickled down into the world of consumer electronics. That's all changed now, as advances in display technology now "trickle up" to professional lines from the consumer world. One such feature is the High-Definition Multimedia Interface, or HDMI. This copy-protected video/audio/data interface, originally intended to connect televisions to Blu-ray players and set-top boxes, is now standard on cameras, monitors, and other professional equipment and has created myriad switching and distribution headaches. Other display interfaces, such as DisplayPort, are evolving into "multifunction" ports that carry video, audio, data, Ethernet, serial device control, and even high-speed serial data. Alternately, all of these functions are being combined with HDMI into structured wire interfaces (HDBaseT).
The Society for Information Display (SID) encourages and promotes displays, and display related science and technology, including the business of displays and display related fields. SID operates in three major regions namely, Americas, Asia and Europe. To fulfill the purpose of the Society, SID organizes and sponsors conferences and Exhibits all over the world on displays and display related subj...
The available color gamut in imaging systems is discussed. Both theoretical and practical gamuts of object colors, color reproducers, and, in particular, cameras are presented. The practicalities of an extended color gamut for both film and electronic capture are explored by study of a regular series of object spectra varying in both center wavelength and bandwidth.
When a lens is mounted to a camera there is an inevitable mechanical tolerance associated with the lens optical center, and another associated with the camera optical center. These separate tolerances can be additive or subtractive for a given lens-camera combination (both tolerances entail unpredictable +/− limits). This aberration poses the greatest challenge to the imaging alignment of stereoscopic rigs. Lens operational dynamics add another variable differential in terms of small mis-tracking between angle of view over the focal range of a zoom lens pair, mis-tracking between their optical focus, and mis-tracking between their aperture settings. Many workers in the field of 3D are diligently seeking practical and cost-effective solutions to these disparities. — This paper will describe recent developments that entail automatic and dynamic corrections for these differential tolerances. New software in the digital servo systems that operate lens zoom, iris, and focus control allows entry of compensation data that corrects for mis-tracking errors in these three operational functions. Separately, a novel development by 3D rig designer Microfilms of France, utilizes the technology of optical image stabilization built into an HDTV lens to implement automatic real time correction of both the fixed and the dynamic optical miscentering errors between two lenses. A different image stabilization technology - built-into the lenses of integrated HD lens-camcorders (increasingly popular for small handheld 3D rigs) - allows corrections for the fixed optical mis-centering between any two such systems at specific focal length settings.
