On June 13 2013, we celebrated the final anniversary of CineGrid Amsterdam at the EYE Filminsitute in Amsterdam. The project has put ‘4K and beyond’ on the map in the Netherlands.
Research director Frank Kresin has been passionately involved in CineGrid Amsterdam. He looks back at the project with pride:
“CineGrid Amsterdam has brought together a great number of special people from wide-ranging backgrounds, organisations and countries. Together, over the last six years, we have explored and extended the possibilities of audiovisual technology; in doing so, we found a new artistic medium, that is still developing ferociously. Just think of how we started – with fiber carefully put across the canal for Era La Notte – and developed – with Red End, Handelingen, Sintel, the Green Screen live demo’s, and many more experiments that travelled the globe.”
During the screenings at the event, we saw how far the 4K technology took us: from a look inside the creative minds of young moviemakers to a stunning trip in space with the NASA. And although it was the closing event, the main focus lay on the future of 4K and CineGrid.
There are still a lot of questions to study and possibilities to explore. To name just a few:
- Exploring compositing in the cloud.
- Working together internationally through networks, either using existing or making new content.
- How to perfectly combine high-resolution sound and images?
- How to create a sustainable technical infrastructure?
- What will chances in the movie industry, when key people can actually focus on the creative work instead of issues like distribution?
- What new scientific challenges lie ahead?
- Shifting the focus from ‘how do I preserve all the content?’ to ‘how do I decide what to discard?’
Since there is enough left to discover, CineGrid Amsterdam will not say goodbye. Instead we say: see you soon!
Check out all the pictures of the event here.
