New Educational Offerings at CEDIA Expo 2019

When Samantha Ventura, CEDIA’s senior director of education, began mapping the educational offerings for CEDIA Expo 2019 in Denver, she asked her team a question: “How would somebody coming to Expo this year want to spend their money? When we built courses for a business owner, we focused on a lot of the classes that are leadership based, as well as project management or sales classes that could really take their skillsets to the next level.

“We also asked ourselves: If that business owner was to bring technicians along, what would he or she want those people to learn?” Ventura continues. “So we’ve put in a new hire track — a specific class list for those folks — as well as more advanced technical classes that would make sense for somebody to come and bring along one or two or three guys or gals to learn at the same time.”

Derick Abshire, CEDIA’s director of curriculum, adds: “One of the things we’ve tried to implement this year was identifying the level of experience people have. We have basic classes that are designed for anyone with less than two years’ experience in the industry. Then we have intermediate classes that cover folks with up to five years’ experience, and advanced for people with more than five years of experience in the industry.”

Abshire notes that this year’s curriculum will include new courses — a lot of them, in fact: “This year we had a big push to get some new cutting-edge content. For 2019 we have 125 different classes, 57 of which are brand new — that’s closing in on 50 percent.”

Here are just a few examples of those new classes:

Home Cinema Master Class
The Home Cinema Design Master Class will help attendees learn the secrets of high-performance home cinema design and maximize their knowledge in the strongest revenue-generating sector of the industry. It will feature three “deep dive” sessions focused on video performance, advanced audio techniques, and the cinema environment, taught by three world-renowned experts in the field:

Anthony Grimani, Grimani Systems and Performance Media Industries: President of Grimani Systems and Performance Media Industries (PMI), Anthony is a highly respected expert in home cinema design and acoustics. He has worked on more than 1000 theater projects over his 34-year career at Dolby, THX, and PMI. He will explore and discuss one of the most tricky of all design topics — optimizing bass performance for multiple seats.
Joel Silver, Imaging Science Foundation, Inc.: Founder of the Imaging Science Foundation (ISF), Joel will bring all this experience to bear in his workshop: “How bright does a projected image need to be?” He will discuss in detail the impact of emerging video standards and technologies on the desired brightness levels for home cinema, focusing on HDR within a projection-based environment
Theo Kalomirakis, TK Theaters: “The Father of Home Theater,” Theo Kalomirakis of TK Theaters has designed some of the finest private cinemas for movie stars, sports legends, and world leaders. Theo will share his experience balancing performance, aesthetics, and usability in a high-end home cinema, exploring room construction, layout, interfaces, and environmental controls.

The session will round out with a panel question and answer session where students will have the rare opportunity to submit questions on any aspect of home cinema design to this most esteemed expert group.

Related: CEDIA Releases 2019 Boot Camp Schedule

AVoverIP Methods, Formats, and System Design
Take the deepest dive offered yet at CEDIA Expo into the complex world of AVoverIP. Distributing video over an IP network is quickly gaining preference over matrix or splitter-based distribution systems. From professional post-production to commercial and residential applications, the course will cover knowledge such as current and emerging compression codes and standards, network speed and latency implications, maintaining video features such as HDR, and infrastructure and system design best practices.

How to Achieve Success with LED Lighting (Why Retro-Fit Lamps Flicker, and how to Make them Behave!)
Use of solid-state lighting (LED) is on the rise, yet many projects suffer from flicker problems. The good news is that LED lamps and fixtures can be dimmed successfully. This course takes participants on a journey through dimming system design, detailing the methodology required to specify stable performance.

Immersive Audio: Unified 3D Speaker Layouts for Multiple Listeners
Immersive sound offers the possibility of life-like home cinema experiences, but also raises challenges with new formats — especially with non-compatible 3D speaker layouts. This presentation will cover immersive sound, the three immersive sound formats, and recommended speaker layouts. Additionally, the course will explore constraints found in high-performance home cinemas and proposes unified speaker layouts for multiple listeners. The course will also demonstrate practical implementation in a real project.