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Today, the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) Awards Committee announced the winners of the 2018 HPA Engineering Excellence Award.  Winners were determined at a blue ribbon judging session held at IMAX on the 16th of June. The coveted honor will be bestowed November 15, 2018 at the 13th annual HPA Awards gala at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

The Engineering Excellence Award was created to spotlight and reward companies and individuals providing services to the professional media content industry for their outstanding technical and creative ingenuity in media, content production, finishing, distribution and archive. The HPA Awards launched in 2005 to recognize creative artistry, innovation and engineering excellence in the professional media content industry.

Joachim Zell, Chair of the HPA Awards Engineering Committee said, “Once again, the Engineering Excellence judging sessions brought us outstanding presentations from a variety of companies at work in different parts of the media and entertainment ecosystem.  The presenters are representative of the amazing work that great companies and brilliant individuals are bringing to the marketplace. The judges had a strong field of excellent technologies to evaluate, and the results were extremely close. Based on the effort, talent and time from the presenters and the enthusiasm of the judges, it is clear that the HPA Engineering Excellence award is meaningful to our industry, and I want to personally thank our presenters and our intrepid judges. Congratulations to the winners and to the entrants for truly impressive work.”

The winners of the 2018 HPA Award for Engineering Excellence are:
 

• Blackmagic Design - DaVinci Resolve 15

DaVinci Resolve 15, released at NAB this year, offers a major step forward for the post-production workflow, a significant shift in technically and creatively matched toolsets as well as overall efficiency. The platform, designed to provide a full suite of post-production tools, from ingest to delivery, directly integrated in a single ecosystem, includes significant improvements in quality, functionality and time to delivery. Exchange formats, translation and conform can be eliminated, and last-minute change efficiently managed for feature film, episodic TV and short form productions.
 

• Canon - Visual and Technical Monitoring of HDR Images

Canon has seen the need for not only visually seeing HDR images on set, in editorial, and in finishing but also for engineering tools to know exact values of the HDR images and its pixels; compare SDR and HDR images; compare different HDR deliverable systems; out of gamut warnings; and connection to various manufacturers camera metadata.

This complete system from Canon ensures that HDR and SDR image creation is easily and accurately be accomplished.
 

• Cinnafilm, Inc. – PixelStrings

PixelStrings is a cloud-based video conversion service focusing on ultimate playback quality for media.  Leveraging the award-winning framerate conversion, retiming, artifact/noise/telecine correction, and transcode technologies from Cinnafilm, this PaaS enables the mass creation of best-possible video versions while leveraging infinite, GPU-enabled cloud compute power.  The platform is a growing hub of other best-of-breed media technologies and is a simple pay-as-you-use toolset available 24/7 though a browser.  PixelStings enables the freedom of a predictable OpEx process.
 

• IBM Aspera & Telestream - Telestream Vantage with Lightspeed Live Capture powered by Aspera

IBM Aspera and Telestream have developed a game-changing solution for high-speed capture and production of live, broadcast quality video from remote locations for faster production turnaround. The API integration of Aspera’s FASPStream streaming technology with Telestream Vantage and Lightspeed Live enables open-file workflows so production teams can work on live video feeds from remote locations in real time, with dramatically lower costs compared to satellite delivery, fiber or on-location production and more flexible deployment options.

Honorable Mention:

• Samsung - Samsung Onyx The Samsung Onyx Cinema LED technology with DCI certification has come to market for both Cinema and Post Production uses with two models: a 2K resolution 5 meter screen and a 4K resolution 10.3 meters screen.  LED technology delivers visual quality, technical performance and reliability beyond that of traditional projector-based operations. This system also features state-of-the-art surround sound from Harman/JBL. While operating nominally with traditional 14 ft-L SDR imagery the screen is adopting support for HDR systems such as EClairColor and PQ with operating points at least to 300 cd/m2 and black performance including “off” and 0.005 cd/m2.

In addition to the honors for excellence in engineering, the HPA Awards will recognize excellence in 12 craft categories including color grading, editing, sound and visual effects.  The recipients of the Judges Award for Creativity and Innovation and other special awards will be announced in the coming weeks.

Tickets for the 13th annual HPA Awards will be available for purchase later this summer. 

About the HPA^® Awards
The HPA Awards were created to foster awareness and recognize the achievements of the individuals and companies that have contributed to groundbreaking technologies and creative excellence within the professional media content industry, and build involvement in the Hollywood Professional Association. The HPA is a partner of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers® (SMPTE®). Information about the HPA Awards is available at http://www.hpaonline.com.

 About the Hollywood Professional Association
Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) serves the professional community of businesses and individuals who provide expertise, support, tools and the infrastructure for the creation and finishing of motion pictures, television, commercials, digital media and other dynamic media content. Through its partnership with the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers^® (SMPTE^® ), the leader in the advancement of the art, science and craft of the image, sound, and metadata ecosystem, the HPA continues to extend its support of the community it represents. Information about the HPA is available at www.hpaonline.com.