ETC hosted its 9^th vETC virtual conference at this year’s (IBC) in Amsterdam, Sep 15th, 16th, 17th and 18th (Hall 7 Booth C28).

vETC highlights significant presentations of emerging technologies and their impact on the M&E industry. This event’s speakers explored how procedural generation machine, learning, and other tools affect, computer vision problems. We explored nerves and other amazing new tools that help simplify building 3-D worlds along with many other cutting-edge technologies.

Support with key resources came from HP, Intel, Halostage, and Ready Set Studios, with supporting companies Aputure Imaging Industries Co., LTD, ARRI, Blackmagic Design,  Cooke,  Final Pixel, and Mo-Sys.

Halostage powered by ICT AG is the LED wall partner with Brompton Technology. The system was built by Halostage and Ready Set Studios with Mo-Sys for the tracking system.

All additional supporting gear was donated by Final Pixel.

Led by Erik Weaver, director of ETC’s Adaptive and Virtual Production project, vETC (a virtual conference), is a concept implemented by ETC in 2015 to address the overflow of speakers and topics at conferences.

The program, along with speakers and bios, are below.

vETC at IBC2023 -
Friday, Sep 15th (Day 1)

vETC at IBC2023 -
Saturday, Sep 16th (Day 2)

vETC at IBC2023 -
Sunday, Sep 17th (Day 3)

