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Students learning or practicing broadcast technology at Santo Tomas Professional Institute in Santiago, Chile, will benefit from two modern, fully equipped studios on campus and will enter the field with experience using the latest solutions from Grass Valley, a Belden Brand. The two studios feature a full range of state-of-the-art technology and enable the Santo Tomas Professional Institute to become an ASP—Grass Valley Authorized Service Provider—for its students.

The Professional Institute signed the partnership agreement during the 2015 NAB Show in Las Vegas. Equipment installed across the two studios includes six LDX Flex cameras, one Karrera K-Frame S-series switcher with two control panels, two Kaleido-X16 multiviewers and Densité modular interfaces. VGL in Chile performed the installation and will provide service.

“After looking at all the equipment in the market and evaluating our options, we chose Grass Valley for the outstanding quality and reputation they bring to the table,” explained Dario Cuesta, national director communications area, Santo Tomas Professional Institute. “Also, the opportunity to form a true partnership was a major factor.”

In addition to serving as an advanced training facility for the next generation of broadcast professionals in Chile, Santo Tomas Professional Institute will also host Grass Valley customers and prospects for equipment demonstrations on a regular basis.

“It’s important that the next generation of professionals learn on the newest, cutting-edge solutions,” said Cesar Carabajal, sales manager, Grass Valley. “Real-world experience during their time at the Professional Institute will prepare them for the challenges and opportunities they will face in the field. Santo Tomas is showing a real commitment to practical education with this investment.”

Sheldon Chau and Antoine Combellas have won top honors at the Fifth Annual Volker Bahnemann Awards for Cinematography at New York University’s (NYU) Tisch School of the Arts.

The grants were established in 2010 to honor Bahnemann’s 48 years at ARRI; he served 32 years as CEO and president of ARRI Inc. and ARRI CSC. The grants are funded through generous donations from ARRI, ARRI CSC (now ARRI Rental), the Stahl family, along with friends and colleagues. The awards and endowment are a perpetual bequest to recognize talented cinematography students each year with a production grant to fund their thesis projects.

Chau and Combellas competed among a group of finalists selected by Tisch faculty at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Graduate finalists included Chau, Felipe Vara De Ray and Joanne Mony Park. The undergraduate nominees were Combellas, Ben Potter and Cale Evens Nichols.

After footage from the nominated artists was screened, Michael Carmine, NYU associate arts professor and director of cinematography studies, presented Combellas with the undergraduate award. Combelles is a French cinematographer based in New York. With a background as a still photographer, the young DP has been working on web content, music videos and shorts. He aims to use his European culture and American experience to bring a unique sensitivity to filmmaking.

Chau was presented with the award by Anthony Jannelli, head of cinematography at NYU’s graduate film department. Chau was raised in Los Angeles where he found early filmmaking inspiration from The Criterion Collection. He went on to earn a Bachelor’s degree in Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine. As an MFA student at NYU, he received a nomination in 2013 for the Kodak Cinematography Scholarship.

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) announced that the 2015 NAB Show’s Technology Summit on Cinema (TSC), produced in partnership with SMPTE, concluded on April 12, having provided attendees with a fresh perspective on the past and future of storytelling. More than 600 people attended the two-day summit, “Building the Future of Storytelling,” which offered a roadmap for future success and also explored potentially disruptive innovations that could ultimately redefine the cinema experience of tomorrow.

“The audience for this year’s program was fantastic, as were the technical sessions, which featured intriguing discussions by renowned industry executives, experts, and creatives,” said SMPTE Fellow Bill Hogan, the 2015 program chair for the TSC. “The various panels, presentations, and productions showcased during this year’s summit reflected the rapidly changing nature of cinema technology — revealing how far we’ve come, and how far we might yet go.”

In a keynote titled “Leveraging New Technology to Preserve Creative Intent,” David Keighley, chief quality officer and executive vice president at IMAX Corporation, and Jan Yarbrough, senior colorist at Warner Bros., discussed the relationship between enhanced technical capabilities and the filmmaker’s creative vision. The conversation covered topics ranging from creative opportunity to standards for screen brightness and bit depth to effective storage media. Keighley stressed the importance of raising the bar with respect to the quality of the image projected on screen, and Yarbrough explained the balance he must strike in maintaining creative intent and making the most of new technology when restoring library titles.

The TSC featured an exclusive “first look” at SMPTE’s “Moving Images” documentary, which is being produced by Randall Dark and directed by Howard Lukk, with cinematographer Travis LaBella. The feature-length documentary is slated for release in conjunction with SMPTE’s centennial celebration in 2016, and it focuses on the evolution of motion-imaging technology, as well as the people behind it. The four-minute preview, edited by Bobby Hewitt and featuring music from Life In Film, highlighted some of the first moving images from the early 1890s along with clips and interviews extending up to the present. During the TSC, SMPTE also generated buzz — on the show floor and on Twitter — with the screening of the first video in its #LIFEWITHOUTSMPTE public awareness campaign (available at www.lifewithoutsmpte.org), a multichannel initiative showcasing the Society’s contributions to media and entertainment.

Speaking to a specific SMPTE contribution to the industry, the session titled “DCP Update and Future Delivery Options: Satellite, Fiber, and Internet” examined SMPTE Digital Cinema Packaging (SMPTE-DCP) and featured a discussion of SMPTE-DCP’s unparalleled support for higher bit rates, dynamic 3D subtitles, Material eXchange Format (MXF), fully encrypted subtitles, and auxiliary data.

