The Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) has announced the recipients of the 2015 HPA Engineering Excellence Award. The award was created to spotlight and reward companies and individuals providing services for the professional media content industry including, but not limited to media, content production, finishing, distribution and archive, for their outstanding technical and creative ingenuity. The coveted honors will be bestowed during the HPA Awards gala on November 12, 2015 at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the HPA Awards.
The winners of the 2015 HPA Engineering Excellence Award, sponsored by NAB Show, are:
Canon, 4K Cine Zoom Lens
The Canon Super 35mm 4K cinema zoom lens offers a 20:1 zoom range with a 1000mm telephoto capability. Its compact body is less than 16 inches long and weighs less than 15 pounds.
Dolby Laboratories, Dolby Vision Projector
The Dolby VisionTM projector displays high dynamic range HDR images with a contrast ratio greater than 100,000:1 and projects a color gamut of Rec2020.
Panasonic, 4K Camera Imagers
Panasonic’s Super 35mm 4K DCI imager, used in the Panasonic VariCam35 4K, features high dynamic range, high speed 4K 120fps, low noise and dual native ASA technology, resulting in switchable 800/5000 ISO.
Quantel, Pablo Rio 8K
Quantel’s Pablo Rio performs real-time 8K 60p editing, color correction and finishing. Its benchmark is set to work with uncompressed, full size 8k graphic files.
Sony Electronics, BVMX300 Monitor
Sony’s BVMX300 30 inch 4K OLED monitor displays full 4K (4096×2160) images as normal range or as high dynamic range at color gamuts exceeding DCI P3.
In addition, Colorfront will receive an Honorable Mention citation for its Interactive HFR Frame-Blending, which features real-time, interactive HFR frame-blending with a simple slider interface to control the amount of motion blur of a moving object.
Joachim Zell, chair of the Engineering Excellence Awards Committee, commented, “Every year, the HPA Engineering Excellence Awards attract the most interesting and intriguing submissions from a wide variety of companies. This year we saw a particularly diverse and compelling array of entries, and the judging was difficult and close across the board. It is a testament to the incredible ingenuity of the engineering community that we saw such a competitive field. We congratulate the winners, and we want to thank all who entered; this was an entirely impressive and record group of entries. Congratulations to the winners and to their worthy competitors.”
In addition to the Engineering Excellence Awards, the HPA Awards will recognize excellence in 12 craft categories, including color grading, editing, sound, and visual effects. The HPA Judges Award for Creativity and Innovation will be announced shortly. As announced earlier, Leon Silverman has been named the recipient of the HPA 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award.