The SPEAKERS - vETC at IBC2023

Speaker	Bio
Chris Adamson Sr. Business Development Manager, Entertainment Movella	Chris Adamson has been in the mocap world since 2012 working in technical production roles. After spending 8 years at Xsens Chris worked at an Action Design studio (SuperAlloy) working on AAA game titles and VFX heavy movies. Back as a Sr. Business Development Manager at Xsens Movella Chris is the connection between customers and their product experience.
Jamie Allan Director, Business Development, Global Agencies + Advertising NVIDIA	Jamie is an industry lead at NVIDIA focussed on Media, Broadcast and Advertising. He works with world-leading organisations and developers to help bring their visions to life and accelerate the ecosystem into a new era of accelerated computing and AI.
Ian Armstrong Founder, Executive Chairman Silverscape	A classically trained, emotionally intelligent Marketing/Sales leader with over 23 years’ experience in fast moving commercial environments including 8.5 years in marketing soft drinks and 15 years in automotive marketing. Experienced in managing leading brands in their category up to £24bn turnover across multiple geographies, routes to market and multi-franchise environments. Is a strong strategic thinker with a proven ability to deliver ‘best in class’ output by leading demanding internal and external agency teams. Someone who has been successively promoted through high profile roles delivering results via technical excellence and strong management competencies. A desire to explore the ‘new’ to deliver exceptional commercial results whilst staying focussed on the agreed strategy.
Miguel Churruca Director, Marketing and Communications Brainstorm	Miguel Churruca is Marketing and Communications Director of Brainstorm Multimedia, provider of industry-leading real-time 3D interactive graphics solutions. Before joining Brainstorm, he was Marketing Director at Blusens, a consumer electronics Spanish multi-national company with subsidiaries in Europe, Middle East, America and Asia, and previously Head of Marketing for Southern Europe and South America of Quantel, a British company manufacturer of high-end hardware and software for broadcast and film, where he worked for ten years in different positions. Between 2014 and 2016 he was Director of Institutional Marketing at the Universidad Pontificia Comillas ICAI-ICADE, one of the most renowned and respected private universities in Spain. Miguel Churruca is an experienced speaker, giving several conferences, lectures and workshops around the world covering a variety of topics, from Digital Film Technology to Marketing Procedures. Miguel earned his degree in Communication Sciences (Advertising and PR) from the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain, and holds a post-graduate in Audio-visual Communication from the same university, as well as a Marketing and Commercial Direction Masters from the University of Barcelona, Spain. He has also been an active member of several Associations such as DIRCOM, ADG-FAD, as well as belonging to technical and professional committees.
Michael Cioni Founder & CEO Strada
Niall Hendry Head, Partnerships and Delivery Move.ai	Niall is Head of Partnerships & Delivery at Move.ai. Niall is a specialist in deploying & productising AI-powered real-time and post production technologies for Media, Entertainment & Sport.
Laura Herring Executive Director Silver Spoon	Laura Herzing is Executive Director at Silver Spoon, a leading provider of real-time content and experiences built on Unreal Engine. She plays a key leadership role in developing the company’s corporate strategy and oversees all production. With a background in design, Laura got her start working in small advertising agencies. After moving to the vendor side, she led global teams producing live action commercial and animation jobs around the world. Laura has been working in real-time and virtual production since its infancy. From using Unreal Engine to animate Chester Cheetah in real-time in 2017, to producing the world’s first real-time avatar singing competition in 2021, she has witnessed firsthand how utilizing gaming tools for real-time production is fundamentally changing the way content is being created across industries. Laura resides in Brooklyn and enjoys spilling her coffee in cities around the world.
Jeremy Hochman Co-founder Megapixel	Jeremy Hochman is co-founder of Megapixel, a pioneer in visual technology including processing, screen analytics, and display tech. He’s actively involved in SMPTE’s rapid industry solutions group, a member of the TV academy, and has been doing virtual production for 20 years since before it was called virtual production.
Muki Kulhan CIO, Executive XR/MetaTech Immersive Producer & Creative/5G Technologist, Muki International	Creative and forward-thinking CIO/Executive ImmersiveXR Producer and Creative R&D with over two decades of professional, award-winning experience creating interactive and immersive content across emerging platforms, MetaTech 'verses' & worlds, RT3D, cutting/bleeding-edge and 5G innovation, engaging fans via music, sport, broadcasting and entertainment.
Senthil Kumar Co-founder Qube Cinema	A tech entrepreneur with multiple patents to his credit and experience in both movie and television production, Senthil Kumar is a co-founder of Qube Cinema, the company that brought digital editing to India with Avid, digital cinema sound to India with DTS and helped transform the cinema industry worldwide with its Qube digital cinema system. He is also a member of the Oscar Academy and an active Trustee of The Banyan, an NGO that supports the homeless and the mentally ill.
Barbara Lange Principal and CEO Kibo121	Barbara Lange is principal and CEO of Kibo121, a consultancy firm focused on guiding media tech organizations on their path to sustainability. Lange has been an invited speaker on sustainability at industry events including the NAB Show, SVG (Sports Video Group), IBC, SMPTE, SMW (Streaming Media West), and the HPA Tech Retreat. She is actively engaged in the industry groups developing a greener future in media, including Greening of Streaming, and SMPTE’s working group on sustainability in media in the cloud. Lange serves as the program manager for the NAB Show’s Excellence in Sustainability Awards, is a Secretariat volunteer member of Greening of Streaming, and co-founded the Media Tech Sustainability Summit. Lange is a member of the International Society of Sustainability Professionals (ISSP). Prior to launching Kibo121, Lange served as the executive director at SMPTE, the global professional association, and standards body, that supports the technical framework and professional community which makes quality motion imaging available to consumers in a variety of media formats. Lange’s career started in business development and product management in scholarly publishing. She holds a B.A. in Chemistry and German from Washington and Jefferson College and completed the Executive Development Program at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and the Entrepreneurial Growth Lab program at the Women’s Enterprise Development Center (WEDC). Lange has been recognized for her leadership by Washington & Jefferson College, the IEEE, StudioDaily50, and with the TVNewscheck’s 2020 Woman in Technology Award. In 2021, she was honored by TVB Europe as a 2021 Technology Leader to Watch and by Broadcast & Cable with the 2021 Tech Leadership Award.
