NEW YORK—In response to members ’requests to accelerate their work on new technologies, SMPTE has launched a new initiative, the Fast Industry Solution (RIS) and has established plans to provide guidance and educational materials that provide ways to improve and simplify virtual systems. productions.
The initiatives were presented at a recent webinar where SMPTE explained how to accelerate the pace of innovation with the RIS initiative and introduced an advisory panel that will work on its new On Set Virtual Production initiative.
During the webinar, the group highlighted a number of issues the industry faces as virtual production is used more.
These include issues such as interoperability for virtual production technologies, workflows, good practices, the development of a unifying common language, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, the use of higher quality video and audio in virtual productions, the need for better training and the involvement of universities, both in terms of training students and conducting research.
SMPTE President Hans Hoffman, and the head of media foundations and production at the European Broadcasting Union, noted that SMPTE members had been telling the organization that it needed to find ways to speed up its work. about new technologies. The new fast-track solution for the industry addresses these concerns by allowing us to “be more agile and fast, bringing value to the industry on a much faster scale than with the work we’ve done in the past,” Hoffman said. .
The organization chose virtual production as the first RIS effort because the volume of virtual production has exploded and because virtual production was at a time of its development where work on issues such as interoperability, workflows and best practices would provide an immediate benefit to its members and the industry.
“It’s a kind of wild west out there and if you look at virtual production, everyone drives or uses a different kind of transportation, from as simple as a bicycle to an advanced one like a space shuttle,” Kari Grubin explained. consultant and a long-time media and entertainment executive who presented a detailed summary of virtual production and RIS initiatives.
Grubin said that “SMPTE’s role is not to design these vehicles, but to really provide the recommendations and rules of the road to suit any vehicle the creative community chooses to use.”
One of the main challenges the initiative will address is interoperability. “File formats don’t translate to all platforms, there are more than 300 file formats and game engines combined,” Grubin said. “More than half of them are owners, so they don’t necessarily move very easily from one system to another.”
As for the chronology of the effort, Grubin explained that in 2021 they were going to incorporate a project manager and establish the advisory group. Some of the advisors were introduced during the webinar; SMPTE is in the process of recruiting others.
They are also working on the operational structure and are contacting groups and actors in the sector to cross-promote the effort in conferences such as IBC.
“The advisory group will begin to understand what needs to be addressed so that by the full year 2022 we can begin work,” he explained, with plans to “push through the recommendations by the end of 2022 or earlier.”
They will also “examine all available educational information” and make the results, such as a database of interoperability guidelines, available.
Grubin stressed that SMPTE chose virtual production because it was an area that could benefit from the SMPTE experience and because the timing was right.
“The time to do it is now, because the ecosystem has a very large technical and creative flow,” he explained. “It is early enough for us to monitor new developments” and at the same time “take areas that are approaching maturity” to develop a standard or good practices in certain areas that can be used more in virtual production.
SMPTE announced that the first members of the advisory board are:
Raed Al Tikriti, Disguise Product Director
Wyatt Bartel, executive vice president of production at Lux Machina
Des Carey, head of film innovation at Samsung Research America
Chris Swiatek, co-founder and product manager of ICVR
Pat Griffis, vice president of technology, Dolby Laboratories
Chaitanya Chinchlikar, Vice President, Head of Business, CTO and Head of Emerging Markets at Whistling Woods International
David Long, director of the MAGIC Center / MAGIC Spell Studios and professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology
Richard Welsh, Governor General of the SMPTE Board
Looking to the future, Raed Al Tikriti, Disguise’s director of products, noted that “we see significant growth in this space given all the benefits that virtual production offers” and that the content that is produced “is growing and demanding ”with improved video formats and audio systems.
This is causing people to push the envelope with new technologies and make “the ability to collaborate to create content increasingly important,” he said.
This also highlights “the need for interoperability between content creation tools,” he added.
Des Carey, head of film innovation at Samsung Research America, noted that “COVID has been brutal for everyone, but on a positive note … I think it’s been a very innovative time.”
Over the next three years, Carey added that Samsung “takes everything we know about post-production, theatrical exposure, home screens and carrying [that knowledge] in virtual production ”to achieve more consistency.
Chris Swiatek, co-founder and head of product at ICVR, agreed. “I think we’ll really see the formation of a more standardized content channeling between real-time engines and stages, and most importantly bring those resources up to VFX publishing,” he said. “Doing this … without loss of visual fidelity or metadata … will be really important.”
Swiatek also stressed that “seamlessly mixing virtual and real environments” will be more important as virtual LED wall production is adopted.
Richard Welsh, Governor General of SMPTE Board, added that augmented reality will become more important because it can reduce the cost of productions and at the same time reduce travel, which will reduce carbon footprints. “This is a very important focus of all studies,” Welsh said.
These trends will also accelerate production because they will involve fewer trips. “Without a doubt, we will achieve a much faster delivery of content [and give]… to independent filmmakers the opportunity to open the limits of what they do in terms of the environments they can film ”.
Chaitanya Chinchlikar, vice president, head of business, CTO and head of emerging markets at Whistling Woods International, noted that from an academic perspective the effort would help them educate students on new technologies and participate in “technological research that will benefit the industry “.
The full webinar is available here.