HPA announces Engineering Excellence Award winners
September 6, 2012

HPA announces Engineering Excellence Award winners

LOS ANGELES — The Hollywood Post Alliance has announced the 2012 recipients of the organization’s HPA Engineering Excellence Award. The winners were selected from a large and varied field of technology offerings. They include Sony Electronics, Cinnafilm, Dolby Laboratories and Crossroads Systems. The 2012 HPA Engineering Excellence Award will be bestowed upon its recipients at an event scheduled to take place November 1, at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. 

Leon Silverman, President of the Hollywood Post Alliance, notes, “The Engineering Award not only represents the creativity of technology and technical innovation, but also helps to enable the creative power of our artistic community. The products and processes that we honor with this award continue to demonstrate the important engineering work that is done ‘behind our industry’s scenes and screens.’ The HPA Engineering Award has become a mark of excellence within our post production community and we are proud to honor these organization with the recognition they have earned through hard work and achievement.”

The following is a list and description of the winning manufacturers and their technology. 

- Cinnafilm’s Tachyon: Tachyon, is a standards transcoder that was created to eliminate time consuming trips to/from SDI hardware when high quality conversions are needed in transcoding workflows. Broadcasters and web/mobile media content providers can leverage Tachyon to simultaneously perform the most complex cadence corrections, mixed mode normalizations, repair compositing errors, and perform standards conversions while simplifying workflows and dramatically decreasing processing times. 

- Crossroads Systems’ StrongBox: StrongBox is a file-based and fully portable storage solution for long-term data retention. The enterprise-level solution is the first to leverage Linear Tape File System (LTFS) technology, combining the scalability of tape with the speed and accessibility of disk. Crossroads believes StrongBox is the industry’s most cost-effective answer to ever-growing data storage requirements, seamlessly scaling for today, while future-proofing for tomorrow.

- Dolby Laboratories’ Dolby Atmos: Atmos delivers a more natural and realistic listening experience that moves sound around and above audiences, transporting them into the onscreen adventure. It provides content creators with a new creative freedom to tell their stories and simplifies movie distribution with a single universal package to deliver to audiences the full impact of the artist's intent, regardless of theatre configuration. 

- Sony Electronics’ F65 Camera: The F65 CineAlta digital motion picture camera system derives true 4K resolution using a unique 8K CMOS sensor that has higher resolution, increased exposure latitude, and wider color gamut than any previous digital motion picture camera.  As part of an overall camera system based on Sony’s SRMASTER open platform, the F65 is the gateway to an end-to-end 4K file-based mastering workflow. The F65 camera is currently in use shooting several motion picture and episodic TV productions.   

Tickets for the HPA Awards will be available in mid-September and can be purchased online at www.hpaawards.net.