At the beginning of the year, Rich Welsh, senior vice president with Deluxe, was appointed the new president of Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), succeeding Renard Jenkins. Rich recently spoke with TV Tech during the 2025 Spring TV Tech Leadership Summit. An edited transcript follows.

TV Tech: Congratulations on your new appointment, Rich. Can you tell us a little about yourself?
Rich Welsh: I’ve been on the board of SMPTE for about 12 years in total, although not continuously, and more recently, on the senior side of the board.

Becoming president of SMPTE, I can't believe it, somehow it's not the sort of thing that I would have even imagined when I started my career. But I've learned a lot about the industry and the mechanics. I think what drives me now to do this, is to help bring new talent in and develop that understanding of the different areas of the industry that people can be in, and also to help nurture the talent that is going to invent the new technologies we will be using in the future. So yeah, it's been an interesting journey for me, a fairly winding path, and none of it planned. But I've loved every minute of my career so far, and I can't imagine doing anything else.

TVT: In addition to you, SMPTE also has a new director as well?
RW: Yes, Sally D'Amato. Sally is exceptional. We have worked together for a long time. She's been there a lot longer than I've been on the board, and, in fact, probably longer than I've been a member. She has really grown with the organization over the last couple of decades, and I was delighted that we chose her to be our new Executive Director.

Sally and I really believe in the same things in terms of the future of SMPTE and how we should get there. And I don't know anyone who has such deep and wide knowledge of SMPTE, and not just the mechanics of it and how it works, but a lot of the history, and she's able to help guide us as a board to make sure that we're understanding the history of what we're doing, as well as trying to plan for the future.

TVT: Do you think the name SMPTE still accurately describes what its members are?
RW: The acronym is used a lot, and sometimes people don't know what it is, but I actually think we're somewhat broader than that these days, and we've debated whether we should change the name. It has changed in the past as well but it means so much more than just motion pictures and television these days.

TVT: What do you think is the public’s impression of SMPTE regarding standards these days?
RW: Standards are a core part of SMPTE, and it's why we started. So for those who don't know, Charles Francis Jenkins, who started SMPTE, originally standardized 35mm film so he was the person looked at all the different formats out there, and came up with the initial standard of 35mm being the gauge, 24 frames a second, four perforations. And this led to the standardization and projection, which obviously then meant films could be played the world over. I mean, it's incredible to think back in 1916 we started a worldwide standard for media delivery, something that we still work on today.

And I think this speaks to why standards are so important. If you think about just watching video on your TV, laptop, mobile or tablet, these things aren't possible without standards, so it's it's really important still that we have standards organizations like SMPTE.

I completely take on board the thought that the standards take many years to create and honestly, a while ago, that was true—it's difficult to shake off that reputation once you've got it. We are much more nimble now; we can produce standards more quickly. Standards are not one giant, monolithic thing for any particular application, they have to be much more modular, and we have to be more flexible in the way in which we're able to update them and swap parts out. The modern suites of standards coming out of SMPTE have developed more quickly, and they are much more flexible to change with the rapidly changing technology environment that we're in today.

TVT: What are some of the more interesting standards SMPTE is working on now?
RW: We're still working quite heavily on a video over IP, obviously, that's a huge transition for the broadcast industry, and as we move to more cloud-based environments, that's just going to become more and more important to other parts of the industry, like film and TV, TV production.

There are parts of the industry we’re very familiar with, and other parts are not so much—or there's certainly technical barriers. So another suite of standards—IMF for interoperable master format—is used extensively for mezzanine masters, and we've recently bridged between that and digital cinema and introduced the PDCDM standard.

It's going to be very niche, but it's one that's close to my heart, because it's basically taking the kind of IMF thinking around JPEG encoding at a high quality level—so actually lossless JPEG for a master that is now, then half the size, and also using high throughput JPEG2000, which means it can be encoded and decoded very quickly. And this is really useful in the film production chain to get the Digital Intermediate over to the mastering houses that are going to make the original and then all the different foreign language versions and so on. I think we're still in draft, and we're going to release that, publish it fully in the very near future, but it's already being used.

