COMPANY TOWN : A New Player : Research Group Is Helping Hollywood Go High-Tech

When conjuring up an image of a computer whiz at the top of his or her technological game, a flashy Hollywood executive may not come to mind.

But it should. Under the direction of the Entertainment Technology Center, the entertainment industry is moving boldly into the computer age and embracing high-speed digital networks in a way no industry has before.

The Entertainment Technology Center is a 2-year-old industry-funded research and development group whose mission is to bring together the region’s creative talent and technical know-how. From the basement of the USC School of Cinema and Television, a coalition of studio executives, network engineers and computer scientists are pioneering a course that the aerospace, health care and education industries may well be following in the coming years.

This week, the people behind the center are showing the Hollywood community how that will happen in a series of forums at USC’s Johnny Carson Sound Stage called “live@the.INTERSECTION” (the intersection between entertainment and technology, that is). That’s where they’re presenting HollyNet, a prototype of the kind of advanced network that will one day connect the major studios with post-production houses, special effects firms and even the county’s film permit office.

“We’re unveiling the first-ever wide-area, intercompany live broad band digital network,” said Steven Koltai, senior vice president and general manager of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and chairman of the ETC board. “The idea is to have something which should be created by and for the industry. We want to know if people agree with the premise, find it useful and have an interest in helping to design it, test it and participate in it.”

Input from the grass roots is at the core of the Entertainment Technology Center philosophy, said Executive Director Allan Yasnyi. The center’s purpose is to figure out what technology Hollywood wants and needs, then determine the best way to implement it industrywide to allow companies to work together more efficiently.

“The ETC can function as a focal point where people in the entertainment industry can learn about what’s going on, exchange ideas, analyze various new technologies and share information,” said Dick Lindheim, executive vice president of the Paramount Television Group in Los Angeles and an ETC board member. “In this sort of chaotic world, that’s a very important function.”

HollyNet is one of the center’s earliest projects. It was launched 1 1/2 years ago as an experiment to see what could be done on an industrywide network, said David Belson, who heads up research and development for the ETC.

“We’re bringing the pieces together to form something greater than the sum of their parts,” he said.

For example, “you can pull up someone’s face [on a computer network] and instantly get their film credits too, even though the picture and credits are from different databases,” he said. Or “if you’re looking for locations to film in, you could draw a circle on a map--like a line around Arizona and Nevada--and type in that you’re looking for a farmhouse. Then you can do a search and get a list of all the farmhouses in that area. Plus you can get their addresses and find out if they’re available for a shoot that weekend and even send e-mail to make a reservation.”

An early version of the network was widely used when it was accessible on the Internet’s World Wide Web. Since it was taken down last month, Belson has fielded inquiries from HollyNet fans who are eager for it to re-emerge.

“HollyNet is representative of what will be the next paradigm for many businesses,” said Bob Rogers, an ETC member who is chairman of BRC Imagination Arts, a Burbank production company. “The fundamental software system can be used for a whole bunch of things. There are all kinds of businesses that this can apply to.”

Hollywood is the ideal guinea pig for this kind of network because the kinds of things entertainment companies need to send one another over computer lines contain a huge amounts of data, said Thomas MacCalla, director of entertainment technology for Pacific Bell, one of the lead companies in helping to build the advanced network.

Pacific Bell has already laid the fiber-optic cable that will make the private network function throughout Hollywood, Burbank, Glendale, North Hollywood, Century City and Culver City. MacCalla is now working with TRW and other companies on combinations of hardware and software that allow the HollyNet work best with the least amount of bandwidth, a measure of a network’s data flow capacity. The final version of HollyNet will be accessible by password to members of the entertainment community, and it will be up and running within a year, Yasnyi said.

HollyNet will use a cutting-edge transmission technique called Asynchronous Transfer Mode, or ATM, which allows a great volume of high-resolution images, video, sound and other computer data to travel over the same network circuits at extremely high speeds. With ATM, HollyNet will carry data more than 10,000 times faster than a 14,400-bit-per-second modem, which is typically used to connect a personal computer to an on-line service such as Prodigy or CompuServe, MacCalla said.

MacCalla says the health care industry could use a HollyNet-type network to transmit high-resolution images such as three-dimensional magnetic resonance images between hospitals and doctors’ offices. Aerospace companies could store and share data, and classrooms could be connected to computer networks for interactive multimedia homework exercises.

Other projects Belson envisions for the Entertainment Technology Center include development of an industrywide bar coding system to keep track of props and costumes, and a more realistic way to simulate sunlight, among others. Center staffers are already developing a computer model of how a movie is made so that the process can be made more efficient, he said.

So far, the participating studios have shown a rare willingness to share ideas, and the center will be productive as long as that cooperation continues, board Chairman Koltai said.

“We have been getting increasing support and enthusiasm,” he said. “There’s a growing level of cooperation which bodes really well for our industry, and for L.A.”

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The Goals

The Entertainment Technology Center is an industry-sponsored research and development group at USC. Among its goals:

* To develop technology standards for the entertainment industry

* To create a high-speed digital network to connect studios and production companies throughout the Los Angeles area

* To help Hollywood find ways to make movies more efficiently

* To serve as a sounding board for issues of industrywide concern