Today was the day I planned to give my feet a rest and give my brain a decent workout with conference sessions. The biggest gossip of IBC is that Fuji have announced they will stop producing film at the end of 2012. That's huge news for everyone here I think. It is great for some, awful for others.
However, my conference sessions today focused on the future, beyond film. The need for standards, and improvements in what we produce and how we produce it.
James Cameron and Vincent Pace gave a talk about what they call "5-D Production". Basically, it's a nice way of selling to clients that when we make something in 3-D, they get a 2-D deliverable as well. The production costs are the same, although the post costs are a little higher, but Cameron and Pace are on a mission to educate content buyers and distributors that having both deliverables is okay. Make something great in 3-D, and it will be great in 2-D as well. Around 70% of all televisions sold at the moment are 3-D capable. Cameron suggests that in about a year, autostereoscopic televisions will be ready for the consumer market, and we as content creators need to be ready. He's a man with high hopes for this, but the other speakers I heard today had a more important technical issue to press on us.
Audiences got really excited when they first saw decent quality images jumping out of the screen at them in recent years. Now, however, they're asking if the dorky glasses and occasional headaches are worth it, when the quality of the image is generally less than they have grown used to. I saw six conference sessions today, and I left with a definite sense that having a good knowledge of image standards and measurements, and a good knowledge of stereoscopy, is no longer good enough.
I have got to start getting very serious about higher resolutions, higher frame rates, higher bit depth, and higher expectations from my clients, and their audiences.
More importantly, ACES workflow, which is going to be a hard pill to swallow for most post houses and their colorists; is about to be the new standard for all deliverables.
With the sad end of Fuji, and the very serious charge into ACES, times are about to change for us in post production. Quickly, and radically. So we had all better embrace the new, fire up our bandwidth, and have some fun with it.