Berlin Amsterdam New-York San-Diego

maybe in English below

Voyage un peu long mais ca va, de la place pour mes jambes donc je ne peux pas trop me plaindre et de plus tous mes avions ont réussi leur atterrissage. J'ai gagné pas mal de points sur Foursquare avec tous ces aéroports ainsi que quelques taches de sauce tomate sur mon t-shirt blanc... A retenir pour les futurs voyages: mettre un t-shirt noir et éviter les plats en sauce.

L'arrivée à San Diego ressemble à celle que j'ai eu à San Antonio ou Albuquerque. L'aéroport est vide, il fait chaud, il fait nuit, je ne sais plus dans quel fuseau horaire j'évolue. Mais rapidement je trouve mon bus, 2$ et 12min de trajet et j'arrive à mon hotel. Là je fais la connaissance de mon voisin de chambre, Alexandre prof brésilien comme moi venu écouter et aider sur place la conférence CIC. Il temps de s'effondrer, la session "short course" dont je suis un peu responsable débute dans 7h.

in live translated English

Journey a bit long but still ok, I had room to squeeze my legs so I can't really complain, besides my numerous airplanes did succeed in each of their landing.  I won a few points in Foursquare with all these airports as well as a few tomato sauce stains on my white shirt... Notes for the future trips: wear a black shirt and avoid pasta with tomato sauce.

The arrival in San Diego reminds me those I had in San Antonio or Albuquerque. The airport is empty, it's dark, it's warm, I don't know in which time zone i'm evolving. But quickly I find my bus, 2$m and 12min later I'm in my hotel. I meet my room neighbor for the time of the conference, Alexander a Brazilian professor coming like me to help and listen this week at CIC. It's about time to collapse, the session "Short Course" I'm involved in is starting in 7h.

Marathon under the sea

The location
Second marathon, in Amsterdam after Vilnius last year with many spotters for the TCS Amsterdam marathon 2016. I also met a spotter this year who was part of the team in Lithuania, we call him Martin because his name is Martin. Sadly he could not join me this time - which is also not a bad thing as he is much faster than me - but he could host me. I had the best pasta ever the night before so I can't complain :-)

The days before
I arrived in town Friday evening and the race was scheduled for Sunday morning. The perfect time for me to have a last drink two days before the run. I did plan to stay sober the week before, but I completely failed on that. This week before was a pretty cool one where I spend all my evenings almost going out and meeting with my friends which simply help you to feel good.

Saturday I did the way home to the run start and picked up my registration stuffs. People from everywhere, taking pictures, still smiling, a good atmosphere. After that I went on a small walk but not tool long.

The day of the run
Awake at 6:30am about three hours before the race. Just the time to have a big breakfast and to digest. About 45min before the official departure I'm in the stadium from where we start and will come back later. People are slowly warming up, the challenge is to stay warm without using too much energy and for that matter all plastic bags are transformed into poncho for runner. 9:29am we are all packed, the plastic bags and other capes are flying around and we start! I running with the group 3h00/4h00 this time.

The first 33km
They are fine actually, I'm in my pace, feeling good and should be under the 4hours. The weather is good, the energetic gel taken every 10km have some effect. The race is pretty compact even so there is some space when we pass the sign 25km and the first exhausted people are appearing. Passing the 33km I had have a small blister under my right foot and need to slow down, even walk a few meters...

Needless to say that until 41km it was a bit difficult, but then seing the sign "last 500," I gather my last source of energy and run over at least 100 people which is always a great pleasure for a final time of 4h1min30sec. A lot of people on the side encouraging us, sometimes you could hear your name - it's written on your bib - which gives you a mini kick or energy to keep going, pretty cool! Also funny to look at your tracking device after the race, the path you follow is sometimes below the see level.

Going home
Like last year the 12h to 24 hours following the event are a bit painful, you live in slow motion but you are happy. There is a great feeling in you body after all, to have accomplished something, I felt good for days :-) and I want to run another one!

New Little Planets

After the color version in square format I worked on black and white version of some of my little planets.  One example is the image below, it was taken in Amsterdam about in October 2014. One print is available on my Etsy shop here in size 40x80cm and it's beautiful.

Somewhere in Amsterdam with many spotters around me, October 2014

Valerian agent spacio temporel - episode transatlantique

What a long day, subway, walking, flying, subway again and finally Berlin. Long distance flight in autumn puts you in a another time space. You start your journey in the underground by day time, when the subway reaches the surface on his way to the airport the night has come, you can't see much outside because you are too far from the city lights and you are constantly in the position of having to wait or having to run, you are prisoner of your own schedule.

Seated with a window on my right I can barely see the extremity of the wing, too big, too windy, too dark. On board the KLM crew is struggling to make function each individual video screen. Organized as I'm I forgot my book in my checked luggage, so I re-started Bel-Ami on my tablet to kill the time. Eventually the on-board team succeed to reboot the system, but I will only see 15min of something on a bad screen and left to say hello to Morpheus.

