This year’s Engineering Emmys will celebrate four companies that have helped the TV industry overcome the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as awarding seven recipients for their exceptional engineering developments.
The awards, which were originally due to take place during NAB Show in April, will be presented in a virtual ceremony on 29th October.
The four companies being honoured for their work with remote production are:
- Evercast: A real-time collaboration platform that combines video conferencing, HD livestreaming and full-spectrum audio in a single web-based platform. Requiring no file sharing and no specialised hardware, Evercast allows users to securely stream any creative workflow (live cameras on set, Avid, Premiere, Maya, Pro Tools, etc.) to anyone, no matter where they are located.
- HP Inc: ZCentral Remote Boost continues to accelerate remote creative processes for production teams around the world. Z by HP technology is powering remote work for editors, artists and other creative professionals with the capabilities required for collaboration, creativity and production. ZCentral Remote Boost provides users access to high-performance computing for a range of applications and use cases including VFX, simulation and 3D, providing flexibility for end users to create on almost any end-point device remotely.
- Sohonet: ClearView Flex enables a user-friendly, real-time remote collaboration capability that creatives can initiate and manage for a wide range of uses in pre-production, production, VFX and post production. It can be deployed on any network and viewed with reliably consistent user success in a rock-solid, studio-approved secure ecosystem on the most popular consumer devices including AppleTV, iPads/iPhones, Android tablets/phones and Mac/PC.
- Teradici: Teradici Cloud Access Software enables artists and producers to work from home or anywhere they need to be by establishing a secure remote access connection to Windows or Linux desktops hosted in the studio, a private data centre or a public Cloud. Users can access their remote workstations through the Teradici PCoIP protocol from a wide choice of client devices and can use their display, keyboard, mouse and peripherals like Wacom devices as if they were on a local machine, with the resolution and colour fidelity they need to maintain the highest-quality standards.
Among the companies and recipients being honoured for their exceptional engineering developments are:
- Apple Inc for its Apple ProRes video codec
- Codex for CODEX RAW Workflow
- Dan Dugan for Gain Sharing Automatic Microphone Mixing
- Epic Games for its real-time 3D engine, Unreal Engine
- RE:Vision Effects which has introduced the industry to optical flow-based post production video tools
- Sound Radix Auto-Align Post makes phase/time corrections of a moving multi-microphone recording.
- Bill Spitzak, Jonathan Egstad, Peter Crossley and Jerry Huxtable for Nuke
Speaking about his award, Dan Dugan said, “It’s such an amazing honour for me to receive an Emmy for my invention. This recognition is, without a doubt, one of the highlights of my life. I’ll be thanking a lot of people in my acceptance speech for their unflagging support and inspiration.”
Peter Crossley, Nuke Engineering manager at Foundry, also expressed his delight at the award, stating: “We are honoured that our work on Nuke through the years is recognised by the Television Academy. We’ve tried to build on the legacy that Bill and Jonathan created, by concentrating on improving performance and stability at scale, expanding our feature set and workflows with support for Deep Compositing, GPU Processing and a proprietary Particle System, as well as keeping Nuke up to date with industry standards by adopting support for the VFX Reference Platform and libraries such as OpenColorIO and Alembic.”
Brian Gaffney, vice president of Business Development at Codex, said, “We would also like to thank the cinematographers who have demanded a RAW master and for the digital imaging technicians and data managers and post partners who have quickly adopted high density encoding into the workflow. Codex is absolutely thrilled to receive a second Engineering Emmy Award in recognition of our continuing work to evolve the production pipeline from capture to the Cloud.”
