SMPTE prides itself on the community it has built over the course of a century. That community was not built in a vacuum. Our members play a huge role in expanding, maintaining, and supporting the SMPTE community, and many members even go out of their way to make their Section the best it can be. Billy Mouzakitis is a member of the newly formed SMPTE UK North and has supported several events for the Section.
A multispectral digitization workflow that uses a uniform distribution of spectral bands across the visible spectrum can significantly improve results and provide reliable documentation of heterogeneous archival color film stocks. It also enhances versatility for innovative renderings compatible with future projection technologies. Reducing subjective interventions in film digitization remains a cornerstone of restoration ethics. Multispectral scanning directly leverages the information embedded in historical film stocks, enabling a robust, material-based technology that respects the unique properties of each film element. An integrated multispectral digitization and post-processing chain supports physically accurate rendering of scans by including measurements from various cinema projection illuminants. The goal of this workflow is to represent the color appearance as it would have been perceived on the cinema screen. Building on more than a decade of research into the technology and aesthetics of historical film colors and scanning, we have integrated this knowledge into a practical solution.
This paper describes a proof-of-concept approach to monitoring timing errors and word loss in TV subtitles. It reviews previous attempts at subtitle monitoring and the problems caused to viewers by subtitle timing errors and word loss. It then introduces the use of speech to text technology and the conventions in subtitling where repetition, non-speech content and errors can make the task of aligning the speech-to-text transcript to subtitles more challenging. The paper describes the approach taken to remove non-speech content from the subtitles and transcript, along with the complex and iterative natural language processing techniques devised to ensure a sufficiently accurate alignment between the two. It then gives examples of the ways in which the results are displayed and some sample results showing the scale of problems with subtitle quality, along with examples of 24-hour plots, which are a convenient way to identify issues across a large sample of data. The paper concludes by reviewing the limits of this approach in terms of accuracy and points out the need for human oversight.
Since 2015, Trinity College Dublin has delivered a Master's-level “Motion Picture Engineering” (MPE) course uniquely combining core principles with cutting-edge developments in the field. In 2025, to address diverse student backgrounds, we developed a domain-specific AI Teaching Assistant (AI-TA) using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). While RAG is well-established, this paper addresses practical implementation and classroom integration challenges, covering architecture, compliance, system tuning, prompt engineering, UI integration, and operational workload. The AI-TA was deployed to 43 MPE students over seven weeks during Spring 2025. Anonymous telemetry captured engagement patterns, and AI-assisted topic categorization facilitated query exploration for curriculum refinement. Exam outcomes showed no significant performance differences across usage levels, suggesting open-book assessments thoughtfully designed for AI accompaniment need not compromise academic integrity. Students found the AI-TA useful but remained cautious about its use as a tutoring substitute skeptical of its suitability for open-book exams. Our code is available on GitHub.iihttps://github.com/sigmedia/ai-teaching-assistant
Coded Multi-Source Media Format (CMMF) is an extensible container format designed to facilitate the management and interchange of audiovisual media and metadata. It enables efficient, decentralized, multi-source, multi-path, and multi-access content delivery for services that require high quality, availability, and robustness while also having strict latency and bandwidth requirements. It is protocol-agnostic and can be easily incorporated into existing systems and workflows. Results from extensive, real-world testing on a commercial content distribution platform show that CMMF-enabled multi-source delivery significantly improves client Quality of Experience (QoE) across all relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPls) compared to a widely adopted platform that switches between multiple content distribution networks (CDNs). CMMF-enabled clients during this trial experienced up to a 46% reduction in the video startup time, 75% reduction in the connection-induced rebuffering ratio, 12.7% improvement in the content normalized average session playback bitrate, 86.3% reduction in the video startup failure rate, and 58.9% reduction in the video playback failure rate.