When I wake up it's Amsterdam again. Next day. I'm getting closer. Two more hours waiting and a last jump in the sky to Berlin. Smooth landing, I get my luggage and my TXL almost immediately. Good to be home. People are drinking beers in the bus, no one is hiding. Started in New York Upper West Side near 96st - and some cream cheese bagels for the breakfast - with several stops in Wall Street, stopping by the North and South Pools and continuing by a short visit in l'Imprimerie on Spring Street 11 I finish my journey as I started it yesterday, with something to eat, kettwurst it was.

Meet the spotters in Amsterdam

I'm a spotter for the Berlin Spotted By Locals city guide. The idea behind this series of guide is simple and brilliant: to ask locals to share their spots, the place they like, part of their daily experience in the city where they are currently living. It is different than Yelp, Tripadvisor, Foursquare - I'm also writing for to some of them irregularly - or many other platforms where you can find information of about every items on a map. Only spottedbylocals is better.

Less than two years ago as I joined the Berlin team, its spotters were talking to me about this first spotters weekend in 2012, describing how epic the weekend was. It was the first and I was secretly hopping that the weekend planners will continue on a yearly basis. But they didn't. Actually hosting around 100 people, people that don't know each other, people that you only know shortly from they writing or skype interviews can be risky. But they did it again at the end of October.

Long story short, it was a great weekend. People and weather were accordingly friendly. All writers from Berlin did join the trip, so I knew some of the people. It was a great feeling to meet all the spotters from so many cities, a strange but confortable impression to know each other for a long time even so we were meeting for the first time and it was not because we are all part of the same company 

Bart and Sanne - founders and bosses behind spottedbylocals - did manage to select a very interesting crowd, talking about family will be to easy, more a community. During this weekend I tried to get a typical profile of what is a spotter. What does it mean to be a local in such a globalised world? We are all very connected, probably half of our brain is permanently linked to the internet, our multiple avatars almost never sleep and only our physical body sometimes need some rest. But still we - I think - love to meet people, engage in conversation, share life experiences that make us less an icon on the internet and more a human being - the Community fan will love that. If by travelling somewhere, by visiting a place, drinking a coffee you had the feeling to be part of the place then we won.

Back to IBC 2013 - Movie Making Colour Management, Best Practice and more

The last two days of the IBC 2013 conference have seen two interesting sessions on movie post-production, pipeline, standards and more important than everything else: color (or colour (ou couleur (oder Farbe))).

The session "Movie Making Colour Management, best Practice" was on many aspects my favorite. The panel discussion was covering all the movie pipeline steps: from real acquisition people (camera system with ARRI), to display people (Dolby), to big studio (Walt Disney) and post-production (Fluent Image Ltd). Comparing to a few years ago - when the full digital wave was hitting the cinema world, first scanning then editing, filming and now displaying (?) - it seems that people are getting familiar with the new equipment, digital cameras do not appear as magic devices being able of technological feats only... but cameras with their given properties (how they capture light and color). On that aspect, the ARRI person as well as the Fluent Image person were saying the same (it was two months ago so I may not be completely accurate): try the camera before starting shooting your movie, once on schedule for shooting you do not have the time for experimentation (this is what reasonable post-production companies do, I have seen that in Berlin by ARRI post-production people). In the past you were choosing this or this film-roll (i.e. fuji or something else) and your lab was then processing the film, now you choose a camera and its captor/sensor properties.

What is interesting when a new technology is introduced in an established pipeline is how the cards are redistributed (i.e. power, influence). Before the director of photography (DP and not TP which is a French basketball player) was deciding the light, the film-roll for the next production and in a way fixing the color "limit" of the production and kind of imposing its choice, vision. Now it is a bit different: the color can be modified anywhere along the movie production pipeline (which doesn't mean it should be done that way!). And this give a nice transition regarding the input to the discussion from the Big Studio person who was talking about standard and ACES and simplifying the workflow. Starting from color consideration (extremely important considerations say the color scientist) with ACES, it is more guidelines than absolute recipe that are introduced to the pipeline.

Of course the importance of display calibration was mentioning. All and all pretty standard comments but reasonable comments on what people should do or not do: be prepared in advance, know your tools. Danger of processing the dailies too much for the important people, it means you need a grading team on set and you take the risk to fix the color "mood" of the film to early.

I also do remember, or I think I remember that this panel of professional said they need color scientists, good for me, or I dreamed it? In any cases they need color scientists.

During the last day and maybe the last session it was about compression (for the Hobbit movie), especially jpg2000, and color artifacts that can occur. The problem of archiving was tackled by people from the EYE center in Amsterdam: what do you do when you have to scan old film material with very different fps.


