Someone Will Be There Who Knows the Answer
The Oversight Executive for Motion Intelligence of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence is scheduled to be in the southern California desert next month. So are the chief technology officers (CTOs) of both Panasonic and Sony. So is the head of the Visual Space Perception Laboratory at the University of California – Berkeley. So is one of the developers of Cablecam. So is the CTO of Cable Television Laboratories. So is a co-inventor of MP3. So is the mysterious Mo Henry, whose credit has appeared in movies ranging from Apocalypse Now to Zombieland.
The list could go on and on. Hundreds of top technical executives will be there. CTOs and VPs of Hollywood studios and television networks will be there. So will the head of emerging technologies of the European Broadcasting Union. So will the VP of standards of the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) and the director of engineering and standards of the Society of Motion-Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). Where will they be?
It’s the 16th annual Hollywood Post Alliance Tech Retreat, February 16-19 at Rancho Las Palmas conference center in Rancho Mirage, California. But every part of that title can convey a false impression.
HPA, for example, is not yet 16 years old, but the retreat is older. When the organization that created it, the Association for Imaging Technology and Sound, went belly up, HPA’s founders thought the retreat was too important to die, so they took it over. After 9/11, when other events went down in attendance, the retreat went up. It has actually had to turn people away on occasion because it has sold out.
Similarly, “Hollywood” and “Post” are misleading. The event is not (and has never been) in Hollywood. Its participants come from all over the world, from 
New Zealand 
to Norway, and from Bombay to Buenos Aires. If someone at the retreat is from NATO, that could be the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the National Association of Theater Owners (both have sent representatives, sometimes at the same retreat); similarly, there have been representatives from MPEG the Moving Picture Experts Group and MPEG the Motion Picture Editors Guild. More »
