White Papers

Presented at 142^nd SMPTE Technical Conference

• "Considerations for Moving to a Video Server Based Facility" by Roger Crooks, director, Profile^® business development. Moving to a video server-based environment requires an analysis of a facility's total workflow. Without understanding the big picture, it's easy to make a costly mistake. This presentation will help highlight the right questions to ask and looks at the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches.
• "Management of the Aspect Ratio Transition" by Peter Symes, manager, advanced technology. Several discussions have addressed the issue of producing original programming suitable for both 16x9 and 4x3 delivery, but little has been said on the subject of transitioning the broadcast facility. This presentation will examine the issues and some possible ways to approach the problems and offer a framework for broadcasters to select strategies appropriate to a particular situation.
• "4:4:4 Compression of Moving Pictures for Digital Cinema Using the MPEG-2 Toolkit" by Michael Bruns, principal engineer and James Whittlesey, senior hardware engineer. Image compression is used in digital cinema distribution to make a movie's visual content more practical to transport, store, and assemble. The scope of compression techniques provided in the MPEG-2 toolkit are broad enough to meet today's picture quality expectations of digital cinema theatrical presentations with enhancements in rate control, 4:4:4 chroma format color space, and greater color precision than the profiles that are defined for television.
• "A Platform for Constructing Distributed Asset Management Systems" by Steve Bilow, product marketing manager, media software products. With television's transition to digital comes the requirement to manage a variety of distributed assets. A facility-wide management system must oversee these assets--even if the creation and storage systems already include smaller-scale management tools. The greatest chance for success is through tools that allow a variety of systems to collaborate.