Hollywood Sign - H 2014
AP Photo/Reed SaxonThe Hollywood Post Alliance, a professional association for the broad postproduction community, has rebranded itself as the Hollywood Professional Alliance.
HPA president Leon Silverman of Disney said the new name reflects its place in the wider Hollywood community along with its planned merger with the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.
Silverman announced the change Wednesday morning at the start of HPA’s annual Technology Retreat in Palm Springs. Last spring, HPA and SMPTE revealed plans to merge and have been steadily moving in that direction.
The retreat program is addressing the shifts taking place in the postproduction business. “There’s more post than there’s ever been,” Michael Cioni, CEO of Light Iron, the post/technology subsidiary of Panavision, said in an address as the program got underway. “But we need to redefine post, which I think is any manipulation of an image after it leaves the camera.”
Cioni contended that the name “post” no longer applies. “The fusion of production and post is happening now,” he said, adding that he hopes the business continues to change as the community’s “value is amplified when things get complicated.”
One example of a change that he expects to see in the not-too-distant future: the elimination of transcoding. Citing the Panasonic 4K Varicam digital camera, which is designed to capture three different codecs at once, he predicted: “Thirty-six months from now they will start putting multiple compression boards in [all] the cameras.”
On technology standards, Cioni admitted that he views them as “important but limiting. … I separate them into creative and mechanical. I want standards in the mechanical, but not the creative elements.”
Disclosure: Carolyn Giardina serves on the HPA board.
