HITS

Members of the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) will be out in force at the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) Tech Retreat, Feb. 19-23 in Palm Desert, Calif.

Many MESA members will be exhibiting as part of the Tech Retreat Innovation Zone. Some members will be among the speakers during the Tech Retreat’s conference program.
The annual event is an informal gathering that brings together the thinkers and doers of the content creation industry for five days of connection and engagement.

The focus is on technology, from all aspects of digital cinema, post-production, film, TV, video and related technologies for the exchange of information.

Here’s what MESA members plan for the event:

Adobe
Adobe is a sponsor of the HPA Tech Retreat. Additionally, the Adobe team will be showing demos in the Innovation Zone and participating in some of the breakfast roundtables.

Adobe will be demonstrating Project Cloak (previously shown as a sneak preview at the Adobe MAX 2017 conference) and the 360/virtual reality editing capabilities in Premiere Pro, it said. Cloak is “content-aware- fill for video,” and is powered by Adobe Sensei, the company’s AI and machine learning platform, it said.

Cloak helps users to remove unwanted elements from a video by imagining what would appear if those unwanted things were removed, it said.

Advantage Video Systems
Advantage Video Systems president Jeffrey Stansfield will be speaking and running the roundtable “Workflows for Post on Set.” He will be part of a panel speaking on ways to cut cost and save time on sets, touching on subjects including Production Asset Management, file transfer systems, on-set central storage, artificial Intelligence (AI) and leasing innovations for productions, he said. His tour table, meanwhile, will focus on building an asset management team and “developing good DAM governance and taxonomy,” he told MESA.

Aspera
IBM division Aspera will be focusing on stream management, endpoint discovery and centralized configuration at the Innovation Zone. “The ability to register, discover, and configure endpoint devices are all important aspects in the ongoing management of streams in live IP-based video transport solutions and complex post workflows,” it said ahead of the event. “This becomes especially important for remote contribution scenarios where WAN and Cloud configurations are involved. However, to date, existing standards have paid little attention to the on-boarding and long-term management aspects of video over IP,” it said.

At the Innovation Zone, Aspera “will outline and demonstrate an architecture for stream management, device discovery and centralized device configuration using several standards based technologies,” it said, adding: “Supporting the AMWA NMOS Discovery and Registration Specification (IS-04), the goal is to enable a device to be shipped between locations and automatically ‘call home’ to obtain its configuration from a central location such as a broadcast center—thus reducing or eliminating the need for manual intervention and skilled personnel onsite.”

Avid and Microsoft Azure
Avid won’t have any speakers at the event this year, but it will be co-sponsoring the event at the platinum level with Microsoft, who will also be joining Avid in the Innovation Zone. At booth #B21, the companies will be focused on moving media workflow into the cloud, “showcasing the latest innovations powered by” Avid and Microsoft, Avid said. Demonstrations will include: Avid MediaCentral editorial management, Avid MediaCentral featuring Microsoft Cognitive Services, Avid NEXIS with SSD Media Packs for 4K mastering workflows, Microsoft Surface Studio and Hub featuring Avid Media Composer, and Microsoft Azure Data Box for transferring data to Azure, Avid said.

Fortium
Fortium will present its latest tools and strategies for protecting sensitive media content. Company representatives will demonstrate the latest version of MediaSeal, its advanced access control content security solution, with the new Live Folder encryption on-the fly feature, in the Innovation Zone, it said. Employed by studios, independent producers, post-production facilities and others worldwide, MediaSeal “protects sensitive pre-release media during post-production, dubbing, localization and review, reducing the risk from cybercrime, accidental distribution and piracy,” the company said, noting it’s a member of HPA’s IMF User group and will be demonstrating in the Innovation Zone’s section for IMF User Group members.

Also, Fortium CEO Mathew Gilliat-Smith will host two breakfast roundtable events on cybersecurity. In a session titled “Production Security for Risk Reduction,” Gilliat-Smith will discuss strategies that studios and other content producers can use to reduce the risk of piracy and protect content throughout the production cycle, Fortium said. It’s scheduled for Feb. 21 at 7:30 a.m.

