Partners and attendees stressed that the structure of the debates, promoted by UPF, helped to generate fascinating discussion about the characteristics of the post-production industry, and the challenges of improving it via the use of intelligent metadata.

For one day, Universitat Pompeu Fabra became the ideal place to talk about metadata and the future of the postproduction industry.

But not only for the partners of the iMP project who, on June 30, came to Barcelona for the Workshop organized by UPF as part of the dissemination of the project. A total of 35 workshop attendees, included professionals, students and researchers from Spain and throughout Europe, all agreed about the quality of the presentations and the rich exchange of ideas that took place in the panel sessions and tech demos organized in the facilities of both UPF and Barcelona Media.

Participants could share their experiences in professional or academic environments related with the impact of the use and management of metadata in postproduction and distribution of audiovisual media.

The discussion featured two main thematic blocks, the first dedicated to using metadata in post-production, and the second dedicated to stereoscopic 3D (with considerable contribution from iMP’s fellow FP7 project, 20203DMedia).

Wolfgang Lempp: “This represents a major gating technology for the future of post-production”

The keynote speaker of the Workshop was Wolfgang Lempp, Filmlight, whose talk was titled “Using Metadata to Improve the Cyclical Post-production Workflow”.
Mr Lempp (Scientific and Technical award winner in 2010 for the development of the Northlight film scanner), pointed out that the research in the framework of the iMP project is showing new ways of leading the post-production and distribution process in the film industry, particularly in regard to storage and metadata.
“Far from being just a bit of added functionality, this represents a major gating technology for the future of post production”, he said.

At the end of the day a 3D Audio Demo was held in Barcelona Media Audio Lab. The session showed the differences between the classical Stereo audio, the Dolby Audio system, and the 3D Audio System being developed in BM. Conceptually, the idea of having one speaker that can be identified disappears, and the user can be immerged in the sound as if s/he were in a real space.

It provided a spectacular end to an interesting and motivating day.