Micro-credential - Motion Picture Engineering

Why should I take this MC

The pandemic has amplified the importance of both movie making technology and streaming media platforms. Companies like Netflix, Apple, Amazon are both content creators and streaming media platforms and this fuels the demand for engineers in both domains. As the areas of filmmaking and media streaming converge, engineers in post-production houses need to understand more about the latest compression standards and engineers in streaming media teams need to understand more about what high quality image manipulation entails. This course suits engineers in a start up in the video streaming space or designing image enhancement technology as well as those embarking on a graduate degree in Video Engineering. If you have just joined a post-production house or start up as an early stage graduate this course is an excellent onboarding strategy.

What will I learn – learning outcomes

You will learn about engineering design in both high end postproduction and best in class streaming media workflows. The first part of the course gives you both the mathematical underpinnings of algorithms for rotoscoping, matting and motion estimation and the practice of developing your own tool in a high end platform. In the second part of the course you will learn about the fundamentals of video compression technology and how that is applied to content aware transcoding. Through all of this you will learn the mathematical fundamentals of the new Deep Learning algorithms which are disrupting both these domains. Finally, the course is interspersed with domain insights from practitioners in industry e.g. Google, YouTube, BBC, Facebook, Foundry, Weta and others.

 What will I do – outline activities
You will use the cinema industry standard NUKE compositing platform to develop your own application for a cinema effect. You will write a short scientific paper about your effect including reporting on visual fidelity and computational complexity. You will also attend guest lectures from internationally acclaimed industry experts. In 2020/21 these guest lectures were delivered by 3 Academy Award winners: Simon Robinson (Foundry), Peter Hillman (Weta) and Anil Kokaram (Trinity); R&D experts from Google :  Peyman Milanfar a lead scientist behind the camera tool in the Pixel phone, BBC : Marta Mrak the lead scientist for the BBCs compression division and the Video infrastructure team of Facebook, Ioannis Kompatsiardis. In the last 5 weeks of the course you will apply what you have learned about video compression and fidelity to creating media streams using workflows established by Netflix and Youtube video engineering teams

 How is this MC delivered – mode of delivery

The module is built around 5 contact hours per week. There is a fixed 3 hour block for practical work and 1 hour blocks for lecture material every week. In the first two weeks the 3 hour blocks will be used for an introduction to the NUKE cinema compositor and its programming environment. Thereafter you will be led through several short exercises in plugin development and compression usage. These blocks will be mostly self directed with advice from the module coordinator in the first hour of each block.

 How is this MC assessed – assessment specifics

This is a 10 ECTS course and there are 4 exercises and 1 mini-project. The mini-project is built around the design of a colour-keyer in NUKE which you also write up in a 4 page paper. There are 2 quizzes about the underlying mathematics of effects and compression and 2 practical laboratory exercises.

ECTS and NFQ level and learning hours: 10 ECTS, Level 9, learning hours: 250

Engineering – Courses – Trinity College Dublin (tcd.ie)