Cedric Lejeune Founder Holli	Cedric started in 2000 as a visual effects assistant on Discreet Smoke, working on TribalX, a complex full CG/MoCap production for children and managing the network infrastructure in a small post-production facility. In 2000 he becomes an application engineer for Post Logic, a French VFX system reseller and supports a wide range of products for CG animation, infrastructure, effects, colour grading. He was in charge of the implementation of the first industrial digital intermediate pipeline at Éclair Laboratoires in 2002 and different setups in Paris and Europe. In 2006 he starts his first company, Workflowers, to develop consulting and training services, accompanying film labs in the transition to digital and helping post-production to step into the cinema world. He specializes in digital cinema and video workflows, infrastructures and colour science. He managed the setup of early ACES color pipelines in Digital Cinema and Visual Effects facilities. His early works on online collaborative environment and content management tools have made him an expert of cloud technologies for media. Workflowers’ image processing tools are used by major studios in the world. In 2015 he joins the European cinema group Ymagis to supervise the technology for post-production and mastering labs in the group (New York, London, Liège, Berlin, Barcelona, Paris). The integration of Eclair Laboratoires extends the delivery of content to broadcasters and OTT and gives an opportunity to develop a century old brand as an innovative one. He then assembled the technology and innovation team to create more efficient and global workflows across the group. He led the development of EclairColor, the HDR solution for cinema (www.eclaircolor.com). In 2020, while continuing R&D efforts for EclairColor and developing HDR and HFR image technologies for the Chinese market, he reboots Workflowers to help media industries in their transition to a more sustainable model. With his team of media engineers, he helps studios in building and implementing organization and technical strategies with sustainability in mind. In 2023 he starts Fast&Young, a consulting company helping media organizations integrate new business paradigms, with a data centric approach to boost efficiency and reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions. He partners with Perfect Memory for the development of their semantic technology toolset for the movie studio environment. Cedric is a member of Commission Supérieure Technique (CST), Visual Effects Society (VES), Society of Motion Pictures Technicians and Engineers (SMPTE) and Hollywood Professionals Association (HPA). He Is a member of the EBU Sustainability group, the SMPTE Cloud Sustainability working group and a founding member of La Cartouch’Verte, an association to promote good environmental practices in animation movies production.
Barbara Marshall Lead, Global M&E Industry HP	Barbara has spent 30 years in the media & entertainment industry with organizations such as the BBC, Autodesk, Epic Games and now HP Inc. As the Global M&E Industry Lead at HP, she oversees initiatives and industry partnerships that drive adoption of Z by HP technology solutions in entertainment content creation. She has led marketing and PR teams both in-house and agency-side, consulted for several start-ups and was also technology editor with Broadcast Magazine in the UK. She has a strong commercial and analytical background, having started her career as a commodity analyst/trader and holds a BSc in Agricultural Economics from University of London.
Michael McKenna CEO and Co-founder Final Pixel	Michael holds the vision of how Virtual Production will revolutionise filmmaking. On productions he leads as Director of Virtual Production, overseeing VAD and OSVP for Film, TV and Advertising clients. He is a leader, an innovator and a disruptor, operating at a unique intersection in technology, creativity and business to produce world class content.
Jodi Nelson-Tabor Head, Final Pixel Academy Final Pixel Academy	Dr Jodi Nelson-Tabor is the Head of Final Pixel Academy, which is the trainjng arm for Final Pixel - a global, end-to-end Virtual Production Company. She is responsible for the development of talent pipelines for Virtual Production to support and enable collectively as an industry close the skills gaps. This includes business development, creation and curation of its growing catalogue of Final Pixel Academy courses and training, VP training delivery and facilitation, education, outreach and knowledge transfer, rrsearch and innovatiin, thought leadership and communication, and nurturing strategic partnerships across multiple stakeholders, including education and university organisations, corporate creatives and technicians, producers and professional crew across all HODs and emerging talent across film, tv, media and games.
Nils Pauwels Partner & Director ReadySet Studios
Rob Payton Production Specialist/Consultant (Arri), Filmmaker and DP ARRI
Camilla Powell Product Manager disguise	Camilla has over 2 decades experience in media related industries in both an engineering and product capacity, where innovation has been a consistent theme. During 15 years at Sony Professional, Camilla worked in engineering to develop and deliver software for the digital signage, IP security and broadcast asset management and workflow, both as global product releases and bespoke enterprise projects. Since Sony, Camilla has moved across to Product Management to be more involved in the what and the why than the bits and bytes. At Grass Valley Camilla oversaw the launch of a suite of asset management capabilities on Grass Valley’s Agile Media Processing Platform (AMPP), which successfully delivered the Olympics in 2021 for Eurosport on a hybrid cloud an on-premise system built for massive scalability. Camilla more recently moved to disguise to specialize in Virtual Production, as well as overseeing key initiatives such as the disguise partnership with move.ai for delivering markerless motion capture.
