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Welcome to Hollywood

Sep 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Cynthia Wisehart

Inside the THX Best Practices Lab for Windows Media

In 1914, the low-slung, two-story clapboard house was a farm building, surrounded by haycocks in wide-open fields, perfect for landing aircraft for the Mary Pickford aviation picture The Girl of Yesterday. The studio stood in the rural midst of early Hollywood, a mile or two from another farm-turned-studio — Sunset-Gower. Soon after its debut, it became the property of William Clune — who became hooked on Hollywood, and rich, on the back end of the shameful blockbuster Birth of a Nation. During Clune's long tenure, various management entities passed through — each one adding to the physical layout and creative reputation of what is now Raleigh Studios, today owned by the Rosenthal family.

From the beginning, there was technical innovation, says Raleigh historian Marc Wanamaker — the early use of cloth as a diffusion device for outside stages and the introduction of sound stages were the WWI equivalent of digital dailies and 24p.

Today — August 31, 2005 — Wanamaker evokes all this history in the studio's Chaplin Theater for an assembled group of post and broadcast professionals from all over the world. He's setting the scene for the Raleigh's latest technical role — as host of the THX Best Practices Lab for Windows Media.

With this introduction, we adjourn to the historic Bronson building that houses the lab, the clapboard now terracotta with glossy teal trim. Other than the relatively hip color scheme, the building is cozy low tech, the walls covered with creeping fig, the front porch framed with jasmine, durantha, and a climbing English rose (St. Cecilia, I'm guessing). There's a point to this bed-and-breakfast charm too. It's an invitation that deliberately avoids the intimidating, hipper-than-thou trappings that sometimes go with technology. The underlying point of the facility is that digital media technology will one day be as ubiquitous as refrigerators — and just as essential to consumers. It won't be ensconced only in sleek custom homes and trendy offices. Mayberry will be digital. That assumption — and the opinion that Windows Media can be the currency of production, delivery, and exchange of future media — gives the Best Practices Lab its mission.

It is, of course, self-serving for Microsoft, but not entirely so. As it happens, Windows Media technologies allow content creators and executives to envision something that is necessary to understand: how content creation, distribution, and consumption can be integrated and monetized. It suggests an organic, format-independent, device-independent flow of media, a network that can serve a tiny, ruthlessly compressed image to a cell phone, or a pristine HD image to a set-top box or digital projector. Just being able to see the model is the starting point, and from there the specifics can be explored at the BPL.

The lab is a nonprofit, supervised by board and advisory committee and funded through a tiered membership system available to companies offering products and/or services relevant to the creation and distribution of Windows Media format content (including WMV9, Microsoft's implementation of VC-1).

Microsoft, THX, and their first technology partner, AMD, (Avid was also announced during the event as a new partner) launched the lab with a two-day workshop on VC-1, the codec that Microsoft turned over to SMPTE for certification. The process of that certification is now nearly complete — only the public comment period remains — and implementation is now on many people's mind.

The two-day workshop, attended by 100 or so top-quality broadcast, post, and new media executives from across the world, had educational segments on source and capture, preprocessing, hardware and software encoding, quality control, and audio, as well as walking people through the Digital Living Room, where home and commercial media distribution scenarios are modeled. Threading through the presentations was an important point: the suggestion that the achievements and assumptions of managing signal must be reconsidered in light of the options data-centric models offer. This was not just presented rhetorically; in particular, the source sessions and the fascinating preprocessing session both featured various exercises designed to demonstrate empirically where key assumptions from the signal-based, hardware-driven past might not translate directly to data. This basic premise underscored why a lab environment with an independent oversight entity (THX) may be so important to helping Hollywood explore alternatives.

The event also included invited partners from across the spectrum, including such familiar companies as Avid, Autodesk, and Adobe, as well as companies that may be less familiar, including the encoding companies Inlet, Digital Rapids, Drastic Technologies, and Tarari. Others, including Gridiron, Xytech, Rightsline, and Tektronix, demonstrated the end-to-end environment — encompassing storage, asset management,and rights management — that Windows Media technologies can span. Many of the companies were there to help people understand new capabilities that digital enables; Tektronix was there to make sure people understood that data needs test and measurement just as much as signal does.

The lab facilities include capture, editorial compression, authoring, and audio suites; machine and operations room; the digital living room; and connectivity to the Chaplin Theater, which is THX-certified and equipped with digital projection. Appointments for introductory visits are available now. Specific problem-solving and workflows may be requested for demonstration sessions. Sample topics include content creation workflow from acquisition to deliverables, HD and SD encoding with hardware and/or software, IP delivery scenarios, authoring workflow for WMV HD, HD-DVD, and BD. Multi-channel audio creation and distribution, and consumer distribution and consumption scenarios, including home and mobile devices. In addition, member companies will host periodic scheduled workshops and panels. Information is available by email at bplpartner@thx.com or by calling (323) 960-4040.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.