As
the conversion of theaters to digital infrastructures grows globally, the Society of Motion Picture and Television
Engineers (SMPTE), the world’s leading
developer of motion-imaging standards, today announced two digital cinema
products designed to standardize workflows and ensure a consistent movie-going experience:
the Digital Leader product for post production and the Digital Projection
Verifier (DPROVE) product for theatres. The products both are based on the SMPTE
RP 428-6-2009 Recommended Practice.
“As the digital-cinema
rollout accelerates, there is a critical need for standardized workflows,” said
Barbara Lange, Executive Director of SMPTE. “SMPTE worked with more than 300
people from multiple sectors of the industry to ensure that new these products
provide high-value, interoperable performance across the production-to-display
chain.”
Today’s announcement was
made at the SMPTE 2010 Technical Conference & Expo, the annual gathering of
the world’s leading motion-imaging researchers, scientists, practitioners, and
manufacturers.
Digital
Leader ensures efficient downstream DCDM creation
The new SMPTE Digital Leader
product allows post facilities to add leaders and/or footers to D-Cinema
Distribution Master (DCDM) reels prior to encoding and encryption, thereby facilitating
reliable and efficient downstream digital master creation and quality assurance.
The product features 8- and 4-second head and foot leaders for a full
quality-control check and supports a comprehensive range of aspect ratios and
frame rates. It also provides 2D and 3D support where applicable.
The Digital Leader product
is available on a pre-loaded hard drive with TIFF and WAV files for each
variant.
DPROVE provides easy checks for projection
systems
The SMPTE DPROVE product
addresses a key issue for digital cinema operators: the need for a simple and reliable
tool to check critical parameters such as digital projector performance,
alignment, masking, and picture-sound synchronization. Like the Digital Leader
product, it includes all quality-control parameters and a comprehensive range
of variants. It supports both the JPEG Interop and SMPTE 429-2:2009 (2010)
standards to verify backward and forward compatibility with digital-cinema
servers from multiple manufacturers.
The DPROVE product also
makes it easy for non-engineering personnel to check the health of their
systems. Packaged on a flash-memory drive, it uses standard key-based
encryption to unlock its features. Theatre operators can then set it to perform
one-time or looping sequences for regular confidence checks of their venues.
