On October 29, the Television Academy celebrated the honorees of the 72nd Engineering Emmy Awards, live-streaming the ceremony from its website for the first time. The awards were announced on October 8, and the event was hosted by CBS “Criminal Minds” star Kirsten Vangsness for the fifth consecutive year. The Engineering Emmys are awarded to individuals, companies or organizations for technical developments that improve or invent things that “greatly impacts the production, recording, transmission or reception of TV.”

TV Technology reports that four of the winners — Evercast, HP, Sohonet and Teradici — were “specifically recognized for their work on developing and deploying engineering technology that has assisted with remote production during the pandemic.”

Evercast was honored “for its real-time collaboration platform that combines video conferencing, HD live streaming and full-spectrum audio in a single web-based platform” that requires no file sharing or specialized hardware. Its solution “allows users to securely stream any creative workflow (live cameras on set, Avid, Premiere, Maya, Pro Tools, etc.) to anyone, no matter where they are located … with ultra-low latency and uncompromising quality.”

In its press release, the TV Academy described that HP was awarded the Emmy for its Z by HP and ZCentral Remote Boost, which power “remote work for editors, artists and other creative professionals with the capabilities required for collaboration, creativity and production.” The latter offers “access to high-performance computing for a range of applications and use cases including VFX, simulation and 3D, providing flexibility for end users to create on almost any end-point device remotely.”

Sohonet’s ClearView Flex “enables a user-friendly, real-time remote collaboration capability that creatives can initiate and manage for a wide range of uses in preproduction, production, VFX and post production.” It especially enables those working from home and “can be deployed on any network and viewed with reliably consistent user success in a rock-solid, studio-approved secure ecosystem on the most popular consumer devices including Apple TV, iPads/iPhones, Android tablets/phones and Mac/PC.”

Teradici has specialized in remote workflows for 15+ years, and Teradici Cloud Access Software, using the Teradici PCoIP protocol, “establishes a secure remote access connection to Windows or Linux desktops hosted in the studio, a private data center or a public cloud to work from anywhere.”

Seven additional Engineering Emmys were awarded, one to Apple for its Apple ProRes video codec for film and TV, introduced in 2007, that has since become ubiquitous due to its “excellent preservation of source video quality and … fast encoding and ultra-fast decoding.” Codex was awarded an Emmy for its Codex RAW Workflow high-speed data-migration processor, which it says is the fastest secure high-speed data-migration process for RAW camera content available.

Others honored with Emmys were: Dan Dugan for gain sharing automatic microphone mixing, which “automates the robotic part of mixing multiple live talkers;” Epic Games for its Unreal Engine real-time 3D graphics system for photorealistic rendering, dynamic effects and multi-user capabilities; RE:Vision Effects for “introducing optical flow-based post-production video tools in the form of Twixtor, ReelSmart Motion Blur and RE:Flex;” Sound Radix for its Auto-Align Post platform “that makes phase/time corrections of a moving multi-microphone recording;” and Bill Spitzak, Jonathan Egstad, Peter Crossley and Jerry Huxtable for Nuke, a widely used node-based compositing toolkit.

Related:
Apple Wins a Technical Emmy for Its Breakthrough Video Compression Format, Cult of Mac, 10/30/20
Apple ProRes Video Codec Honored at the 72nd Annual Engineering Emmy Awards, 9to5Mac, 10/30/20