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Queen's Award reception at Buckingham Palace

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Graham Thomas Graham Thomas | 08:37 UK time, Wednesday, 27 July 2011

On Thursday (14th July) Peter Brightwell and I had the honour of representing ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D at an evening reception at Buckingham Palace for winners of the 2011 Queen's Award. We were there following the announcement that ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D had won an award for the Piero sports graphics system. There were several hundred guests, representing the 156 companies that won awards across the categories of Innovation (in which we were one of the 44 winners), International Trade (102 winners), and Sustainable Development (10 winners). These are highly prestigious awards given for outstanding achievement by UK businesses; to win an award in the Innovation category we had to demonstrate that Piero was both highly technically innovative and had been a significant commercial success.

On arrival, we mingled with the other guests, managed to locate the two representatives from our co-winnerÌý, and prepared ourselves to be introduced to Her Majesty The Queen. The guests were rounded up and filed by one-by-one, with each person having their name and company announced, before the introduction. I attempted to give a brief explanation of our recent trial of theÌýVenueVu system at Wimbledon. Some of the other winners that we spoke to included a company that is talking to Red Bee Media on applying techniques used in the Piero system to medical image analysis, and representatives from the University of Manchester, who had won an award for International Trade by attracting a large number of foreign students. All in all it was a fantastic evening and a great honour for the Piero team and ´óÏó´«Ã½ Research & Development.

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Peter Brightwell and Graham Thomas outside Buckingham Palace

Peter Brightwell and Graham Thomas outside Buckingham Palace.

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Comments

  • Comment number 1.

    Wasn't Piero a very basic digital matte drawing tool for TV in the early 90s? (Pen, tablet and a single frame store)

  • Comment number 2.

    @Kit: The only TV graphics tool I've come across called Piero is the one referred to in this post, i.e. a system that generates tied-to-pitch graphics (that stay locked to the pitch as the camera moves), 3D virtual viewpoints, etc., and was first used in 2004. Early sports graphics tools, often known as 'telestrators', were of the basic kind you describe, and if you know of one that was called Piero I'd be interested to hear more.

  • Comment number 3.

    Graham, I am not sure of the spelling but MPC, when it was in Noel Street, installed a very basic tablet device as I described above in at least one edit suite (edit 4). The device had an analogue PAL output so must have predated the suites conversion to D1 / Abekas A84 so it may be a few years earlier than I suggested.

    At the time MPC was owned by Carlton. Carlton also owned Cox (of matrix and vision mixer fame in the 80s) so it may have been one of their prototypes, although there was always a working relationship with Courtyard (did they exist then?) so it could have been theirs. Certainly too simple to have been a Quantel product (Carlton also owned them).

  • Comment number 4.

    Just to avoid confusion I am talking about matte as in "matte and fill" rather than the more film orientated matte painting (scene extension).

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