In a session titled “Cybercrime is Worse: Here’s Help,” Gilliat-Smith will discuss the expanding scope of cyber threats and describe what media companies can do to can avoid becoming victims, Fortium said. It’s scheduled for Feb. 22 at 7:30 a.m. “Even behind a firewall the threat of cybercrime is real, and every company needs to take the threat seriously,” Gilliat-Smith said ahead of the event. “It’s essential both to understand the nature and scale of the threat, and to take sensible measures to protect sensitive content,” he said.

MediaSeal combines AES encryption with multi-layer access control and security auditing. Files are encrypted at-rest locally, centrally or in the cloud — an MPAA and CDSA guideline, Fortium noted. Editors and reviewers can work on media securely, within segregated networks, with access control permissions managed across entire workflows, supported by comprehensive audit trails of user activity, it said, pointing out MediaSeal is “used on many of the current top TV and motion picture titles.” MediaSeal supports the IMF standard and protects all media formats from Pro Res to QT seamlessly in all editing workflows: Pro Tools, Media Composer, Premier and Final Cut, Fortium said, adding it will demonstrate new encryption on-the-fly with Live Folders.

GrayMeta and 5th Kind
GrayMeta will have a booth (C11) in the Innovation Zone showing both of its solutions, Platform and Iris, the company said. Also, on Feb. 19, GrayMeta CTO John Motz will join other AI experts to discuss where AI is headed, on the “AI Vision Panel: What Will Happen and When?” at 4:15 p.m. In a description of the session on the event’s web site, HPA quoted Yogi Berra’s line: “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” HPA added: “Without a goal, without a vision, without a road map, advances are achieved by chance. Find out from this esteemed panel of artificial intelligence visionary experts where AI may be headed and how they envision the future of AI.” Also speaking on the panel will be 5th Kind CEO Steve Cronan.

HGST
HGST parent company Western Digital (WD) will be “focused on C4 integration work” that it’s doing, Erik Weaver, global director of media & entertainment strategy and market development, told MESA.

In a blog post about his company’s presence at the Retreat, he said: “From cloud to AI, to UHD and direct view cinema, there’s a rapid and monumental data transformation” in media & entertainment (M&E). “The industry is generating ever-increasing amounts of data due to higher resolutions, VR, HDR and new AI initiatives. We’re seeing data evolving as fast as it’s growing. To keep up with these changes we’ve seen several transformations. What started with traditional storage infrastructures recently evolved to adopt cloud resources and software-defined architectures. Now we are seeing a third transformation towards nimble and collaborative workflows that remove previous brittleness and extensive human intervention.”

He added: “As production workflows extend across multiple clouds, geographic locations, hardware, software tools and teams, a key problem arises in organizing and managing these assets across such a wide domain. File system structures have been created to easily help us (humans) manage, find, and identify data. But their structure also imposes severe limitations of naming conventions and strict file paths. If one studio organizes their files in one way and another production company organizes their files in a different way, it takes a lot of manual work to get them working on the same files and being able to track changes to those files, and access them over time.”

A “very fundamental enabling tool that recently became a SMPTE standard” is the C4 ID, he went on to say, explaining: “Just as KEYCODES (or edge codes) were used in film production to link edits and other data back to an exact frame on the original negatives, C4 IDs are unique fingerprints of digital files that provide a way to track files and the relationships between them. The C4 ID system is an ID that has a standard format. It is unique for each file and is not affected by filename, location, or time, and it can’t be faked. You will have the same C4 ID for the same file; even if it’s called something different, and even if you got it from a different source. The C4 ID will always remain the same for all users, anywhere.”

WD is “in a unique position with our family of brands,” including HGST, that deliver solutions for every step of the workflow,” he said.

