NAB2005: Digital Cinema Summit Returns, Thanks to SMPTE, USC

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and the Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California again will team up to present the fourth annual Digital Cinema Summit next month at NAB2005 in Las Vegas. Predicted to be among highlights will be new product announcements based on the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) specifications, along with the issues faced in implementing them through SMPTE standards--as well as the impact of digital cinema on entertainment, technology and theatrical exhibition worldwide. The summit will be held at the LVCC on April 16-17.

SMPTE President Edward Hobson said his group's work to standardize the Digital Cinema specifications "will provide the necessary data for manufacturers to build global, interoperable equipment, and for users to calibrate it. At the summit we will drill down into four components and explain how our standards address the issues they raise."
Speakers will offer an overview of the DCI specs and examine color encoding, security, compression, and packaging components of the standard. Because the transition to digital cinema is a global effort, various panels will look at new digital cinema research in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, and at how digital cinema will be implemented in theatre circuits worldwide.