Hollywood Section Meeting Report

HOLLYWOOD SECTION MEETING REPORT

March. 17, 2009

The Hollywood Section’s March 24th meeting entitled “White Gamut – its not just for Polar Bears” was held at the Motion Picture Academy’s Linwood Dunn Theater. More than 90 people attended from both SMPTE and the American Society of Cinematographers.

The evening began with a pre-show reception in the theater’s lobby, with food sponsored by DKP-Imax and Modern Videofilm.

Following the reception the evening’s program started with announcements from section chair Paul Chapman followed by membership coordinator Beverly Pasterczyk who described the recently announced new membership categories.

The meeting was then turned over to the presenters Rod Bogart and

Rick Sayre of Pixar who gave an entertaining and informative presentation on the meeting subject. They first explained a little history of how the issue of projector white gamut came about, and what steps were taken to investigate. They explained how during the 2K/4K comparative sessions held at the Entertainment Technology Center unexpected differences in color were noticed between 2K and 4K projectors. Further investigation revealed consequences of a direct implementation of the minimum gamut of the DC28 reference projector, causing clipping of all white points except calibration white.

A summary of the findings of the SMPTE White Gamut Study Group was given, which resulted in a set of recommended revisions to the DC28 Reference Projector document RP 431-2. They described an informal survey that was done on a number of digital cinema projectors, and explained how proposed changes would affect their performance. Several demonstrations made during the presentation illustrated the effect of potential clipping that can occur without the proposal. They showed that the proposal better preserves the color gamut for both film and digitally originated material, and that an artistically chosen white point can be maintained from mastering through exhibition.

Following this presentation Dan Sherlock from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Science and Technology Council demonstrated and explained the new SMPTE Digital Leader. He explained that it only provides the critical verification of sync between sound and picture, but also provides a wealth of features to verify proper image presentation. It helps with setting screen masking, verifying projector color space and white point settings, evaluating the quality of projector rescaling and filtering and checking the stereoscopic phase.

A short Q&A session with all the presenters followed the presentations. The evening then concluded with Pixar short film “Presto” which was presented on a Barco 2K projector set up with the new ‘virtual white’ calibration.

Submitted,

Paul Chapman

Chair, SMPTE Hollywood section.

5/2/09