Standards allow commercial deployment of tools that help us as an industry operate better, be more efficient, and actually push technology forward as well and allow us to do new things that we couldn't do before. It gives filmmakers more flexibility to be creative and try new things.

TVT: In terms of Hollywood, you’ve described AI as a “ticking time bomb.” Can you elaborate?
RW: Actually I described AI as a ticking time bomb or a gold mine and I think it's both. Actually, it is a huge opportunity for new revenues and more efficiency and a new creative palette, actually. So on the opportunity side, I actually see this as a the bigger story here, but we should be mindful that we're in a bit of an ethical and legal minefield right now with AI and I think you we need, as an industry, to get to grips with, not only quite rapidly changing legislation, but also the question of what's ethical, and I don't just mean replacing jobs, because I think that's what people run to straight away when you talk about AI.

I really don't see that as a long term problem in the way that any other technology has not really destroyed jobs. Certainly some processes have been automated but typically, new jobs appear as a result of automation of other processes.

On the ethical side, I think we as an industry are trying to come to an agreement with is this: How can we make sure that when we train AI, we do so responsibly in terms of the content going in. Is it properly licensed? Is it available with the blessing of the creator of that content? Or is it rights managed so that we can compensate people for the use of their creative works in training?

I think that's really important and obviously for the studios, that's a really big challenge. Because on the one hand, there's a lot of information out there on the internet; it's very hard to stop anyone from accessing that and building models with it. But having a responsible, ethically sourced data set for your model is becoming more and more important, and it's even becoming a selling point for a lot of these AI providers.

The legislative part of that is probably more challenging, but it's in flux. So again, it's difficult to know where we should go, but I feel like it's pointing towards a change in the way copyright is handled to again allow rights to be tracked all the way through both the training of models and then inference the output of models, so that you can see, for instance, if the output of a model used certain components of a data set.

So you could even say that, “yes, this copyright material was used in this particular output of the model.” Now that then leads to a potential compensation methodology where people get paid when the output of the model uses their creative work as part of the development of that output. So obviously the commercial structures around that are super complicated, but we have to think about these things and just be fair and equitable to everybody in the chain.

TVT: The NAB Show is a big event for our industry. What are SMPTE’s plans for the show?
RW: AI is going to be pretty high on the list. We have the Future Of Cinema conference where we will be covering AI in film production, but we'll also be looking at other topics around cinema, as we do every year.

NAB is a really big show for us as you can imagine. It's a good opportunity for us to meet our members and reach out to our constituents and hopefully also encourage people to join simply and get involved. I'm looking forward to encouraging younger members of our community to get involved because, they’re the lifeblood of any organization like ours.

Watch the keynote in its entirety on the TV Tech Leadership Summit, now on demand.

Rich Welsh has announced he has been appointed president of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE).

He succeeds Renard Jenkins, who has come to the end of his two-year tenure in the role. Welsh will serve as president from January 2025 to December 2026.

Writing on LinkedIn, Welsh said: “I look forward to working with my colleagues in this great organization, all the amazing talent in the industry and everywhere media touches to unleash creativity for our artists, ensure integrity for our media and deliver the best possible experiences to audiences everywhere in the world.”

Welsh was appointed SMPTE’s executive vice president in 2023 and has now moved up to the organization’s top role.

SMPTE is currently on the hunt for a new executive director, with Sally-Ann D’Amato stepping into the role of interim executive director last October.

This article initially appeared on TV Tech sister brand Radio World.

Shortly before the start of the SMPTE 2016 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition, NewBay editors spoke with Richard Welsh about his plans as the incoming Education Vice President for SMPTE.

TV TECHNOLOGY: What is your first order of business as the new Education Vice President for SMPTE?

RICHARD WELSH: SMPTE has a solid education program that is a key element of the organization's leadership in the industry. My first job is to make sure all the support and expertise remains in place to maintain the high standards SMPTE's education team is known for. That said, I want to hit the ground running and bring a group of diverse and strong individuals together to make sure we stay ahead of the pack with our work in education.

