LOS ANGELES — The Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) has announced that its 2018 Engineering Excellence Awards will go to Blackmagic Design, Cinnafilm, Canon, IBM Aspera and Telestream, with Samsung receiving an honorable mention. The awards are peer-judged and considered highly competitive.

The HPA Awards Engineering Committee evaluated prospective candidates at a blue ribbon judging session held at IMAX on June 16. Awards will be formally presented at the 13th Annual HPA Awards Gala, set to take place Nov. 15, at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

[Read: HPA Panel Examines Road To ATSC 3.0 And Repack]

With the Engineering Excellence award the HPA recognizes the following companies for outstanding technical and creative achievement in media, content production, finishing, distribution and archive:

• Blackmagic Design for DaVinci Resolve 15, a new platform integrating creative and technical tools streamlining tasks from ingest to delivery, while improving quality, functionality, and time to delivery for feature film, episodic TV and short-form productions.

• Canon for Visual and Technical Monitoring of HDR images, including engineering tools for determining exact values of HDR image pixels, comparing SDR and HDR images, utilizing camera metadata, and other key quality control capabilities.

• Cinnafilm Inc. for PixelStrings, a cloud-based video conversion service focused on media playback quality by employing framerate conversion, retiming, artifact/noise/telecine correction, transcoding and other toolsets available on a predictable, platform-as-a-service OpEx model.

• Telestream’s Vantage and Lightspeed Live integrated with Aspera’s FASPStream streaming technology, which enables high-speed capture and production of live, broadcast quality video feeds — and open file workflows — from remote locations for faster production turnaround.

• Samsung for its Samsung Onyx LED technology with DCI certification for cinema and post production, available in 2K resolution 5-meter screen and 4K-resolution 10.3-meter screen models.

“Once again, the Engineering Excellence judging sessions brought us outstanding presentations from a variety of companies at work in different parts of the media and entertainment ecosystem,” said Joachim Zell, chair of the HPA Awards Engineering Committee as well as EFILM’s vice president of technology.

“The presenters are representative of the amazing work that great companies and brilliant individuals are bringing to the marketplace. The judges had a strong field of excellent technologies to evaluate, and the results were extremely close,” Zell added.

In coming weeks, the HPA will announce the recipients of the Judges Award for Creativity and Innovation, among other special awards, as well as recognize excellence in 12 craft categories, including color grading, editing, sound and visual effects.

Tickets for the 13th Annual HPA Awards Gala will be available for purchase later this summer. Visit www.hpaonline.com for more information. The HPA is a partner of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.

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NEVADA CITY, CALIF.—While the demand for 4K Content is high, there isn’t a lot of it out there. One possible solution is to upscale HD content to 4K images. This is the strategy of the recent announcement that will see Telestream’s Vantage media processing platform able to integrate with Cinnafilm’s Tachyon, a frame mechanics and standards conversion system, and Dark Energy, a motion compensation based noise reduction and image scaling platform..

With Cinnafilm technology GPU based, it allows the decoding, encoding and workflow functions of Vantage to occupy CPU resources while Dark Energy and Tachyon features are processed. This allows Vantage users to upscale content, including HD to UHD. It also optimizes high resolution moving images for low bit-rate delivery over standard Internet distribution networks.

Telestream is a provider of video transcoding and workflow automation technology, based in Nevada City, Calif. Cinnafilm is a provider in video optimization products with its headquarters in Albuquerque, N.M.