And more political, how the standards are pushed from each side of the Atlantic and which company, studio, government, open-source project and so are the main players in these battle/discussion.
 

Back to IBC Multi-platform and big data in TV

Two things I remember about the "Second Screen" and "Big Data" sessions in IBC this year and I think they are connected. The multiplicity of devices around us has changed somehow the way we watch television (I don't have a television). For some it is an improvement, it is the open door to multi-platform (TV + online presence on various networks) more than cross-media and surely a challenge to monitor the viewer attention. In other words what is doing the audience when watching television and where do I put my advertising?

England seems to be a giant laboratory where everyone can be observed, his behavior analyzed and quantified (they are statistically big twitter users). The amount a of generated data is enormous - we talk about big data - and the risk to be overloaded is real. This actually the case and I heard during the session from the panel discussion speakers that data scientists are needed (good for us).

An interesting talk from Twitter UK what to illustrate how the live audience reaction can be used to add information to a TV show. Example of the last US presidential debate was to say: six channels (not sure) were broadcasting exactly the same video stream, after days one was getting most of the viewers attention. Why? Explanation was this TV channel (it was Fox I believe) was able to analyze the tweets live during the debate (using the twitter API everyone can access all tweets) and to provide a global audience reaction to it, so nothing like "this candidate sucks" or "I like him" was appearing on screen but a simple feedback yes the candidate is answering the question or no he is not (not exactly that but not too far). You do need to have data scientists, people doing social graph analysis to retrieve such information. And there are companies offering this service to TV channels, doing interactive programming (I think they call it like that) and able to process the multiple streams of information coming from the audience, be it a tweet, sms, email, FB message... And if you know where your audience is then you are able to monetize this information.

Usability, it's nice to have many possibilities to react, send feedbacks, but they are so many options that it is difficult to drag most of the viewers attention or at least the group you have targeted without losing half of them on the way. I explain, if you are on your sofa, you don't want to follow a specific procedure, fill a form, touch your tablet screen with 3 fingers, flip the tablet in the air to be able to "interact" with the program to access something. In that sens someone from Shazam gave a great talk. He made a simple experiment to illustrate his point by asking us: who had the app on his smart-phone and what do you do to use it? You press the button to start the app and raise you phone toward the speaker. Their idea was to use this known behavior to communicate with the TV audience: you are watching a program, the shazam logo appear on screen, you raise you arm with the app on, some kind of audio qr-code are activated and you have access to new content on you tablet or smart-phone, brilliant (it was for tv program RedBull if I'm correct).

Back in IBC - Cutting Edge Session 1&2

It was almost on all lips during IBC this year, you have to improve the immersive experience for the viewers. Not only the story or TV program have to be original and addictive and if possible an endless source of money generator, no, they also have to be more immersive.

But what is an immersive experience? Different people, different interpretations. The idea is to offer to a spectator - while he is at the cinema or in front of its tv - an experience the more realistic it can be, the viewer should forget he is watching a display (e.g. watching a football game on your sofa and feeling you are in the stadium). The question becomes how to improve the display to make it more immersive? That's what the conference speakers (#ibcconf hosted during the show #ibcshow early September in Amsterdam) were trying to answer in their presentation. And especially in the sessions "Cutting Edge 1 & 2" new technologies were discussed. I took part in session 2 and we are all presenting what are the things comings, which technology will be predominant in a near future and hopefully the one we propose will be.

Starting from a rectangle display with a fixed resolution (e.g. HD), a fixed frame per second rate (e.g. 25fps), a fixed color dynamic (e.g. each color channel pixel coded on 8bits) what do we do? How do we introduce new "things" without destroying completely the existing workflow (from image acquisition, encoding and compression, diffusion and display)?

Increasing the resolution to 4K was written everywhere this year, increasing the resolution almost 4 times the one corresponding to HD (which is the one for Blue-Ray, DVD is way smaller), but so far there is not real content or affordable customer product for home. Professional movie cameras (or the latest GoPro) can offer this resolution, but only movie theater could follow on that (also I don't remember what is the offcial/recommended resolution for film distribution). Comparing to some years ago, the switch to full digital is a reality in many movie theaters and even so the quality in full digital is said to be lower than with film, two things are interesting: there is limit for an average viewer to see/perceive a difference in quality above 2K (so do we need to go so high?) and depending where you sit in a theater you will perceive different resolutions. In case you don't know this already, the human eye is performing filtering on the signal he receives, details will be perceived in an image depending of the viewing distance (this is use in many image compression algorithm where you remove what is not seen anyway).

Researchers at BBC where showing their latest work on fps, which fps is achievable in order to increase the viewing comfort. They said that above 100fps it's better, for you to appreciate the difference they were showing the same sequence (athletes doing high jump) with "normal" fps and higher fps side by side.