TVT:Are there topics/areas of knowledge you think SMPTE should focus on expanding right away?

RW: I believe the media industry is about to move into a new phase of connectivity—not just in terms of the way content reaches consumers, but in the way the systems, processes and content itself is all interconnected with the wider world. We have huge opportunities in the areas of multidimensional experiences, hyper-scale data, artificial intelligence applications. These are affecting almost all industries now and SMPTE is at an ideal juncture in its hundredth year to look forward, not months, but many years and even decades. Our education program is as much about inspiring the next generation of creative engineers to build the technologies and artistic tools of the future as it is learning about what is happening right now.

TVT: Are there educational methods—online resources, webinars, etc.—that you intend to utilize to a greater degree than SMPTE has previously?

RW: I think we make good use of many technologies including online already, but there is always room for improvement. I am keen to look at how we enrich the experience of SMPTE's education resources. For instance, the webinars are currently limited to a fairly two-dimensional experience—a webcast where the presenters and audience are all individually accessing the session through their computer. I'd love to see the webinar sessions take place with a live audience (maybe as part of a section meeting) and be webcast live. How about that in VR? I'm sure this would be a very engaging way to experience what has, in the past, been simply slides and an audio feed over the web.

TVT: The term “engineer” encompasses many more types of work than it did even quite recently, with much more happening in software and IT-based environments. How do you see SMPTE further expanding its educational arm to address this changing tech environment/workplace?

RW: We probably need to recognize what that role translates to in those fields. Software engineers are giving way to dev-ops in the IT world and anyone serious about moving "all-in" to an IP/software-based media environment will need to understand the new paradigm of the flexible engineer/operator that is becoming pervasive in IT. SMPTE is uniquely placed to identify the key attributes needed and define the next generation of media savvy coding ninjas. The hacker-filmmaker will rule the (media) world in the future.

TVT: How do you plan to extend education beyond the physical classroom/conference room? How do you reach the next generation of engineers and engage them?

RW: I think we need to embrace new thinking about the consumption habits of the up-and-coming SMPTE membership. We're great at long-form learning, but I think building a library of highly focused short-form learning would help us engage better. This could extend to many media formats and be highly searchable and extensible. I'd love SMPTE members to be able to tap a huge volume of learning resources that would adapt the content and build a custom experience for each individual. This probably looks like a huge task on face value, but the SMPTE members of the future are born of a generation that have come to expect a highly tailored experience from their entertainment content—why not their SMPTE experience too? 

Richard Welsh is co-founder and CEO of Sundog Media Toolkit Ltd. Welsh has worked in the cinema industry since 1999. He has been involved in various technology development work during this time, primarily in digital cinema and is named on patents in the area of visual perception of 3D. He started the cloud software company Sundog in 2013, which specializes in scalable post-production software tools aimed at high-end broadcast and movie productions.

LAS VEGAS—TV Technology asked a cross-section of NAB Show-goers a series of five questions regarding what they considered the main themes, evidence of those, whether or not these initiatives will take hold, and what promising technologies from past NAB Shows did not see daylight. (A complete list of quotes from respondents and links to their full 5Qs is at “NAB 2016 in 21 Quotes.”)

Richard Welsh, chair of 2016 NAB Show’s Future of Cinema Conference, co-chair of HPA Tech Retreat U.K., CEO of Sundog Media Toolkit:
Q1.How many NAB Shows have you attended?
R.W. Eight.

Q2.What, in your opinion, were the main themes of the show this year?
R.W. VR/360 degree capture, cloud everything, HDR. 

Q3.What were some examples of these themes?
R.W. Lots of 360-degree camera rigs on display, from all big-name camera manufacturers such as BlackMagic, GoPro, Canon etc., plus lots of stitching technology to transform 360 into VR such as SilverDraft. The launch of the Lytro Cinema camera is a step change in camera technology, the like of which hasn’t been seen since the move from black and white to color. This may have a huge influence on future camera design in general and in particular on “scene-based” capture facilitating VR.
There were a raft of DAM/MAM solutions and storage systems with cloud-based offerings, and big file transfer software vendors (Aspera, Signiant, FileCatalyst) offering integration to the major cloud providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud etc).
Lot’s of OTT and pop-up playout solutions leveraging cloud, and a big shift of focus to cloud software from on-premises. Even traditional hardware manufacturers were offering (behind the scenes) their boxes in the cloud by making their hardware available on-demand in data-centers.