Derek Powell Director Altman Solon	As a Director based in Altman Solon’s Los Angeles office, Derek is an expert in the firm’s Media & Entertainment practice, specifically focusing on media technology and operational improvements. Throughout his tenure, Derek has led engagements in the M&E industry and across a variety of functional domains. His recent work has emphasized growth strategy, business performance improvement, and emerging technologies. He previously held senior level roles domestically and internationally at Deloitte, Sony and Warner Bros. Strategy & Operations - Advising global film, television, music, and gaming clients on entering new markets, evaluating potential investment opportunities, and validating strategic fit of M&A targets. - Developing strategies to launch and manage new services and products - Providing media expertise from production to distribution and archiving / preservation - Partnering with content creators with production technology and on-set tech capabilities; localizing content for global audiences, mastering content in all established and emerging formats: ingests, tags, encodes, and delivery; and preserving and archiving of film, TV and other media assets. Business Improvement - Developing and implementing post-merger integration and re-organization programs - Leading digital transformations to drive direct-to-consumer business models and defining - Creating actionable and insightful analyses across production, post-production and distribution to identify areas of risks and opportunities and monitor operational effectiveness - Providing quantitative and qualitative expertise to optimize core media operations to drive greater flexibility, agility and time-to-market capabilities leading to cost reduction, revenue enhancement and asset utilization Emerging Technologies - Exploring the application of emerging technologies and capabilities within the media industry – virtual production, cognitive technologies (algorithms, ML, NLP, NLG), robotics and process automation (RPA), big data, AR/VR and IoT ecosystems.
Hesling Reidinga Creative Captain The Wolfgang Project
Ian Robinson Expert ZBrush Trainer Maxon	Ian is an expert ZBrush trainer at Maxon. From creating video tutorials, live streaming, hosting events and interviewing some of the top artists in the world, Ian is dedicated to helping others learn how to use the software to the best of their abilities. He covers topics from 3D printing and toy design to game assets and animation ready modeling.
Ravi Velhal Lead, Technology Policy and Standards Intel	Ravindra “Ravi” Velhal leads Digital Media Standards, Technologies, advance media formats and Immersive Cinema programs globally at Intel for the last 23 years. He and his teams pioneered first ever live streaming of Tokyo 2020 Olympics games in 8K, 60 fps, HDR over the open internet to selected locations worldwide, launched 8K OTT service with GloboTV in Brazil and delivered 8K VR livestreaming of Beijing Winter Olympics nominated for the Sports Emmys. As an Immersive Cinema pioneer, he co-produced Le Musk. multi-sensory VR Cinema by A.R. Rahman premiered at CannesXR, 75th Cannes Film Festival and recently launched in Hollywood (P.G.A Innovation Awards nominated). Ravi co-produced dozens of Hollywood Immersive VR projects including Save Every Breathe: Dunkirk VRE with Warner Bros, FIRST MAN: VRE with Universal Pictures (Emmy nominated), Grease with Paramount Pictures in Volumetric capturing 5 trillion pixels, directed Rio Carnival 2018 VRE with GloboTV, Sony Pictures on SpiderMan: Home Coming VRE (Emmy nominated) multi-player VR game over 5G at MWC 2019. Ravi collaborated with Sony Pictures to launch Sony Innovation Studios. Ravi has been nominated for Hollywood’s Digital Entertainment Group’s “Lifetime Achievements Award) and won DEG’s Technology Achievement Awards, recipient of Hollywood’s prestigious Lumiere award twice, Infinity Film Festival of Beverly Hills Audience Choice Award, Monolith Awards winner for pioneering 8K livestream, iABM 8K Project of the year winner, finalist for “Technology Leader of the year 2021” by iABM, FICCI-Frames pioneering contribution awards for advancing media sector in India. Ravi holds more than dozen global patents, wrote several research papers and spoke at more than 110 forums and prestigious conferences worldwide. He currently co-chairs Encode group in 8K association, Immersive Cinema at Infinity Festival, served as a director on the AIS/VR Society board, IEEE CS Oregon Chair, contributor towards climate change initiatives and an advisor to film and trade organizations, globally.
Erik Weaver Director, Adaptive & Virtual Production ETC	Erik Weaver is a specialist focused on the intersection of cloud and the Media and Entertainment industry. He currently directs ETC’s Adaptive and Virtual Production project that encompasses many aspects of the cloud, including transport, security, metadata, long-term storage, and formation of an agnostic framework that unites key vendors and studios. Prior work includes ETC’s “Production in the Cloud” as well as global M&E strategy for Western Digital. Weaver has fostered and achieved many accomplishments in the M&E market including executive producer on several ETC R&D film projects like: “Ripple Effect” (2020) that examined safety protocols and virtual production during the pandemic; “Wonder Buffalo” (2018), a production that entered the SXSW Interactivity competition, and focused on an HRD first, cloud, & volumetric capture. The project was brought together by volumetric capture, photogrammetry, ambonisic sound, and interactivity; “The Suitcase” (2016), a CAA People Choice Award and Tribeca 2017 entry that focused on HDR, cloud-based workflows and Live 360. He was also chairman of NAB’s “Next Generation Media Technologies” Conference 2014-2017, as well as chairman and initiator of vNAB 2015-2019 (later rebranded as the ongoing vETC). Weaver’s SMPTE involvement includes the Rapid Industry Solution (RIS) initiative which seeks to operate with greater agility to respond to emerging technology challenges, and the C4 MR30 Standards group, which oversees and helps educate the M&E industry on using C4, Semantics, and NoSQL for Managing Motion Picture Data. Weaver has also spoken – and continues to speak – at numerous M&E conferences and tradeshows.
Jack Wenzinger Global Leader M&E Content Production Partners AWS	Like a sculptor chiseling form from stone, Jack Wenzinger has spent over two decades shaping media supply chains and content workflows, seeking always to push boundaries. As an innovator of cloud and AI, he guides partners to new frontiers, transforming challenges into futuristic triumphs. Though his fellowship in virtual production was hard-won, his passion for the cinematic possibilities is boundless. When not conferring on cinematography or wrenching, you may find him engrossed in Rush's cerebral lyrics or wind-racing on his motorcycle. His mind ever journeys through imaginative landscapes both physical and digital, always reaching for unseen horizons. Yet he remains grounded by connections, welcoming any who would explore ideas, technology, creativity or the perfect vintage shovelhead. The clockwork universe turns inscrutably on, but Jack listens for the rhythms that drive our spirits eternally onward.