The summit’s second keynote, “Virtual Reality: Coming to a Display Near You,” engaged Arthur van Hoff, co-founder and chief technology officer at Jaunt VR, in a conversation about cinematic virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). “What we are all aiming for is not VR; it’s really the ‘holodeck’ experience,” van Hoff said. He discussed AR technologies, including the Microsoft® HoloLens, explained why AR is significantly more difficult than VR, and described the many applications — live concerts, sports, travel, film, news, advertising, and education — in which VR offers a lower-cost alternative with tremendous potential.

The session titled “Cinema and Virtual Reality: Perfect Together?” extended that conversation, delving into the state of the art in immersive cinema experiences and exploring ways the technology might develop in the future. Richard Welsh, SMPTE governor for EMEA and the Central and South America region and CEO of Sundog Media Toolkit, moderated the panel, which featured experts including van Hoff and Ted Schilowitz of 20th Century Fox, Barco, and Jaunt VR. The panel further explored future applications of VR and AR within the theatrical environment.

“At this year’s TSC, we talked about how disruptive technology such as VR and AR are poised to transform the experience of moving images, and we plan to take the discussion to the next level in 2016, the year of the SMPTE centennial celebration,” said Welsh, who has been appointed TSC program chair for 2016. “Given all the new developments taking place in cinema technology today, we’re confident that the program will feature some very exciting innovations in cinema technology.”

The 2016 Technology Summit on Cinema will take place in Las Vegas on April 16-17. 

Microsoft hopes to get more people using the next version of its Windows software on all kinds of devices by giving them access to many of the same apps they're already using on Apple or Android phones.

In a major strategy shift, a top executive told an audience of several thousand software developers Wednesday that Microsoft will release new tools to help them quickly adapt the apps they've built for Apple or Android gadgets, so they will work on smartphones, PCs and other devices that use the new Windows 10 operating system coming later this year.

On the first day of the company's annual software conference, other executives showed off more uses for Microsoft's holographic "augmented reality" headset, the HoloLens — although it's not yet for sale. They also announced the official name for a new web browser, called "Edge," that they promised will be faster and more useful than the Internet Explorer that's been a Microsoft mainstay for 20 years.

All those initiatives are tied to the impending release of Windows 10, the centerpiece of Microsoft's ambitions to regain the stature it commanded when Windows-based PCs dominated the computing world. Today, after losing ground to smartphones and tablets that run software from rivals Apple and Google, Microsoft wants to make Windows 10 the universal software for PCs, phones and other Internet-connected gadgets.

"Windows 10 represents a new generation of Windows, built for an era of more personal computing," CEO Satya Nadella said during a keynote speech, adding that today's consumers and corporate workers want to have the same experience when they are using a variety of devices.

Although Microsoft has previously shown off some features of Windows 10, it's hoping to enlist an army of software developers as allies in its campaign to build enthusiasm for the new release. The company is using the three-day conference, called Build, to demonstrate more features and app-building tools, with an emphasis on mobile devices as well as PCs.

"Our goal is to make Windows 10 the most attractive development platform ever," Vice President Terry Myerson said.

To win over consumers who use competing software, Microsoft needs to persuade outside developers, who create software for consumers and corporate clients, it's worth their time to create new apps and programs for Windows 10.

"Getting developer buy-in is absolutely the crucial thing," said J.P. Gownder, a tech industry analyst at Forrester Research. He said Microsoft has struggled with a "chicken-and-egg" problem, in which developers have been reluctant to build mobile apps for Windows because relatively few people use Windows phones and tablets.

Currently, there are more than 1.4 million apps for Android phones and about the same for Apple devices, while there are only a few hundred thousand apps that work on Windows phones and tablets.

Microsoft's move to help developers adapt their Apple and Android apps for Windows 10 is a major change from the past, when each company maintained rigid differences in their software platforms. Microsoft is also hoping to entice developers by promising that apps for Windows 10 will work equally well on PCs, mobile gadgets, Xbox game consoles and even the HoloLens.

The company has another big carrot to wave in front of those developers: Microsoft has already said it will release Windows 10 as a free upgrade to people who now have PCs or other gadgets running the previous two versions of Windows, provided they upgrade in the coming year. That could help create a huge new audience of Windows 10 users in a relatively short time, Gownder said.

Myerson predicted there will be a billion devices using Windows 10 within the next two to three years. Apps for all those devices will be distributed through a single Windows app store. Myerson also said Microsoft will partner with wireless carriers so consumers who lack credit cards can pay for apps on their phone bill — a popular method in developing nations.

Microsoft has not said exactly when Windows 10 is coming, although some were hoping the company would announce a date on Wednesday.

Since he became CEO last year, Nadella has been presiding over a major overhaul at Microsoft. He has redesigned some of Microsoft's most popular programs for mobile users and invested in new "cloud-computing" services, in which businesses pay to use software that's housed in Microsoft's data centers.

Microsoft announced several new initiatives Wednesday for its Azure cloud-computing service, which has emerged as a fast-growing rival to a popular cloud business operated by Amazon. Microsoft is releasing new programming tools for Azure clients to create programs for computers that run Apple and Linux software, as well as those that run Windows.