The Television Academy has announced the companies and individuals that will be honored at the 73rd Engineering Emmy Awards, among them Netflix co-founder and CEO Reed Hastings, recipient of the Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award, and Dolby Laboratories, honored with the Philo T. Farnsworth Corporate Achievement Award. The awards honor individuals, companies or organizations for developments in broadcast technology. The latest honorees — ranging from creators of high-end special effects tools to systems that help maintain distancing protocols — will be recognized at a live ceremony at the JW Marriott Los Angeles Hotel on October 21.

“It has been a challenging year for the television production community; but despite the pandemic, production has come back and with it a host of new technologies that are being used to help the storytelling process,” said ATAS VP of awards and Engineering Emmy Awards committee chair for the 2020 season John Leverence in a statement.

In addition to the special awards for Dolby and Hastings, the following will receive Engineering Emmy Awards:

• Marcos Fajardo, Alan King and Thiago Ize for Arnold Global Illumination Rendering System, an “artist-friendly” photo-realistic, stochastic, ray-tracing renderer widely used by VFX and animation firms globally.
• ARRI for the ARRI SkyPanel, a family of efficient, ultra-bright LED soft lights with multiple control options. SkyPanels can generate accurate color temperatures between 2,800k and 10,000k, allowing lighting directors to pre-program and control parameters including color, hue and saturation, optimizing the production lighting workflow.
• CEDAR Audio Ltd. for CEDAR Studio, a film and television post-production audio toolkit for cleaning and restoring audio that includes the industry-standard dialogue noise suppressors as well as Retouch, which introduced the industry to spectral editing.
• Golaem for Golaem Crowd, which helps VFX artists quickly populate TV shows, films and games by procedurally animating thousands of characters with advanced behaviors in real-time and with complete artistic control.
• Stephen Regelous for Massive, the first package to make it possible to create large crowds at scale using an AI-based approach. Massive combines artistic control with a cost-effective means to simulate realistic crowd behavior via a node-based brain system.
• Steve Vitolo, Felipe Mendez and Franco Zuccar for Scriptation, which automates the painstaking process of transferring handwritten notes, annotations and verbal comments to a script and redistributing to all departments. Scriptation allows the personal notes, annotations and diagrams to carry over to new versions of the script, which iterations are then distributed automatically.
• Nicolaas Verheem, Marius van der Watt, Dennis Scheftner and Zvi Reznic for Teradek Bolt 4K, a zero-delay, wireless video transmission system that integrates high-quality wireless video monitoring into the on-set workflow. Bolt 4K has been critical in implementing changes needed to support social distancing protocols due to COVID-19.
• Chaos for V-Ray, a physically based rendering and adaptive ray tracing solution that accurately calculates global illumination and light distribution as well as the physical properties of any material to ensure a seamless blend of real and virtual elements on screen.

Emceeing the Engineering Emmy Awards for the sixth consecutive year is Kirsten Vangsness, best-known as FBI technical analyst Penelope Garcia on the CBS drama series “Criminal Minds.”