BURBANK, CA — The Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) Awards Committee has announced the winners of the 2021 HPA Awards for Engineering Excellence. The HPA Awards (hpaonline.com), including the HPA Award for Engineering Excellence, will be presented on November 18th during a live gala at the Hollywood Legion.
The HPA Awards recognize creative artistry and innovation in the professional media content industry. The Engineering Excellence Award rewards outstanding technical and creative ingenuity in media, content production, finishing, distribution, and archive. The process to be considered for an HPA Engineering Excellence Award included a pre-recorded video presentation, followed by a Q&A with the judging panel and the submitters. Once again, judging took place online.
The winners of 2021 HPA Awards for Engineering Excellence are:
The Arch Platform - Arch Platform Technologies
The Arch Platform allows users to spin up powerful cloud-based digital content creation facilities for visual effects, post production, virtual production and other collaborative creative endeavors in under an hour.
OpenColorIO v.2 – Autodesk
Autodesk has led a major rejuvenation of the widely used open source project OpenColorIO, the first major upgrade in the decade since its original release. The new version, OpenColorIO v2, includes the following contributions from Autodesk: Development of state-of-the-art color processing technology; Leadership of the re-birth of the project and help in transitioning it successfully into the Academy Software Foundation; and greatly improved support for ACES, providing the industry with a free, open source ACES implementation capable of very high quality realtime processing and complete support for the Academy/ASC Common LUT Format (CLF).
Nuke – The Foundry
Nuke is a node-based compositing toolkit that gives artists the power and flexibility to create with confidence. Flexible, efficient, feature-packed and highly customizable, this toolset delivers film-grade results fast for compositors, lighters and animators.
NearTime – Mo-Sys Engineering
NearTime is a workflow for virtual production, meeting the key requirements of cast and crew to see the full effect of the shot on-set in realtime, delivering a higher-quality version of the shot, completely automated and in a timescale which matches the practical requirements of the production – ‘near-time’.
Honorable mentions were awarded to Colorfront LLC for the Colorfront Streaming Server and Deluxe for Deluxe One Dub.