APB PANELLISTS
6 NEWS & VIEWS
October 2016
SMPTE celebrates centennial year
by peter symes
Peter Symes has been SMPTE Director of Standards and Engineering since 2007 . He will be retiring from his position this year .
damentally , we gather the experts and debate the pros and cons of different techniques and parameters to arrive at a standard that will meet users ’ needs , ensure interoperability and benefit the industry as a whole .
Following the adoption of the National Television System Committee ( NTSC ) television transmission system in 1953 , SMPTE ’ s focus became the development of studio standards for creating content for transmission . These standards vastly increased the degree of interoperability so that users could purchase equipment from a variety of manufacturers according to their needs — confident that , for example , connectors , signal levels and timing would all be compatible .
In the 1980s , SMPTE worked with the European Broadcasting Union ( EBU ) to develop proposals for digital studio standards , and this led to SMPTE ’ s role being extended beyond North America to serve the global television community .
In 1981 , when NHK , Japan ’ s public broadcasting service , demonstrated its 5:3 high-definition television ( HDTV ) system at the SMPTE winter conference , the Society became heavily involved in setting standards for high-definition ( HD ), even convincing the Japanese industry to adopt the preferred aspect ratio of 16:9 , and eventually the square pixel array recommended by the computer industry .
In the early days , television was ephemeral — once a programme was created live and transmitted , it generally disappeared forever . The ability to record productions led to the need to identify these recordings . In both film and television , the information was logged in the form of handwritten or printed labels . Soon , another joint SMPTE / EBU Task Force identified the need to transmit and store extensive metadata . The early systems developed for metadata are now being revised to take advantage of modern tools , and of the lessons learnt over two decades of use .
Around the same time , it became practical to store digital programme files , including video , audio and metadata , on computer disk systems , and so evolved the need for standardised file formats to permit interoperability in file-based operations . The first format standardised ,
At its founding in 1916 , the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers ( SMPTE ) began its work to foster interoperability in the motion-imaging field . Its first priority was to standardise film formats . Over the decades since that time , both the scope and complexity of technology in motion-imaging ramped up , particularly in the 1980s and 1990s . Since then , SMPTE , along with the industry as a whole , has struggled with a challenging economic climate , although the Society has used this as an opportunuity to evolve .
The development of effective standards requires strong contributions from both manufacturing and user communities , and the benefits are usually not immediate . The economic downturns of the 1990s and this century led to tighter budgets and , more significantly , to company managements being measured largely on “ this quarter ’ s ” financial results .
In a manufacturing organisation , the importance of standards participation to the future bottom line is evident , particularly when a company can influence the direction of new standards to match the direction of its product development . Some companies recognise this and commit to reasonably consistent support of standards activities , even during difficult times .
Other organisations often pay lip service to the importance of standards but , when an edict is given to reduce budgets or headcount , they allow shortterm interests to dictate that standards participation be drastically reduced , or even eliminated . So , even in the manufacturing field , participation can be erratic . This , of course , leads to the few consistent companies having much greater influence on the standards being developed .
The situation is much worse when we consider user organisations , where it is more difficult to quantify the bottomline benefits of standards participation . Some user companies outsource many of their technology needs and , increasingly , the required expertise for standards development is to be found in small , fastmoving , specialist companies that quite simply cannot afford the expense or time loss inherent in their experts travelling to standards meetings .
SMPTE has recognised these challenges and introduced new technologies into its standards process , such as online meeting platforms , to create a more accessible process and , in turn , rebuild its user community . SMPTE must support standards development in the most efficient and accessible way , while helping users to recognise the importance of standards participation to their future bottom line .
Although the technologies we use , and the technologies we standardise , have transformed dramatically over the past 100 years , in some ways the work of SMPTE has changed very little . Funthe General eXchange Format ( GXF ), was relatively simple . It was followed by the Material eXchange Format ( MXF ), a format intended to be extremely flexible and versatile . In retrospect , MXF may have been overly ambitious and offered just too much flexibility . Over the years , MXF has been “ tamed ” by the development of a variety of Operational Patterns ( OPs ) and other constrained versions , and has become the dominant container format for professional video and audio media .
SMPTE ’ s greatest accomplishment for the movie industry has been its role in the development of digital cinema and the many necessary standards . It ’ s not very often one is presented the opportunity to reinvent a 100-year-old business , and that is exactly what the industry did with digital cinema . Starting in the 1990s , new projectors demonstrated the feasibility of high-quality digital projection . Studios and distributors were keen to find an alternative to 35mm release prints for distribution to cinemas . Release prints are expensive to manufacture , expensive to transport , and have only a short useful life — at one point Hollywood was spending in excess of US $ 1 billion per year , creating and distributing release prints .
Some advocated using HDTV standards for D-Cinema distribution . However it was evident to cinematographers that such a system could not convey the necessary contrast range or image subtlety . SMPTE approached digital cinema as a distinct field , in some cases building on technologies developed for television , but with extensive research and development with the clear goal of meeting
Andrew Anderson
Head of Broadcast Operations Seven West Media
APB PANELLISTS
Stan Moote CTO IABM or exceeding the quality that could be achieved with a 35mm print . I recall a key moment during a 2K projector demo with a wet-gate print on one side of a screen and the digital print on the other , when my colleagues and I , and even the “ golden-eyed ” cinematographers , exchanged looks , all thinking , “ We ’ re there !” Since that time , digital cinema has been implemented at a rate that vastly exceeded anyone ’ s expectations . Today , 90 % of screens across the globe are using digital cinema technology .
The development of D-Cinema included a solution to a major problem — the number of versions of a movie that need to be created . Apart from obvious variants such as dialogue language and subtitle language , there are multiple requirements for image format , explicit content , permissible violence and more . The D-Cinema system was designed for a single distribution that includes all unique image , sound and subtitle elements , and a Composition Play List ( CPL ) for each version that orchestrates playout of the correct sequences and combinations for a given version . The versioning issue is even greater in the television industry , and a similar concept was adopted as the core of the Interoperable Master Format ( IMF ) developed in recent years , and that promises to be one of SMPTE ’ s most widely adopted standards .
As SMPTE moves into its next century , the Society enters an era of further dramatic change . Across the broadcast and cinema industries , the shift towards IT-based systems will require that SMPTE provides standards that serve as “ middleware ” — protocols , application programme interfaces ( APIs ), and software . Already , many recent standards are enabling that shift , and further development — including the ongoing creation of the new SMPTE 2110 standard to transport audio and video over IP networks — will pave the way for even broader use of IT hardware-based systems and IP connections for all types of work , real-time or not .
Although I ’ ll no longer enjoy the role of SMPTE staff insider , I look forward to the exciting work ahead . When I think of all advancements that I have seen in the industry during my career , I can ’ t help but believe that this may be a time of even more rapid evolution in technology . The need for SMPTE standards is as strong now , if not stronger , as it ever has been !
Christopher Slaughter
CEO CASBAA