The SMPTE San Francisco Section presents our Holiday Social.

There will be free food and drinks (wine, beer and soft drinks) so come hungry! Everyone is welcome, members, non-members, guests, spouses, significant others, etc.

Our thanks to Dolby for the use of their facilities. They will also be showing off their Innovation Theatre, featuring 4K projection and Atmos sound system.

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Blackmagic Design, we have been able to secure one of the BEST Taco trucks in the Bay Area to serve food at the SMPTE Holiday Social on December 18^th.

Taco San Buena is regularly voted among the best trucks in the area, so much so that when it comes to catering for corporate events, companies such as Microsoft, Adobe, Lucas Film, Genetech and others turn first to Taco San Buena to provide those services. In fact, one of the trucks has just finished a 6000 mile round trip with Adobe, visiting university campuses in Washington, Colorado, Illinois, Long Island and Southern California.

Be sure not to miss the opportunity to try some of the area’s tastiest tacos at the SMPTE SF section’s Holiday social.

As well as food and drink, we will also have a guest Speaker,  Al Kovalick, who will give us

"A Brief History of the Second"

Captain Kirk said that “space is the final frontier”. He may be right. However, time is giving space some competition.

This talk is about the second. What is it, who defines it, how is it measured, what is its relationship to the  rotation of the earth? Who first defined a day as 24 hours? Why is John Harrison a hero to timekeepers? Why is the world’s most accurate clock made of paper? What does Einstein say about time? How is time used in media systems? These topics and more, such as the Roswell clock, will be considered during this interactive talk with demos.

You may have heard earlier versions of this talk but be assured that this is the fully updated, 2012 model.

Al is the Founder of Media Systems Consulting in Silicon Valley. Previously, he worked for HP as a systems architect and R&D engineer. Following HP he was the CTO of Pinnacle Systems then a Fellow at Avid. He is an active speaker and educator and authored the 2009 book Video Systems in an IT Environment – The Basics of Networked Media and File-Based Workflows. Al has a BSEE from SJSU and an MSEE degree from the University of California at Berkeley. He holds 18 US and foreign patents. He is a SMPTE Fellow and member of Tau Beta Pi and the IEEE.

Our thanks to our event sponsors: