I blew into town this morning with an hour‘s sleep, expecting not much more than a slow day of stem-winding Digital Cinema Summit panels perfect for napping. Instead I got a fast day of welcome surprises.

Cooling my jets in the press lounge while a squad of black-clad IT guys tapped at my iBook trying to puzzle out why the friendliest of laptops can‘t connect to NAB‘s wireless network — after a 20-minute session, the verdict: “Your computer and our network don‘t get along.” No point in my pointing out that that every notebook in sight is a Mac — I encountered CML‘s Geoff Boyle, brimming with excitement. (Geoff, a U.K.-based Director of Photography, founded and runs the influential Cinematography Mailing List, an Internet exchange for professional DPs, ACs, DITs, and camera techs.)

Atlantic Ocean jet lag hadn‘t prevented him from attending a morning session in which Sony‘s new F23 digital cinema camera was introduced to a crowd of “young DoPs, HVX200 types.” Geoff, anything but a Sony fanboy, conceded that the 3-chip 1080/60p 4:4:4 Panaflex lookalike–and I paraphrase–“leaves Viper in the dust. Genesis too.”

Indeed, for Digital Cinematography enthusiasts, it will be Tuesday night‘s CML shoot-out at Media Underground that is the highlight of NAB, and for this event Geoff and co-presenter Scott Billups have corralled every established or fledgling digital cinematography camera at NAB except two: Arri‘s D20 and the highly anticipated working version of RED. Arri apparently feels there‘s nothing in it for them. When I asked RED‘s ubiquitous Ted Schilowitz about it later in the day, he said he‘d be too busy meeting with Apple dealers to attend. Apple dealers? Grinning like the Cheshire cat, he asked if I were attending Sunday‘s high profile Apple press conference.

I had run into Schilowitz at a wine reception sponsored by Germany‘s renown Fraunhofer Institute at the conclusion of the Digital Cinema Summit sessions. Fraunhofer is a large public/private research institute with many locations throughout Germany. It holds many basic media patents including MP3 audio compression. Think Bell Labs crossed with the National Cancer Institute. (That‘s the best I could come up with — hope you‘re old enough to remember Bell Labs — because these days, outside of health, the U.S. government funds little basic research not related to military or intelligence needs.)

The Digital Cinema Summit afternoon sessions were mostly blah-blah-blah about methods and evolving concerns of the Hollywood studios’ Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI), with talk of “evergreen keys” for encryption (think: forever) and unfamiliar acronyms like DSM (uncompressed digital source materials) and DCP (digital cinema package, i.e., disk drive for delivering encrypted movie files to theaters). The final session, thankfully, turned out to be more interesting: recommendations by the European Union‘s WorldScreen project for a worldwide roll-out of digital cinema. The eight WorldScreen partners included Fraunhofer, ARRI, Kodak Europe, Warner Brothers, and Deutsche Telekom. I use the past tense because WorldScreen was chartered to exist from September 2004 to April 2007. Today‘s presentation was their swan song.

Moderator Wendy Aylsworth of Warner Bros. emphasized that WorldScreen had tailored its recommended practices and specifications to global use, including the U.S. One of the early efforts spearheaded by Fraunhofer, for instance, was evaluation and adoption of JPEG 2000 as the universal codec for digital cinema. J2K was a dark horse for DCI ratification in 2005. Most expected MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 to be selected instead. If I were to tell you that certain DCI and ASC members were in quiet contact with WorldScreen several years ago, can you connect the dots?

Aylsworth and guests from WorldScreen went on to explain ways the WorldScreen project had differed from DCI. While DCI was steered by the six remaining Hollywood studios — some charge that DCI‘s spec‘s and methods reflect mostly studio needs — WorldScreen was publicly funded (3 million Euros of 6M total). As a result, WorldScreen‘s process and results were open to public scrutiny. Furthermore, while DCI concentrated on control of distribution and exhibition, WorldScreen examined acquisition, production, and postproduction. (Hence ARRI.) Which gave rise to the idea of flexible wavelet J2K coding, scalable in data rate, signal-to-noise, and display.

You can learn more about WorldScreen‘s findings at www.worldscreen.org.

So anyway, later at the Fraunhofer WorldScreen wine reception where I ran into RED‘s Ted Schilowitz, I came across Fraunhofer‘s realtime JPEG 2000 encoder, custom-built for WorldScreen field tests. It‘s a portable, battery-powered Digital Cinema recorder housing 16 SATA drives (2 terabytes total) in what a helpful Fraunhofer rep told me was “somewhere between RAID 5 and 6.” Inputs include FireWire, Fibre Channel, DVI, dual link HD-SDI. If I understood correctly, its J2K compression is near-lossless 4:1. I wish it were a real product yesterday.

At the same reception I also encountered fellow New York-based HD aficionado, Mark Forman, and proceeded to race across town with him to the Palms Hotel & Casino, where Fraunhofer was fine-tuning their eye-popping 5K projection demonstration, to be presented tomorrow night to a select NAB audience.

See if you can follow this: well-known commercials DP Bill Bennett shot a series of test scenes in red rock country, mostly with a 65mm ARRI camera. The 65mm neg was scanned to 6K on the only 65mm ArriScan Recorder in existence, at ARRI in Munich. The resulting 6K files were downscaled to 4K. The 4K files were compressed to MPEG-2 and played off a disk server in the biggest film theater at the Palms casino. The image was projected as true pixel-to-pixel 4K. The resulting widescreen image didn‘t quite fill the width of the 5K screen because it was “only” 4K. Pillar boxed!

How wide is a 5K screen that‘s 1400 pixels tall and 5000 pixels across? The aspect ratio of Bill Bennett‘s 65mm scenes on this screen was 3.6:1, per Bill. That spells S-U-P-E-R W-I-D-E on a screen over 40 feet in length.

You might be wondering, where in the world did a 5K projector come from? Ah, that‘s what made this screening unique. Rather than demonstrating an actual product, Fraunhofer demonstrated a technology concept. They assembled five SVG+ projectors (1400 x 1050 pixels each), turned them on their sides so that they projected tall frames 1400 pixels in height, then tiled the resulting five images into a single 5K image. There were no visible seams where the five images were edge-blended. The result was perfect to the eye.

It was, hands down, the sharpest, most sensational widescreen image I‘d seen since a Cinerama screening of “How The West Was Won” when I was maybe seven or eight. (You can imagine how wide-eyed I was then–and now.) Breathtaking is not too strong an adjective. Ask any set of eyes who was there.

Will it be downhill from here at NAB 2007?