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HPA Tech Retreat Celebrates 20 Years

The Hollywood Post Alliance Tech Retreat celebrates twenty years of exploring the opportunities and complexities facing an industry in transition and investigating new solutions and technologies, February 17-21, 2014 at the Hyatt Regency in Indian Wells near Palm Springs, CA.

For the past twenty years, the Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) Tech Retreat has gathered a veritable who’s who in engineering, technology, creativity, and strategic business together for a structured yet informal meeting of the minds; where top industry leaders engaged in all aspects of production, distribution, post production, film, television, web and related endeavors, gather in an environment conducive to the exchange of knowledge and information. This year’s 20th Anniversary confab promises all of that and more from February 17-21, 2014 at the Hyatt Regency in Indian Wells near Palm Springs, CA.

The Tech Retreat offers attendees the chance to explore the opportunities and the complexities facing an industry in transition, and to investigate new solutions and technologies that impact its many constituents. 

The HPA Tech Retreat offers lively conference sessions, networking events and technology demonstrations to an engaged audience of participants and panelists that hail from a pool of the top technical, creative, business and hands-on experts. Topics will take the Tech Retreat audience from the nitty gritty to the very precipice.

For a full schedule, visit hollywoodpostalliance.org.  On Monday, February 17th, the event opens for early registration and a pre-Retreat course titled Physics, Psychophysics, and Vision for Advanced Motion Imaging from Charles Poynton and John Watkinson. Tuesday launches the HPA Tech Retreat, with the HPA Supersession: The New Normal is Anything But, focusing on the impact of new distribution platforms in production and post. Wednesday through Friday mornings feature breakfast roundtables where any industry relevant topic goes. The HPA Demo Room opens on Tuesday with demos and cocktails and is a hotbed of new products and technologies that feature curated and expert-demos which illustrate the latest developments. Wednesday focuses on the consumer experience and impact, and Thursday production and post. The Tech Retreat concludes Friday morning, with highlights and an emphasis on engineering. The entire event features many opportunities for one-on-one discussion with industry innovators, technology experts, business executives and other top professionals. 

Mark Schubin, Multiple-Emmy-award-winning SMPTE Fellow has been working in television since 1967, writing about it since 1972, and chairing the HPA Tech Retreat program since 1997, commented on the engaging presentations set for next month. “We are dealing with fundamental changes in the very nature of our industry, from changing methodologies -- broadcast, cable, DVD, DVR, for example -- to the previously unthinkable, such as giving fans in a stadium access to their own instant replays, letting social media shape programming, and all of those things that lay beyond. This is a challenging but expansive time. For example, at the Tech Retreat, we’ll feature a presentation that may appear to be purely tech-focused and narrow (i.e., new display connections) but it will show how the consumer technology is powerfully driving the professional world. As always, we’ll be digging into important topics that are thought provoking, but are also important in terms of our businesses and careers, including two of the most critical issues in our industry: the change from video-specific technology to commodity information technology, and the question of what comes next on the screen, and what delivers the biggest bang for the buck?” Schubin notes, “Maybe it's something a lot simpler than 4K."  He concludes, “And, we’re spending a day with a provocative dive into one of the most important topics there is -- color.”

"This year is a significant milestone for the HPA Tech Retreat as we look back over the incredible effect that technology has had on our industry over the past 20 years," noted HPA president Leon Silverman. "As the world of film and television became increasingly impacted by computer and digital technologies, the HPA Tech Retreat served as an important common ground for our industry to experience and drive transformative change together. Now more than ever, the Tech Retreat serves as an important bridge between so many of the rapidly changing aspects of our industry. As I do every year, I look forward to spending time with the most interesting people I know, and ones I hope to know, at the HPA Tech Retreat.”

Source: Hollywood Post Alliance

Jennifer Wolfe's picture

Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.