Co-chaired by Brian McCarty and Dr. Sean Olive, the conference was intended to stimulate increased dialogue between the Hollywood content creation community and the AES, and drew a substantial audience to the three-day programme, which was presented at the TCL Chinese 6 Theatres.
Keynote addresses were given by noted industry professionals, including Dr. Floyd Toole, former AES president, Louis Hernandez Jr., Avid chairman and Francis Rumsey, chair of the AES Technical Council.
"The genesis of this conference came from the AES's realization that the largest group of working sound engineers is those that do sound for picture in some way. Over the last few conventions we've been addressing workshops and seminars directly to that group of people," said McCarty, who is the chair of the AES Technical Committee for Digital Cinema and Television. "What I'd like to see come out of this are some action items about what the Hollywood community thinks the various organizations need to do to start meeting their needs."
Featuring the AES's first-ever Immersive Audio Day, chaired by Dr. Francis Rumsey, the conference also presented paper sessions, workshops and panels on such topics as cinema acoustics, cinema B-chain measurement and calibration, low frequency reproduction challenges, loudness and noise-induced hearing impairment, dialog intelligibility, equalization and dynamics processing, and content personalization.
Presenters also highlighted the pressing need to address the issues of next-generation streaming services and headphone delivery of the established and emerging immersive formats.
Sponsors for the AES 57th International Conference included: Auro-3D, Avid, Dolby, dts, Harman, MPSE, NBCUniversal Studio Post, Sennheiser, and SMPTE.
(Jim Evans)
