Toronto AES Bulletin June 2001 Review Mar 2001 Meeting

Digital Collaboration: The Future is Digital

Review

A Joint Meeting of the Toronto Sections of the AES and SMPTE March 13, 2001 sponsored by JCI Corporation and Deluxe Studios

INTRODUCTION

Lyle Bunn - JCI - Marketing Manager

Broadband delivery of content files in the entertainment production industry is competing with traditional courier delivery. Within the past few years a number of companies have been providing electronic collaboration for the film and television production industries.

DIGITAL COLLABORATION

John Marshall - JCI - CEO and CTO

JCI is a CyberCarrier servicing the digital transport and storage needs of the film and television production and post-production industries. This includes the areas of content creation, production and distribution.

Video file transport requires system speeds up to 10 Gbps. To succeed, a transport service requires pay per use, on demand availability, security, and cost effectiveness.

COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

Ken Lawton - Lucent Technologies / Bell Labs

Communication Services have been shifting from simple legacy models to advanced broadband services providing rich media content and personalized services. Fiber optic technology has facilitated a massive increase in bandwidth that continues to grow. The next major jump in optic technology will be optical switches, providing higher speed circuits than are possible with existing silicon technologies.

It is expected that advances in silicon, optics and wireless will drive a 250-fold increase in network capacity by 2005. Companies like JCI are creating the software that is key to network management and new services.

SMALL AREA NETWORKS (SAN)

Gary Shissler - SGI

A SAN is a central storage network that services the needs of multiple servers and clients. By consolidating storage resources, SAN's provide better data access and availability while centralizing management and increasing bandwidth. The modular scalability of SAN's improves device reliability, which means less downtime.

The development of SAN's came from the "need for speed". Initially, the early adopters of SAN's were research facilities and the U.S. government. Recent developments in SAN technology have made SAN technology available for any industry requiring high reliability and speed.

RENDERING SERVICES

Tom Eliseuson - netASPx

The company netASPx is a unique Application Service Provider (ASP). Their computing facility allows for network based remote rendering, for clients who require additional rendering service.

This enables a client with large rendering requirements, as animation production, to send their files to netASPx for completion of the time consuming rendering process, thereby freeing up their own resources for other revenue generating activities.

A key element in providing this service is a dedicated, high-speed network as provided by JCI.

ANIMATION RENDERING

Robi Roncarelli - Pixel News

Animation is a growing requirement for the post-production industry. Most computer animation companies are small organizations that have a need for rendering assistance and for transfer of data files. The technologies offered by netASPx and JCI are essential for the development and delivery of animation projects for the post-production industry.

DEMONSTRATION

A videotape that was made of a live video conference was shown. The conference included editors in New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles working collaboratively on a film-editing project. Each of the editors was able to see and hear the other editors while viewing live streaming video on NTSC monitors. They were able to discuss and review edit decisions for a project played out on a Henry edit system in Toronto.

The Toronto chapter of SMPTE has a Real Video recording of the evening's presentations available online at: http://www.smpte.org/sections_chapters/toronto/video.htm

Thank you to Lyle Bunn of JCI for putting the evening together. Thank you to Deluxe for hosting the event. And thank you to JCI for sponsoring the evening.

by Ron Lynch, Committee Member

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