HPA Announces 2019 Tech Retreat Program: Next Gen Workflows, eSports, AI, Remote Production, And More

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The Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) unveiled the schedule for its 2019 HPA Tech Retreat , set for February 11-15 2019. The Tech Retreat, which marks its 25th year in 2019, takes place over the course of a week in Palm Springs and offers an incomparable opportunity to meet and engage with well-known and emerging leaders in engineering, technology, creativity and business. Future trends and technologies of the media and entertainment ecosystem are explored with rigor and examined from new perspectives, and participants are afforded unparalleled access to a wide range of in-depth information, facilitating a nuanced and informed view of industry trajectories. The 2019 Tech Retreat returns to the JW Marriott Resort & Spa in Palm Desert, CA.

Seth Hallen, President of HPA, noted This year we received significantly more submissions for the main program so we are especially excited about this year's event. Each year we get to revisit the familiar and important topics like Broadcaster updates, Washington Update and CES Review for example, but then we dive into so many compelling and thought-provoking new topics. From Monday's TR-X on eSports to the very last session on Friday, the bar has been raised on the Tech Retreat's already incredibly high bar of performance for presenting new topics. We look forward to the great balance of professional collaboration and socializing that HPA Tech Retreat attendees have always enjoyed over the course of this incredibly important week.

The HPA Tech Retreat spans five days of sessions, technology demonstrations and events. During this carefully curated week, important aspects of production, broadcast, post production, distribution and related endeavors for the media and entertainment landscape are explored. One of the key differentiators of the Tech Retreat is its strict adherence to a non-commercial focus: marketing-oriented presentations are prohibited except at breakfast roundtables. Throughout the day, the schedule creates an environment conducive to the exchange of knowledge and information.

Once again, we received many times more submissions than we could use, said Mark Schubin, the Program Maestro of the HPA Tech Retreat. To say this year's were compelling' is an understatement. We could have programmed a few more days! Rejecting terrific submissions is always the hardest thing we have to do. I'm really looking forward to learning the latest on dealing with high dynamic range, using artificial intelligence to restore old movies and machine learning to deal with grunt work, the Academy's new software foundation, location-based entertainment with altered reality, and much, much more. I can't wait!

The 2019 HPA Tech Retreat Program (here):

Monday February 11: TR-X

eSports: Dropping the Mic on Center Stage

Separate registration required

A half day of targeted panels, speakers and interaction, TR-X will focus on the rapidly growing arena of esports, with a keynote from Yvette Martinez, CEO - North America of esports organizer and production company ESL North America.

Tuesday February 12: Supersession

Next-Gen Workflows and Infrastructure: From the Set to the Consumer

Wednesday February 13: Main Program Highlights

Mark Schubin's Technology Year in Review

Washington Update (Jim Burger, Thompson Coburn LLP)

The highly anticipated review of legislation and its impact on our business from a leading Washington attorney.

Deep Fakes (Moderated by Debra Kaufman, ETCentric; Panelists Marc Zorn, HBO; Ed Grogan, Department of Defense; Alex Zhukov, Video Gorillas)

It might seem nice to be able to use actors long dead, but the concept of fake news takes a terrifying new turn with deepfakes, the term that Wikipedia describes as a portmanteau of deep learning and fake. Although people have been manipulating images for centuries - long before the creation of Adobe Photoshop - the new AI-powered tools allow the creation of very convincing fake audio and video.

The Netflix Media Database (Rohit Puri, Netflix)

An optimized user interface, meaningful personalized recommendations, efficient streaming and a high-quality catalog of content are the principal factors that define the end-user Netflix experience. A myriad of business workflows of varying complexities come together to realize this experience. Under the covers, they use computationally expensive computer vision, audio processing and natural language processing based media analysis algorithms. These algorithms generate temporally and spatially dynamic metadata that is shared across the various use cases. The Netflix Media DataBase (NMDB) is a multi-tenant, data system that is used to persist this deeply technical metadata about various media assets at Netflix and that enables querying the same at scale. The shared nothing distributed database architecture allows NMDB to store large amounts of media timeline data, thus forming the backbone for various Netflix media processing systems.

AI Film Restoration at 12 Million Frames per Second (Alex Zhukov, Video Gorillas)

Is more media made for subways than for TV and Cinema? (and does it make more $$$?) (Andy Quested, BBC)

Broadcasters Panel (Moderator: Matthew Goldman, MediaKind)

CES Review (Peter Putman, ROAM Consulting)

Pete Putman traveled to Las Vegas to see whats new in the world of consumer electronics and returns to share his insights with the HPA Tech Retreat audience.

8K: Whoa! Howd We Get There So Quickly (Peter Putman, ROAM Consulting)

Issues with HDR Home Video Deliverables for Features (Josh Pines, Technicolor)

HDR Mini Session

HDR Intro: Seth Hallen, Pixelogic

Ambient Light Compensation for HDR Presentation: Don Eklund, Sony Pictures Entertainment

HDR in Anime: Haruka Miyagawa, Netflix

Pushing the Limits of Motion Appearance in HDR: Richard Miller, Pixelworks

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