NexGuard/Kudelski Group
At the Innovation Zone, NexGuard will showcase its “latest advancement for end-to-end content protection of high value content,” with the following product demonstrations:

J2K/IMF watermarking to secure post-production workflows:

–There is a growing trend for using J2K/IMF as a mezzanine format in pre-release workflow.
–NexGuard recently completed support of the J2K codec in the NexGuard File Embedder, with GPU acceleration and the Comprimato J2K encoder/decoder for optimized performances.
–The demo at HPA is a proof of concept, and the company said it will release the product if content owners and post-houses are interested in deploying J2K/IMF watermarking in their pre-release workflow.
–The demo will include the forensic watermarking of J2K/IMF packages, up to Ultra High-Def (UHD) resolution. This step is fully managed with the NexGuard V2 Manager, thus can be automated in post-production workflow (via integration of the NexGuard Manager API into a Media Asset Management).
–The NexGuard R&D team is also working on the integration of the ProRes 444 codec, another key mezzanine format for pre-release workflow. The company will be able to support ProRes 444 in the NexGuard File Embedder “in the coming months,” it said.

On-the-fly watermarking to secure high-speed content distribution:

–The NexGuard File Delivery product is the other innovation that it will demonstrate at the HPA event.
–The product was released just a few months ago, and NexGuard conducted a webinar with Aspera in November about it.
–The NexGuard File Delivery product is based on a two-step watermarking workflow consisting of a single per asset preprocessing, followed by an instantaneous watermark embedding at file delivery. It supports ProRes 422, XDCAM 422 and H264.

NexGuard “worked very closely with Aspera to have a tight integration into the Aspera Enterprise Server and Faspex, for a seamless forensic watermarking as video files are transferred at high speed,” NexGuard said.

NexGuard will also have studio trailers on display to show its “close relationship” with the Hollywood studios and content owners, it said.

Pixelogic and Dolby
Although Pixelogic and Dolby won’t be exhibiting at the Innovation Zone, they are both scheduled to be well-represented during the conference. As HPA president, Seth Hallen, who is also Pixelogic SVP of global strategy & business development, will be giving the traditional welcome remarks the morning of Feb. 21. He will then be moderating a panel Feb. 22 on “HDR Flavors.” Scheduled speakers for that panel include Pat Griffis, Dolby VP-technology from the office of the CTO.

Signiant
Signiant will demonstrate “new, innovative capabilities that expand the value of its products within the media industry,” the company said. New innovations on display will “greatly build” on its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform and help media and entertainment companies “of all sizes speed up their operations by leveraging Signiant’s patented file acceleration technology, as well as by automating and simplifying file transfer workflows,” it said in a news release.

The technology enhancements to its SaaS platform will enable “professional media assets to be viewed in an adaptive bitrate format without generating a proxy in advance of the play request,” the company said. The demonstration will leverage transfer acceleration technology and cloud-native design “to ensure a highly responsive end user experience without additional customer-deployed hardware or software,” it said.

“This technology has the potential to help users make better and faster decisions when transferring media,” Signiant CTO Ian Hamilton said in the announcement. “As file sizes continue to grow, it is increasingly helpful to be able to easily confirm that a file contains the desired content prior to transfer, thereby ensuring that valuable time and network resources are not wasted,” he said. Hamilton will be on-site at the Retreat to provide a sneak preview of the new innovations, as well as to discuss the “breadth of technology and capabilities across Signiant’s entire product line,” the company said.

Sohonet
Sohonet will participate in a panel during the Retreat’s supersession and in demonstrations in the Innovation Zone, it said.  CEO Chuck Parker will be a featured panelist for a supersession panel Feb. 20, where the discussion will focus on the many workflow options creative and technical communities have to choose from, the company said in a news release. The supersession, “It’s Still Snowing and We’re Just Making Bigger and Better Snowmen,” will cover workflows over a wide spectrum of content creation and explore what it takes to get all this complex content to audiences, Sohonet said.

