The Hollywood Post Alliance has announced that three groundbreaking technologies have been honoured to receive the organisation’s respected Engineering Excellence Award.
The recipients were chosen following a lively and well-attended presentation and judging session late last month at LaserPacific Digital Theater in Hollywood. Created to showcase and reward inventors, manufacturers, vendors and companies for outstanding product or technology application offerings, entries had to represent a significant step forward for the post production industry and were open to any individual, group or company meeting the submission guidelines. Interest in the awards has grown steadily since its launch, and this year saw a record number of entrants in the Engineering category.
The winners of the 2009 HPA Award for Engineering Excellence are:
DVS for Clipster. Erik Balladares, General Manager, DVS Inc, commented, “The Hollywood Post Alliance is comprised of the most brilliant members of the post community and has served as a longstanding beacon for our industry. DVS is truly honoured to accept this year’s Engineering Excellence Award for our advancements with the company’s flagship product Clipster.”
Next, Signiant’s Content Distribution Management (CDM) software, which was developed to centrally manage, secure, accelerate, and automate the movement of rich media content. Through a web-based user interface, all content transfers can be monitored, secured and bandwidth utilisation can be adjusted in realtime. “We thank the Hollywood Post Alliance for this wonderful recognition for Engineering Excellence,” said Tom Ohanian, Signiant’s chief strategy officer. “Signiant is dedicated to delivering world class solutions designed to solve the process automation needs of digital media content owners and we are thrilled to be named an HPA Engineering award recipient.”
Finally, S.Two’s OB-1 Uncompressed Digital Recorder, which is a complete system for providing images from digital cameras to post. Utilising DPX-based file recording using solid-state flash technology with metadata, OB-1 is the smallest, lightest uncompressed recorder. “The team at S.two is proud to be honoured by the HPA with an Engineering Award for our ground-breaking OB-1 solid-state on-board recorder for digital cinematography cameras,” stated Steve Roach.
In announcing the awards, HPA President Leon Silverman said: “The role of innovative technology in post production simply cannot be overstated; to put it simply, it drives our industry. We saw a marked increase in entrants in the Engineering Excellence category this year and the quality of the competition speaks clearly to a superb calibre of engineering vision and talent in the HPA and in the community as a whole. The HPA Engineering Award honours those individuals and companies who have worked diligently and inventively to do something better and ultimately to support the elegant execution of a vision. Companies like DVS, S2 and Signiant propel the industry forward, and their value is of vast importance to content creation.”
Past winners of the Engineering Excellence Award include; Quantel for Pablo Stereoscopic 3D, FastSoft for E Series internet Accelerator, Panasonic for AVC-intra 100 Video Codec, Quantel for Genetic Engineering, Digital Vision for DVO Image Processing Software, MTI Film for Control Dailies and Sony for HDCAM SR.
The HPA Awards will be held on the evening of November 12th at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. The HPA Awards recognise the outstanding contributions of post production professionals working behind the scenes in a number of categories, including colour grading/DI, audio post production, compositing and editorial for television, feature films, and commercials. In addition to the Engineering Excellence Awards, two additional special awards will be given during the Awards ceremony; Paul Haggar, one of the best-known names in the post production community, will receive the HPA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Charles S. Swartz Award will be given for Outstanding Contribution in the Field of Post Production.
