Ryan Salazar ,
Editor-In-Chief,
Broadcast Beat Magazine
For those of you not in the media trade, SMPTE stands for the "Society of Motion Picture & Television Engineers," of which I am a proud member, being a post-production studio engineer.
On Friday, July 22, 2016, they celebrated their Centennial Anniversary by having Barbara H. Lange, SMPTE Executive Director, ring the Closing Bell a the Nasdaq MarketSite - 4 Times Square - 43rd & Broadway - Broadcast Studio.
“The SMPTE Centennial represents a wealth of technical and artistic achievement over the past century, as well as the promise of continued innovation,” said SMPTE President Robert Seidel, vice president of engineering and advanced technology at CBS. “This celebration has been 100 years in the making, and we’re proud to be honoring the accomplishments of our founders and their many noteworthy successors within the Society.”
SMPTE is an organization that was designed to provide a consistency for engineers to conform to when calibrating the productions with which they are associated. For 100 years, SMPTE has been the leader in standards for the motion imaging industry, facilitating interoperability, and therefore business. Standards, recommended practices and engineering guidelines all integrate to describe a particular process; the most important process is known as the timecode.
Timecode, a form of media metadata without which modern videotape editing would not be possible, are added to film, video or audio material to provide a time reference for editing, synchronization and identification. Although primarily for video, they have also been adapted to synchronize music. Once in existence, non-linear editing systems could then allow for programs to be presented as you see them today.
SMPTE timecode is a set of standards developed to label individual frames of video or film as defined by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers in their SMPTE 12M specification. The SMPTE standard consists of a two-part document: SMPTE 12M-1 and SMPTE 12M-2, which includes important explanations and clarifications. It is a digital signal of ones and zeroes that becomes an assignment number to every "frame" of video (or sections perceived by the time recording device digitally as frames, due to there being no physical actual "frames" on digital media), representing hours, minutes, seconds, and frames. For
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