As the desert moon turned red, the engineers on the roof might have contemplated the smell of 3D, the extraordinary visual detail from a microphone, and Dolby's amazing contrast between black and white. No, it wasn't peyote or synesthesia, just the 14th Annual Technology Retreat, conducted by the Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA), in Rancho Mirage, California in February.

HPA's name accurately reflects its constituency, involved in postproduction for Hollywood, but the annual Technology Retreat—which actually predates HPA itself—has no such restrictions. Geographically, attendees range from New York to New Zealand and from Norway to Argentina. In affiliation, they seem even more broadly distributed.

There have been representatives of MPEG the Moving Picture Experts Group and MPEG the Motion Picture Editors Guild. There have been representatives of NATO the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and NATO the National Association of Theatre Owners. Executives have come from ABC the American Broadcasting Companies and ABC the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, as well as other major networks and studios worldwide. There have been members of the American Society of Cinematographers and the Directors Guild of America but also others who work at the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, universities, laboratories, chip makers, software writers, and professional and consumer-electronics manufacturers.

Panasonic's Varicam was introduced at a Technology Retreat; so was Sony's HDCAM SR. The Lucas Digital camera-position sensor used in shooting Star Wars movies was in the demo room the same year as the prototypes of the cameras that shot U2 3D. One year saw the introduction of a low-cost HDTV production switcher, another a system for producing and delivering targeted commercials. Before that, the demo room had 72-frame-per-second HDTV, surround-sound headphones, and DVDs for the blind.

Only three things seem constant about the Technology Retreat: First, despite a slowing economy, travel restrictions after 9/11, and even HPA's best efforts to cut off attendance, the event has grown every year. Second, thanks to the diversity of the participants, no matter what question anyone has, someone there should know the answer. And, finally, as for presentations, expect the unexpected.

Consider the ubiquitous LCD video screen. Some people notice motion artifacts attributed to image storage. Whereas picture tube illumination decays in tiny fractions of a second, LCDs hold their images longer. How much longer?

The opening event at the Technology Retreat this year was a half-day seminar on LCDs at which participants actually got to take apart and rebuild their own displays. It was conducted by Martin Euredjian of eCinema Systems, who received praise even from his competitors (many of whom packed the seminar room). He mentioned one test he'd conducted of image storage on an LCD system; with nothing connected, the picture was still there one-and-a-half weeks later. But, he also explained, normally cells have new information "written" into them with each new frame.

After the LCD session, participants had to choose between a seminar on audio in digital broadcasting (lip sync and loudness, among other issues), under the auspices of the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), or a series of seminars on imagery. Those started with color-science guru Charles Poynton on photometry and radiometry. Do you know what "Zone V" means for exposure? What about the measurement "lumens per person"? They ended with an extensive presentation by the Academy of Motion-Picture Arts and Sciences on their new image-interchange framework (IIF), with accompanying demos and print materials.
What can the IIF accommodate? Consider just contrast.

Lessons in binary arithmetic sometimes begin with a question: Would you rather get a million dollars right now or a penny today, two cents tomorrow, four cents the next day, and so on, doubling each day for a month? The wise would choose the penny. On the 31st day, they'd have $21,474,836.47.

The last payment, 1,073,741,824 pennies, represents two to the 30th power. In cinematography, that billion-to-one is 30 stops of iris range. That's accommodated by the IIF. So is every color that is possible to see (and many that aren't).

Still reeling from that extraordinary contrast range, participants crossed the road the next morning to enter a movie theater and found their noses telling them something was unusual. For the Technology Retreat, RealD and Cinemark had installed a 60-foot non-depolarizing 3D screen, and the odor of the installation hadn't yet dissipated.

Those assembled braved the fumes for a jam-packed half-day seminar on the business of 3D, with everyone from engineers to theater owners providing their insights. Consider screen size, for example. Objects at infinity should be roughly 2.5 inches apart, the distance between the pupils of our eyes. But, if the same image is projected on a 30-foot screen as on a 60-foot one, one of them will be just 1.25 inches (much closer than infinity) or one will be five inches (an unnatural condition likely to introduce eye strain).

Different types of glasses were discussed, too. There are now multi-color filters that can give each eye full color but prevent the wrong eye's images from being seen. Their drawback is that they cost too much to give away. One exhibitor found an excellent return rate in a test asking cinema-goers to deposit even giveaway glasses upon leaving, but collecting them was considered too labor intensive.

Why do exhibitors care about 3D? Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour (shown to the audience along with U2 3D and other stereoscopic material, including different "dimensionalized" versions of Star Wars) grossed $31.5 million on its opening weekend. 3D sells more tickets at higher prices.