“It’s hard to dispute the changes, demands, and often flat-out confusion around new workflows and formats,” Parker said in the announcement. “We cannot deny the incredible improvements and opportunities for creative vision,” he said, adding: “We’re honored to play a part in the HPA Tech Retreat and contribute our experience to the conversation.”

Sohonet was again selected to participate in the Innovation Zone, a curated environment where emerging and important technologies are presented. Sohonet will introduce the newest release of ClearView Flex, a real-time remote collaboration solution capable of streaming to any device with only two frames of delay, it said. ClearView Flex was “designed specifically for the modern media workflow with the kind of security that studios demand,” it said. Also to be demonstrated by Sohonet are recent enhancements to FileRunner, its accelerated file-transfer tool that it said “allows unlimited transfer of files of any size, and easy 100% browser-based usage — without user need for installing servers or client-side software.”

Sony
Sony will demonstrate a variety of products and services at the Retreat, “from the latest in high end full frame acquisition to technologies that combine to form cohesive ‘camera-to- Cloud–to archive’ solutions,” it said ahead of the event. On display will be VENICE, Sony’s next-generation motion picture camera system, featuring a Full Frame 24x36mm image sensor, refined color science, 8-step internal mechanical ND filter system and user removable sensor block.

As wireless streaming workflows to the cloud become more important, Sony’s camcorders have built in wireless proxy video transmission that it noted “can be automatically made available in Ci (Sony’s collaborative Cloud Solution), registered in Media Backbone NavigatorX for media management and sent to Sony Media Cloud Services, Ci, for long-term cloud archive and Optical Disc Archive for on-prem archive.” Sony said: “This solution represents the latest in efficiency and flexibility combing camera to cloud with media management and
archiving.”

Technicolor 
Technicolor will offer a High Dynamic Range (HDR) demo in partnership with Cobalt Digital in the Innovation Zone, at booth D14, Technicolor said.

Following a “successful single-truck HDR broadcast in partnership with” Sportsnet, Technicolor and Cobalt will demonstrate a “fully-integrated product with this technology that fits well into the broadcast workflow and is available in multiple versions to meet broadcaster’s needs,” Technicolor said in a statement.

The demo will showcase commercial products that implemented the same Technicolor algorithms used for a Los Angeles Dodgers broadcast from last July, the company said, adding: “By integrating Technicolor HDR Intelligent Tone Management (ITM) in the workflow, all SDR video feeds are up-converted to HDR to complete the mix in HDR.” Cobalt Digital launched the first converters in the U.S. to embed Technicolor HDR ITM, Technicolor pointed out.

ThinkLogical
ThinkLogical will demonstrate its latest innovations at the Retreat. They include:
TLX uncompressed 4K video and KVM extension and switching, supporting 4K and UHD video at up to 4,096 x 2,160 resolution, 4:4:4 color depth, 30-bits per pixel at 60Hz frame rate, using only two-fiber optic or CATx cables. TLX matrix switches are scalable from 12 to 640 ports.

New zero-latency 4K private cloud editing solution for VFX and post: Thinklogical “makes the efficiency and cost savings of cloud editing a reality with a new, uncompressed 4K-capable solution supporting all popular VFX and post applications and workflows,” it said.

The introduction of an all-In-one solution For virtual desktop: The new TLX client integration module from Thinklogical “combines a full-featured virtual machine processor with a high-performance” 10Gbps KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) extender, “eliminating the need for a separate thin client device” in virtual desktop applications, it said.

Veritone

Logan Ketchum, director of strategic development of Veritone will join speakers from Amazon Web Services, Deluxe Entertainment Services Group and FaceCake in the Monday, Feb. 19 discussion “Novel AI Implementations: Real World AI Case Studies.” Ketchum will be joined by Paul Roberts, senior solutions architect for media and entertainment with Amazon Web Services; Linda Smith of CEO, FaceCake; and Greg Taieb, senior director of localization product development for Deluxe Entertainment Services Group.