About hdr, the display market is almost reduces to one company (Dolby). The technique for taking hdr images (high dynamic range images) is known, basically you have to combine several pictures taken at different exposures. One can see the issues when you want to record movie file and not a single image. Researchers at Fraunhofer ISS proposed a very neat solution where sensors with different sensitivities pseudo-randomly distributed where used. And taking into account sparsity they could in one single shot obtain an hdr image. A brilliant friend did suggest me the following "but why don't they read continuously the captors to get the values at different exposures and create the hdr data on the fly", hmm why? And hdr must not be misunderstood with RAW file format despite data in that format possibly available in higher that 8bits per channel.

And there is our approach which consists in surrounding physically the viewers: the screen is curved (e.g. cylinder or digital dome to spherical display). To do so we combine several projectors to project images on the whole curved surface. This year we proposed a study case where 3D stereoscopic content was streamed to a digital dome. The installation we described use two fish-eye cameras and a 2 diameters dome tilted at 90degres such that while standing you are looking straight in the middle of the curved screen (the field of view proposed is bigger than your natural field of view, you should feel immersed). 3D and immersive experience go together and research is actively done to make the 3D experience more seamless to the user, meaning no glasses to wear, auto-stereoscopy and multi-views. Here as well the colleagues at Fraunhofer HHI and ISS have a strong presence. The matter of 3D and immersive display (or surround cinema) is tricky, the whole 3D thing is tricky (which makes it very interesting), because looking with one eye in real life doesn't make you see a flat image, you still perceive depth. And coming back to immersive display/surround cinema, the way you generate 3D images has to take into account where the viewer may look at, the freedom you are offering (possibility to look in every direction) is a challenge for the generation of proper stereoscopic effect. And I probably lost 98% of my friends after these lines.

All these large, curved, multi-blended displays need to be accurately color calibrated on the top of their geometrical calibration (we also do that at Fraunhofer FOKUS in our department VISCOM). The viewers need to have the feeling to look at one single light source only. The more you forget about the technique during the show you are watching/attending, the more immersive is the experience.

Last but not least, sound is of course in the game. You can't talk about surround cinema without surround sound. That wasn't too much mentioned in the sessions, but both image and sound are working together, beautiful isn't it... That is not my specialty, mine is color and image processing and more, I let the sound to my colleague specialists.

In the Amsterdam harbor

I can see a little improvement over the years coming back to Amsterdam, after almost 8 times I get less lost which is always nice. But to look like a local demands some practical organization, you don't want to not give the impression you are a tourist (by staying in front of the Van Gog museum or asking where is the red light district or example) or one the numerous IBC visitors (they are easy to spot because they often keep their badge around the neck, or they are packed in the tram line 4 and 11,  men dressed in suits, some are struggling to check in and out in the public transport...) they are simple rules to follow: avoid tram line 4 and 11 during the dates of the IBC event, visit other museums than the one mentioned above or simply walk from place to place and try to get lost.

Going to IBC give you only a few hours (or to any fairs or conferences) to explore the city where the event is hosted. And after the whole day standing up, running to this or this session or talking in front of the audience of the "Cutting Edge Session 2" about your work on 3D stereoscopy camera for digital dome you want to find a place who will treat you well (I'm not talking about massage with good ending), a place with a decent coffee or a good beer who tastes different than Heineken are welcomed.

Being a spotter since this summer for Berlin, I use the spottedbylocals city guide for Amsterdam which have the great feature to be usable off-line on your smart electronic device (the other features being a list of regularly updated spots in the city you are visiting or just living). So, you are lost, turn the app on, check on the map the closest spots depending what you are looking for "et voilà".

And for my second evening in town I had the pleasure to meet the people behind the spottedbylocals city guide. Of course we met in one of the local Amsterdam spots, the stadscafe Van Mechelen which offer a large choice of beer and a delicious burger. Nice evening it was.

Arrival in gouda land

As usual in September I'm traveling to Amsterdam for the IBC event. I'm trying to travel light but still my luggage are too heavy: one PowerPoint presentation, one large laptop, three cameras, four lenses, some cables, a suit, sun glasses, other electronic devices and a lot to do on my agenda.

I found out that a bus goes directly from the airport to my hotel, it is pretty neat from the public transport in Amsterdam to have arranged such bus line. So I jump in the bus 192, cross nice suburbs with red houses, canals, bikers, dukes, gees, more exotic birds and end up in Osdorp inWest Amsterdam. No houses anymore, it looks like a giant tetris area, square buildings everywhere, but nice ones, long bike lines, long canals, they don't like curves here, only the gouda is curved.

It is close to 10pm and even if we are 7km from Amsterdam central station it is pretty quiet here. At least my hotel is still open. Time to grab some food where it is possible, go back to my room and sleep. Tomorrow the conference starts and I give a talk in the afternoon.