Q4.Do you foresee any or all of these technologies or initiatives taking hold?
R.W. VR has the furthest to go but it’s obvious HDR and cloud-based media management/processing are here in a big way.

Q5.What technology that impressed you most at a past show didn’t see the light of day?
R.W. Not sure I’ve seen anything I liked that didn’t make it.

HOLLYWOOD, CALIF.—Shortly before the start of the SMPTE 2015 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition, TV Technology spoke with Richard Welsh about his upcoming session “Utilising Massive Compute Resource in Public Cloud for Complex Image Processing Applications.”

TV TECHNOLOGY: What kind of compute power are we talking here, and what is untenable for the average post-production facility?

Richard Welsh
RICHARD WELSH: A recent job we had, processing a 50-minute UHD natural history documentary, ran for four hours on just over 5,000 processors. We could have run that job in real time if we had split it up more, and that would have taken us up to more than 20,000 processors for one hour (there was no rush to get the job back in real time).

A really big VFX house may have 20,000 processors in a render farm, and they may have several of those around the world, but they are running 24/7 on multi-million pound (£) budget VFX jobs. Try soaking up their entire render farm for the odd hour here or there when you feel like it — unlikely. For the average facility, the capital expenditure required for a render farm setup with multi-tens of thousands of processors, and all the required storage, networking, power, cooling and ongoing cost of maintenance is pretty much impossible to justify. Post-production margins are squeezed tighter than ever; and in that environment, when it comes to compute and storage expansion, all roads are now tending to lead to cloud.

TVT: What are some applications and options that cloud computing can provide that were previously unavailable?

WELSH: We're seeing that customers are really positive about the on-demand nature of cloud, and elasticity that it offers. You can dip in and out on tiny jobs without risking the capital expenditure on a box that gathers dust 90 percent of the time. Then when the time comes you can scale to meet huge demand for a short period of time, where the cap-ex spend to meet that demand would be huge for the sake of one or two weeks’ work.

We're seeing huge uptake of transcoding services in the cloud, as an example. It makes a lot of sense to be able to trickle jobs through transcoders during quiet periods; and yet not have to manage the flood every time a new title, or library comes in that needs a generic process. Also, on the video on-demand/ IPTV side, the ability to deploy new channels or upgrade existing ones (from HD to UHD for example) is really compelling. Of course, you can't start another Netflix tomorrow, but the ability to effectively have "pop-up" video channels in the cloud is grabbing the attention of traditional broadcasters. It's almost a saturated market at the top end, so it has reached maturity very quickly compared to other areas.

At our end of the market (post-production) take-up of cloud has been somewhat slower. We're seeing that change now with big post-production hardware names making moves into the cloud. In setting up Sundog a couple of years ago we made a conscious decision to go for the post production niche, and part of that rationale was the ability to productize new processes that were effectively R&D code. We knew that building a platform was a big task, building all the tools from scratch on top didn't make sense. We spoke to lots of big name manufacturers about putting their tools into Sundog. Normally, that product cycle takes many months, if not years. We have gotten to the point now that we can sometimes deploy new tools in weeks. We have several third-party manufacturers already in the system including Dolby and Digital Vision. A couple of the new processes we have that are not available elsewhere are RealD's TrueImage process and a high-accuracy stereoscopic disparity mapping technique, also from RealD. Those tools would have taken much longer to come to market without cloud. Additionally, deploying these tools in a wider platform has enabled us to build other tools around them, such as fully automatic 3D subtitle placement for 3D movies.

TVT: You are using “an iterative motion-compensated, super-resolution pixel reconstruction technique” by way of illustration. How much of a demand is there for this particular technique?

