Palm Springs, Calif.
Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2006, 14h00-18h00

Video Display Technology circa 2006

Instructor: Charles Poynton
Duration: 1/2 day

In association with 2006 Tech Retreat

Synopsis:

As recently as a decade ago, the vast majority of video displays - both in the studio, and in consumers' premises - were CRTs. The last decade has seen large-scale deployment of alternate display technologies, such as direct-view LCDs, plasma display panels (PDPs), projectors using both LCD and DLP technology. As new display technology supplants CRTs, studios and broadcasters need to adapt their critical display viewing practices - while CRTs remain by many accounts the best display technology for control rooms, CRTs are no longer longer representative of the consumer's viewing experience. Apart from all that, CRTs are not likely to be available for much longer!

Issues concerning display technology will be discussed at the 2006 Technology Retreat from a variety of perspectives. As has become the custom, Charles Poynton will present a 1/2-day seminar preceding the main Tech Retreat sessions. This year's seminar will deal with the physics, optics, electronics, and signal processing associated with various display technologies. We will discuss issues of spatial resolution, sample structure, tone reproduction, colour reproduction, and motion portrayal, and how those aspects combine and trade-off against each other in some technologies. We will discuss signal processing, including much-dreaded "enhancement" techniques.

Challenges in signal and colour processing are associated with the introduction of new display technologies. For the last 15 years, colour reproduction in television and computer graphics has been defined by the "Rec. 709" colour space. However, that colour space doesn't encopmpass all of the colours of film, let alone the full range ("gamut") of colours that human vision senses. Recently the Digital Cinema Initiative promulgated a standard for digital encoding of cinema. That standard uses the CIE XYZ system, to encompass the entire range of colours of human vision - the DCI colour range encompasses the gamut of film and then some. In a different forum, the IEC recently adopted a standard denoted xvYCC to enable wide-gamut television broadcasting. Charles will provide some technical detail behind these developments, and outline the challenges (such as gamut mapping) that post-production industry will soon have to address.

Audience: This seminar is appropriate for technical professionals who are experienced in creating and manipulating color imagery for SDTV, HDTV, or digital cinema. It is also suitable for programmers and engineers.

Materials provided: Course handouts will be provided. Portions of the seminar will be based upon Charles Poynton's book Digital Video and HDTV Algorithms and Interfaces.

Charles Poynton - Courses & seminars
2006-04-08