Charles A. Poynton is a technical consultant and writer based in Toronto

Toronto

Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

. He is best known for his seminars on digital video systems and his two books, A Technical Introduction to Digital Video (Wiley, 1996; ISBN 047112253X) and Digital Video and HDTV: Algorithms and Interfaces (Morgan Kaufmann, 2003; ISBN 1558607927). He is currently a columnist at Spectracal.com.

Poynton is a Fellow

Fellow

A fellow in the broadest sense is someone who is an equal or a comrade. The term fellow is also used to describe a person, particularly by those in the upper social classes. It is most often used in an academic context: a fellow is often part of an elite group of learned people who are awarded...

 of SMPTE, and was awarded the David Sarnoff

David Sarnoff

David Sarnoff was an American businessman and pioneer of American commercial radio and television. He founded the National Broadcasting Company and throughout most of his career he led the Radio Corporation of America in various capacities from shortly after its founding in 1919 until his...

 Gold Medal in 1993 for his work to "integrate video technology with computing and communications".

He is a popular teacher of seminars and travels widely for this purpose.

Poynton designed and built, in the early 1980s, the digital video equipment used by NASA

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...

 to convert video from the Space Shuttle

Space Shuttle

The Space Shuttle was a manned orbital rocket and spacecraft system operated by NASA on 135 missions from 1981 to 2011. The system combined rocket launch, orbital spacecraft, and re-entry spaceplane with modular add-ons...

 to NTSC

NTSC

NTSC, named for the National Television System Committee, is the analog television system that is used in most of North America, most of South America , Burma, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and some Pacific island nations and territories .Most countries using the NTSC standard, as...

.

External links

• http://www.poynton.com/