Engineering excellence winners announced for 2021 HPA Awards

The Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) Awards Committee has announced the winners of the 2021 HPA Awards for Engineering Excellence.  The HPA Awards, including the HPA Award for Engineering Excellence, will be bestowed on November 18 during a live gala at the Hollywood Legion.

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. Judging took place online again this year, with a blue-ribbon panel of judges.

The HPA Awards recognise creative artistry and innovation in the professional media content industry. A coveted and highly competitive honour, the Engineering Excellence Award rewards outstanding technical and creative ingenuity in media, content production, finishing, distribution, and archive.

HPA Awards engineering committee chair Joachim Zell said, “This year’s entries showed us again that the companies from our industry are creating innovative, thoughtful products and solutions for new problems, some of which were brought on by the circumstances of the past year, and others addressing non-pandemic problems. Judging day presentations reminded us of the breadth and depth of expertise and creativity in our industry, showing us what is possible for us to accomplish. Congratulations to the winners, and all the entrants, all of whom have much to be proud of.”

The winners of the 2021 HPA Award 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 real-time 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 customisable, this toolset delivers film-grade results fast for compositors, lighters and animators.
• NearTime – Mo-Sys Engineering
  NearTime from Mo-Sys Engineering 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 real-time, delivering a higher-quality version of the shot, completely automated, and in a timescale which matches the practical requirements of the production – ‘near-time’.

Honourable mention was awarded to Colorfront LLC for Colorfront Streaming Server and Deluxe for Deluxe One Dub.

Complete descriptions of the Engineering Excellence winners are available at hpaonline.com

The Engineering Excellence Award will be presented at the HPA Awards gala on November 18th, where excellence in craft categories will also be recognised, as well as the presentation of the Judges Award for Creativity and Innovation (to be announced).