If the smell of 3D seemed an unusual element of this year's Technology Retreat, consider the pictures from a microphone. Morgan Kjølerbakken, of Squarehead Technology, started his presentation on the company's Audioscope, a microphone array that creates a pencil-thin pickup beam that can be aimed even after it has been recorded, with some what appeared to be some photographs. One showed the fine detail of a ship. Every bolt and rivet appeared to be visible in the high-resolution image. But it wasn't a photograph at all; it was a sonograph, picked up by the microphone of a sonar system.

The Audioscope's ability seemingly to reproduce anything anyone says at any time raised privacy concerns from the audience, but they were nothing compared to concerns of a different nature expressed during a panel on the U.S. analog-television shutdown, scheduled for the first day of the 2009 Technology Retreat. CBS even provided a 41-page white paper explaining why they feel the dialogue-normalization system ("dialnorm") that's part of the digital television standard doesn't work. NBC, on the other hand, supports not only dialnorm but also automatic format description (AFD) to match aspect ratios to displays (though still recommending a "center-cut safe" area until AFD reaches market saturation).

Earlier, Peter Putman of Roam Consulting provided his annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) review. There was, for example, an LG Philips LCD that provides three different pictures simultaneously.

Given the extraordinary technology in the demo rooms, there was no need for Technology Retreat participants to be concerned about CES exhibits they might have missed. An Audioscope was mounted on the ceiling so people could eavesdrop on conversations. Canon showed a new autofocus system for high-end HDTV lenses. The American Association of Advertising Agencies showed its new Ad-ID Web-based content-tracking system.

Those were just three of dozens of new technologies shown. Consider just the displays. Panasonic offered side-by-side comparisons of a CRT monitor and a plasma, both showing the digital-cinema standard evaluation material (StEM). eCinema Systems provided a first look at the prototype of an LCD monitor said to have a 15,000-to-1 contrast ratio. And Dolby's high-dynamic range display looked as though it could go beyond even that; the unit adjusts LED backlights to add more contrast (and better uniformity) than an LCD could deliver by itself.

One display trumped all of the others for a while for a number of participants, their demo-session beverages in hand. A lunar eclipse, visible from the conference-area roof, turned the moon red. And that, not counting other panels and presentations, more demos, a dinner, and presentation of the first set of prizes for correct quiz answers, was the end of only the first official day of the event. As Adam Wilt put it in his ProVideoCoalition.com blog, "that happens at the Technology Retreat—it's like drinking from a fire hose."

As it always does, the second day (like the third) began with breakfast roundtables. They're meant to be totally free—anything goes—and, as a result, they can get loud and informative. One 3D proponent found his mind changed about 3D in the home as a result of the arguments at a roundtable. Others were horrified to discover that consumer MPEG-2 decoders rarely use the presentation time stamps (PTS) intended to keep audio and video in sync. Roughly 60 topics were covered over the course of the two breakfasts. And there were still two days of sessions remaining!

A joint Canon and Panavision presentation argued for a "rational digital-camera resolution metric," pounding home the importance of contrast and the modulation-transfer function. There were presentations on upconversion, the Red One camera (including how much it really costs for a complete package and how a cinematographer feels it really compares to film), new data-compression systems and the effects of concatenation of multiple compression stages, the new world of synchronization, and a panel on tapeless workflows (did you know that large stick-on dots that prevent memory cards from being inserted into readers can actually serve a good function?). And there was still more!

Did you know that the digital-cinema StEM exceeds the color gamut of the digital-cinema specifications? And other material can be worse still. Pixar offered a "virtual white" solution now being used in Sony projectors.

Can audio dynamic range be automatically controlled? How can new display technologies be evaluated, and just how bad are they? Does digital cinema really save studios money? Was the HDMI connection designed to fail? Just what is fair use of copyrighted material? Answers to those questions were provided by representatives of Belden, Fox, Silicon Optix, TC Electronic, Universal Studios, and the law firm of Dow Lohnes, among others.

Got a bizarre question about anything in the field of videography? Bring it to next year's HPA Technology Retreat. Someone is bound to be there who'll know the answer.

Someone Knows the Answer
A tradition at the Technology Retreat is a series of quizzes, with prizes ranging from glow-in-the-dark statues of the patron saint of television to propeller-head beanies to plush teddy-bear universal remote controls to—this year—an HDTV camcorder.

See how you do on this year's quizzes. Someone got the correct answer to each of them—often more than one winner per quiz:
- When did Business Week run the headline "3D Invades TV"?
- When, after changing its mind, did the FCC issue its current ruling on HDTV broadcasting?
- Who invented the scanning line for image transmission (hint: it was long before Philo Farnsworth)?
- In what context is ki to 2.4% as yo is to 20.9%?
- What were the tertiary colors of NUTSEQUAMIR?
- What was the first opera written specifically for television (hint: it was long before Amahl and the Night Visitors)?
- What technological breakthrough did the Los Angeles Times attribute to the Metropolitan Opera's 1952 live cinemacast?