The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), a society committed to pursuing motion-imaging standards and education for the communications, media, entertainment, and technology industries, announced the 2014 SMPTE directors. Alan Lambshead, SMPTE standards vice president, appointed Bob Edge, Oliver Morgan and Howard Lukk to serve as standards directors; Paul Stechly, SMPTE membership vice president, appointed Bruce Devlin, Karl Kuhn and William C. Miller to serve as membership directors; and Patrick Griffis, SMPTE education vice president, appointed Michael DeValue, V. Michael Bove, Peter Putman and Al Kovalick to serve as education directors.
“Individually and as a group, the SMPTE members who have been appointed as 2014 directors bring exceptional experience and expertise to the leadership, guidance, and growth of the Society,” said Wendy Aylsworth, SMPTE president and senior vice president of technology at Warner Bros. Technical Operations.
Edge, who is president of Bob Edge TV Consulting, has been active in television standards work for more than 18 years, participating in projects with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Video Services Forum (VSF), Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA), SMPTE and other organizations. He has served as an SMPTE engineering director and as a technology committee chair, is a Life Fellow within the Society and has contributed to the development of more than a dozen SMPTE standards and registered disclosure documents (RDD). Edge is also the author of numerous technical papers describing the application of information technology (IT) and data networking for television production.
Morgan is founder and president of Metaglue Corporation. Spanning more than 30 years, his career in the television industry includes roles as director of engineering and senior consulting engineer at Convergence Corporation, Sony Corporation and Avid Technology. He is a SMPTE Fellow and, as chair of the SMPTE W25 Committee on Metadata and Wrapper Technology from 2000 through 2004, has guided the development of the SMPTE Metadata Dictionary and the Material Exchange Format (MXF). He holds 10 patents and was a founding member of the AMWA.
Lukk is vice president of production technology at The Walt Disney Studios, where he is responsible for helping to incorporate new technologies into the workflow of the studio. He is a SMPTE Fellow and an associate member of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC).
Devlin has worked for more than 25 years within many aspects of media, and today, as AmberFin chief technical officer (CTO), leads the company’s technology strategy. He is a member of the Internal Association of Broadcast Manufacturers (IABM), a SMPTE Fellow and recipient of SMPTE’s David Sarnoff Medal and the British Kinematograph, Sound and Television Society‘s (BKSTS)’ Achievement Award. Devlin has authored patents, specifications and books that drive the professional media industry forward.
Kuhn is senior video systems applications engineer at Tektronix, a role in which he supports digital audio and video, compression, Internet protocol (IP), file-based, and radio frequency (RF) test and measurement. He holds three U.S. patents and one Japanese patent that cover in-service testing of digital broadcast video. Kuhn has served on the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) Technical and Engineering Emmy Committee from 2007 to 2010; he is the past chair of the Washington, D.C., SMPTE section and now serves as the SMPTE Eastern region governor.
Miller is president of Miltag Media Technology, a consultancy specializing in technical standards for television and related industries. He has been a broadcaster for nearly 40 years, earning an Emmy for his contributions to ABC‘s coverage of the XV Olympic Winter Games, and has been actively involved in the development of television standards for more than 25 years. Miller is a SMPTE Fellow and a SMPTE New York region governor. He was awarded the society’s Progress Medal in 2002 and its Presidential Proclamation in 2013. He has held numerous leadership roles not only within SMPTE, but also within the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Broadcast Technology Society (BTS) and the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC).
DeValue is the director of advanced technology at The Walt Disney Studios, where he is responsible for standards, as well as researching new technologies related to content distribution such as 3D, 4K and high dynamic range (HDR). He has co-chaired several groups related to 3D in the home for SMPTE and presented a session on captions in stereoscopic 3D at the SMPTE 2010 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition. In addition to SMPTE, he is an active participant in the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA) and Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) and is also the current chairman of the International 3D & Advanced Imaging Society.
Bove holds an S.B.E.E., an S.M. in visual studies, and a doctorate in media technology, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is the head of the Object-Based Media Group at the Media Laboratory. He is the author or co-author of more than 90 journal and conference papers, holds patents on inventions relating to video recording, hard copy, interactive television, and medical imaging and is co-author of the book, Holographic Imaging. He is on the Board of Editors of the SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal, has served as associate editor of Optical Engineering (OE) and is a fellow of the SPIE and the Institute for Innovation, Creativity, and Capital.
Putman, president of ROAM Consulting, develops training and marketing programs for manufacturers, dealers and end users of displays, display interfaces and wireless connectivity products. He is a contributing editor for Sound and Communications magazine, editor and publisher of HDTVexpert and an InfoComm Senior Academy Instructor for the International Communications Industries Association (ICIA), where he was the 2008 ICIA Educator of the Year. He is a member of SMPTE and the Society for Information Display (SID) and holds certifications from ICIA and the Imaging Science Foundation (ISF).
Kovalick, founder of Media Systems Consulting, has worked in the field of hybrid audiovisual and IT systems for the past 20 years, and currently focuses on media systems, file-based workflows and cloud migration for media facilities. He has presented more than 50 papers at industry conferences worldwide and holds 18 U.S. and foreign patents. In 2009 Kovalick was awarded the David Sarnoff Medal from SMPTE for engineering achievement. He is a life member of Tau Beta Pi, an IEEE member, and a SMPTE Life Fellow. He is the Cloudspotter’s Journal columnist for TV Technology magazine.