Motion Picture Engineering Micro-credential

Organisation profile

Trinity College Dublin is Ireland's leading University, which has been inspiring generations of brilliant thinkers for over 400 years.

Training aim

By the end of the course learners will be able to:

• Design tools in a commercial video processing platform

• Design visual algorithms using motion and texture

• Describe, explain and assess methodologies for subjective image/video quality assessment. LO4. Describe and explain the fundamental building blocks in current motion estimation and video segmentation algorithms.

• Describe and explain the algorithmic tools in current video compression standards

• Assess critically the relative performance of competing video compression standards.

• Analyse the performance of tools within video compression standards

• Design and deploy transcoding strategies for video

• Describe aspects of the business landscape and industrial ecosystem in video technology

Learning objectives

By the end of the course participants will be able to:

• Design and implement examples of VR and AR environments in Unity.

• Design environments that can be applied to a variety of applications such as health, gaming, training and others.

• Develop and program in the Unity environment and be able to develop these skills in an independent manner.

• Show their design and development skills in the Unity software, by creating 2 portfolio-standard interactive environments for VR and AR.

Course outline

The first part introduces the underlying ideas in motion estimation, object segmentation and statistical video processing in general. The second part will investigate modern compression standards such as H.264/5, VP9, AV1/2. The course also considers aspects of Deep Learning as they apply to Video. The course incorporates a bi-weekly seminar program with guest lectures from domain experts e.g. Netflix and Google. Students develop practical skills in research, plugin development and testing that are common in companies developing tools for digital media. Students will be introduced to leading research papers in the field and develop video processing plugins for Nuke (www.thefoundry.co.uk), a leading video-processing platform in the Cinema Post-Production industry

Trainer's profile

Anil Kokaram graduated in 1993 with the PhD in Signal processing from the Cambridge University Engineering Department, UK. He is now a Professor and Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. From 2011-2017 he was the lead of the Media Algorithms Team at YouTube/Google. Before that he founded a media dsp group at Trinity www.sigmedia.tv working in the broad areas of DSP for Video Processing, Bayesian Inference and motion estimation. He has published over 100 refereed papers in these areas. He was a former Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Video Technology and IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. He was founder of a company (GreenParrotPictures) producing video enhancement software that was acquired by Google in 2011. In 2007 he was honoured with a Science and Engineering Academy Award (Oscar) from the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his work in video processing for post-production applications. He was also awarded Fellow of Engineers Ireland 2007.

Course duration

12 weeks

Assessment & certification

Assessment is by 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.

A Micro-credential certificate worth 10 credits on the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) and 250 hours CPD credit.

Who should attend

This Micro-credential has been developed to benefit engineers interested in learning more about the design of engineering systems that enable video streaming and cinema production platforms.

Engineers with a background in Information Science and Engineering including Electronics, Computer Science, Mathematics would be well prepared for this micro-credential. Learners will advance their professional competencies through coursework targeted at industry standard video processing platforms including NUKE and ffmpeg and taught by an Academy Award winner in motion picture effects.