FILE 4K Symposium and Our First Glimpses of Rio

Yesterday was a big success for 4K Digital Cinema, and Jettison High, as FILE hosted the first 4K Symposium in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Moderated by Jane de Almeida, the Symposium featured talks by Todd Margolis, Sheldon Brown, Peter Otto and myself.

Todd discussed attributes of 4K that lend themselves to immersive experiences, giving examples of 4K Teleconferencing and streaming live events such as the opera, Era La Notte. Sheldon compared the future development of 4K to its predecessors, speculating that 4K will spawn various "micro-mediums," as opposed to more monolithic forms of development shown in photography. Peter continued the Symposium with a great introduction to CineGrid, demonstrating the key issues of working over fiber optic networks, such as latency.

I closed out the Symposium with a talk entitled, "An HD Approach to 4K Workflows: Lessons Learned from Hip Hop Culture." Drawing parallels from the history of Hip Hop, I explained how 4K can be created with widely available consumer technology through the use of creative workflows. In addition, I believe that 4K as a medium has an unlimited degree of possiblities beyond making a single image of 8-megapixels. In other words, now that we have the ability to show 8-megapixels of visual data on 50 feet diagonal cinema screens, 4K can be used to display multiple lower-resolution images, increasing the number of visual channels and changing the audience's experience from a passive to an active viewing. All in all, I received a fantastic response to Beatbox360, and I am sure 4K will return very shortly to Brazil.

I will post the talk upon my return to Los Estados Unidos, but for now, it's Caiparinhas and Discotecas in Rio de Janeiro! We just arrived this afternoon after a 6 hour bus ride from Sao Paulo. Brazilian buses are nicer than most American planes. Their seats recline up to 45 degrees with folding foot rests, they stop at nice restaurants, and they're cheap! They do show the same crappy movies though (i.e. Failure to Launch).

Now we are chilling at Copacabana beach, enjoying the fruits of months of work to bring 4K Digital Cinema to Brazil. I can say for sure that this will be my last post until I leave South America...
Muito Obrigado, Tchau!