The Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) Awards Committee revealed winners of its 2020 HPA Awards for Engineering Excellence, to be given out in a virtual ceremony on November 19. This year will mark the 15th anniversary of the HPA Awards, founded to “recognize creative artistry and innovation in the professional media content industry.” This year’s awards will honor EIZO’s Prominence CG3146 31.1-inch HDR reference monitor; Eluvio Content Fabric for managing and distributing large form content; the Moxion Immediates platform; and Carl Zeiss SBE: eXtended Data (XD) lens metadata technology.

HPA Awards Engineering Committee chair Joachim Zell stated that, “this year, we had a great turnout of entries, and in keeping with the standards of the Engineering Excellence awards, an outstanding judging panel of industry professionals reviewed the submissions.” “Without exception, every entry was compelling, and judging was as inspiring as ever,” he added. “We are proud of our industry in these moments where we see that even a global crisis does not break our spirit or the dedication to incredible work.”

EIZO’s Prominence CG3146 31.1-inch HDR monitor, says the HPA committee, is “the first in the world with a built-in calibration sensor” that is on top of the monitor, with a “stable XYZ glass type sensor that resist[s] temperature.” With new algorithms for “both low brightness areas with higher noise and high bright areas with more light saturation” as well as “machine learning display stabilization and custom ASIC technologies,” the monitor both improves image stability and increases “the available colors of the LCD panel by over 22 percent.”

Eluvio pioneered its Content Fabric, which “provides an efficient, secure, and cost-effective means to deliver ultra-low latency video globally just-in-time, without CDNs, cloud transcoding, or databases.” Eluvio Content Fabric is “a single backend for distribution,” linking media, metadata, and programmable code; and serves high quality streaming video to the viewer without intermediaries, separate file copies, or static versions.” Further, Content is “personalized dynamically and rights-controlled via software blockchain contracts.”

Moxion Immediates enable “post and production to securely share and review each other’s footage within minutes of creation.” The footage “complete with Camera, Action, and VFX Wranglers’ metadata, flows from the QTAKE video assist into the Moxion cloud where it can be reviewed and logged before flowing into Editorial or VFX workflows.” For footage created in post, “VFX Previs Cuts can be sent via the Moxion Cloud, back to set, securely to the Video Assist, for playback on the onset monitors, or to any onset iOS device.”

Carl Zeiss’s eXtended Data “unifies two data sets: Key lens data based on the Cooke, and i-Technology and the ZEISS distortion and shading lens data,” which can then “be applied in post-production for more accurate compositing and editing by using the suite of ZEISS developed lens plugins.”

Honorable mentions went to Frame.io and Sohonet for their Camera-to-Cloud and ClearView Flex technologies, respectively. The November 19 virtual gala will also “recognize excellence in craft categories including color grading, editing, sound and visual effects.” The HPA Awards are sponsored by: Diamond Title sponsor Blackmagic Design, Event sponsors Dolby and Zeiss, and HPA Awards Registration sponsor Picture Shop.