WELSH: The technique referred to is the RealD TrueImage process. This is brand new to the industry so it's too early to tell what the mature market will look like. However, we're currently processing jobs on a couple of big Hollywood feature films, with more in the pipeline. At the same time, we've run the process on restoration footage, low-budget indie movies, and wildlife documentaries. Evolutions Television in Bristol, U.K. is a leading post house for natural history work and they have really embraced this process as a core part of their work on high-end content, particularly UHD/4K work. Evolutions just ran TrueImage on "Jago: A Life Underwater", which won the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival's "Grand Teton" prize. So we're seeing take-up from all sides where people are really concerned with getting the best possible quality out of their pictures.

The technique is hugely sophisticated, but delivers spectacular results. The development team at RealD cut their teeth with TrueImage on Peter Jackson's “Hobbit” movies (before Sundog was involved). The productions were struggling with camera noise that was exacerbated by shooting at high frame rate. This is bread and butter for TrueImage — in simple terms it takes noise out while reconstructing detail in the image. You have to see it to believe it; we've had nothing but positive feedback so far. The downside on face value is that the process is so complex it looked impractical in a normal post-production environment. However, when we looked at deploying this process in the cloud it became apparent that this was a way to keep the complexity that makes TrueImage so good and deliver in reasonable timescales.

TVT: You say this type of processing is not without “pitfalls” and “practical limits.” Such as?

WELSH: The sophistication in the TrueImage technique lies in the fact that each pixel is reconstructed by reference to millions of other pixels in space, time and through color channels. The result is that each image frame is referencing trillions of data points during processing. This means hardcore machines and a tonne of attached RAM. We utilize Amazon Web Services' most RAM intensive machines for this process, and it turns out that when you start looking to spin up hundreds of these for an hour or two here and there, you have to pick and choose your data centers. The total RAM on the aforementioned natural history documentary totaled over 15 Terabytes. We have been processing some 120fps 3D 4K footage, and the equivalent length of content on that would require 50,000 processors with 150 Terabytes of RAM. We don't control or have visibility of our customer's workflows so we need to be ready for worst-case scenario because big jobs always seem to come along at the same time. We want to be comfortable that the automatic scaling functions in the Sundog platform won't hit the endstops. For that reason, we prefer to run in the largest Amazon data center available in the same geography as our customer's facility. That gives us the flexibility to call such massive resource in a short timescale.

TVT: What aspects of post production are most likely to be cloud-based going forward?

WELSH: There isn't really anything that's off the table in the future. Right now connectivity is one of the big limiting factors, but the cost is falling rapidly; available bandwidth is going up; and the business models of enterprise class telecom's providers are changing to match the on-demand nature of cloud with on-demand bandwidth.

I think it will still be a few years before we see live color grading or playback of uncompressed 4K high frame-rate content where all the processing and data are in the cloud. I have no doubt that eventually that will become mainstream. But in the meantime there are so many new formats coming down the line that all need more compute, more storage, more network capacity. Scalability of all these things is a core benefit of cloud infrastructure.

With super high resolution, high frame rate, high dynamic range and wide color gamut, virtual reality, augmented reality, holographic image and so much more all coming down the track at speed, cloud is going to be at the cutting edge of the next generation of processing and delivery of entertainment media. What we will see is that it makes more and more sense to push as far back up the process towards the content capture/creation with cloud applications. Where that stops remains to be seen, but there's no reason not to expect even high-end cinematography cameras to stream their data straight to the cloud in the future. Then the content stays in the cloud until it goes to the audience, be that in the cinema, the home, tablets, phones, eyewear or something else we haven't thought of yet!

Richard Welsh is co-founder and CEO of Sundog Media Toolkit Ltd. He serves on the board of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) as International Governor for EMEA, Central and South America. Welsh has worked in the cinema industry since 1999. He has been involved in various technology development work during this time, primarily in digital cinema and is named on patents in the area of visual perception of 3D. He started cloud software company Sundog in 2013, which specializes in scalable post-production software tools aimed at high-end broadcast and movie productions.