ISDCF canceled its November 18 Plugfest and will instead hold a “virtual” plugfest. Date conflicts and difficulty in booking a screening room have caused this change. The virtual plugfest is taking place on the iPath reflector, limited to bona fide techies across the industry.
John Woodward left his position as CEO of UK Film Council and joined Arts Alliance (the venture capital company, not subsidiary Arts Alliance Media) as its Managing Director. Some feathers were ruffled by the move, as Thomas Høegh, majority shareholder of AA, sits on the UK Film Council board. UK Film Council is a government funded agency, scheduled to disband in April 2011.
The 3-D International Society issued its first Lumiere technology awards this month in a filmed ceremony at the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. The awards were broad and deep, with recipients from nearly every company that contributed a quality product or service. Notably, In-Three received an award for its work on Alice. But the heart warming moment was the award given to Boyd MacNaughton, owner of NuVision, and the core technology behind the XpanD 3-D shutter glasses. It is not widely known that Boyd produced over 500 pairs of 3-D shutter glasses for the 2005 ShoWest demonstation of 3-D digital cinema – a quantity of glasses that had never been seen before. This was the first public demonstration of digital 3-D, and was so successful that it caused Disney to release Chicken Little in 3-D. It would never have happened without Boyd.
The Digital Cinema Open System Alliance, aka DCOSA, was announced by Dolby, Mikrom, USL, and XDC. The goal of the group is to establish a common interface for media blocks for new system architectures. DCOSA is a splinter group from CoMBI (Common Media Block Interface). Its web site is at http://www.dcosa.org.