Winners Announced for the 65th Primetime Emmy Engineering Awards

NoHo Arts District, Calif., September 26, 2013 – The Television Academy has announced the recipients of the 65th Primetime Emmy Engineering Awards. Recipients will receive their awards during the Wednesday, October 23rd ceremony at the Loews Hollywood Hotel in Hollywood. Below is a list of the awards to be presented:

The Philo T. Farnsworth Award

The Philo T. Farnsworth Award honors an agency, company or institution whose contributions over time have significantly impacted television technology and engineering.

Sennheiser Electronic Corporation is this year's recipient of the Philo. T. Farnsworth Award. The company was founded in 1945, just a few weeks after the end of World War II, by Fritz Sennheiser (1912–2010) and seven fellow engineers of the University of Hannover in a laboratory called Laboratorium Wennebostel (shortened, "Labor W").  Its first product was a voltmeter.

Labor W began building microphones in 1946 and was renamed Sennheiser Electronic in 1958.

In 1987, Sennheiser was awarded an Oscar® at the 59th Academy Awards® for its MKH 816 shotgun microphone.

The company began producing modern wireless microphones in 1982, and in 1996, Sennheiser received an Emmy Award for its advancements in RF wireless technology.

In addition to microphones, Sennheiser has always maintained its tradition of high-quality audio technology products including headphones, amplifiers and speakers.

Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award

The Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award honors a living individual whose on-going contributions have significantly affected the state of television technology and engineering.

Chris Cookson is this year's recipient of the Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award. Ever the champion of quality, Christopher J. Cookson is known for pushing the television industry to capture and archive the maximum quality possible so that the consumer experience can be enriched as presentation technologies improve. To this end, Cookson has done pioneering work in moving production processes from analog to digital, patenting methods of carrying high-quality data on optical media, developing innovative methods for film archive restoration, and laying the blueprint for end-to-end digital workflows with automated distribution. His substantive work at ABC, CBS, Warner Bros., and now as President of Sony Pictures Technologies, has garnered Cookson many awards including two Emmys.

Engineering Emmys

Five Engineering Emmys will be awarded. Presented to an individual, company or organization for engineering developments so significant an improvement on existing methods or so innovative in nature that they materially affect the transmission, recording or reception of television. This year's Engineering Emmy recipients are:

YouTube

Since YouTube's founding in 2005, the world is surprised on a daily basis by the creativity, inspiration and passion that the planet's most creative people bring to the YouTube platform. Each month, a billion people watch more than 6 billion hours of video. Each minute, creators upload 100 more hours for the world to watch. To meet this fundamental engineering challenge, the YouTube team has created new, innovative ways to upload, store, manage and deliver all kinds of video programming to viewers the instant they want to watch it.

YouTube's parallel media transcoding engine and media processing framework provide for massive media processing capability with extremely low latencies. YouTube's streaming infrastructure is a unique achievement that operates at unparalleled scale, globally. In the last year alone, their new "live" platform delivered coverage of 1,200 live events from the 2012 Summer Olympics and scaled to deliver over 8 million concurrent streams during the Red Bull Stratos Mission. As the world increasingly comes to the internet for high-quality, original content, YouTube's Content ID platform allows copyright holders to manage whether and how their content appears on YouTube, providing those rights holders with an automated way of protecting and managing their rights and monetizing their programming on a global scale.

Together, these achievements have fundamentally changed the way an entire generation thinks of and experiences television.

Aspera's FASP Transport Technology (Aspera Inc)

Aspera's development of FASP technology has enabled the high-speed transfer and synchronization of file-based media data with complete visibility, tracking, bandwidth control and end-to-end security.

Transferring with speed, integrity and security file-based media workflows throughout the supply chain (regardless of distance) on low cost internet networks rather than shipping physical media via tapes or expensive dedicated satellite networks has proven to be an industry game changer. This is evidenced by the fact that the Aspera FASP File Transfer software protocol is used on standard IP hardware to distribute content domestically and world-wide by over 1500 media organizations that include virtually all the major broadcast television networks, Hollywood studios and CG/animation houses.

Digital Dailies (Josh C. Kline)

Digital Dailies® became an impetus for television industry change by distributing production dailies and cuts via a web-based, streaming approach. Adding content security in the forms of both encryption and watermarking, the system was rapidly adopted due to its secure, fast, reliable and low-cost delivery to anyone with an Internet connection, over which shots can be approved and annotated with frame-accurate comments. Having launched in the era of film, Digital Dailies bridged the gap to today's file-based workflows through its advanced metadata processing that enabled a clip-based paradigm.

iZotope RX Audio Repair Technology (iZotope)

iZotope has created advanced audio processing software that enables editors and mixers alike to rescue previously unusable or ruined audio. RX can remove and reduce common issues like crackle, clicks, hum & noise. It can repair distorted or clipped audio, eliminate microphone pops, bumps, crickets and birds to mention just a few. The easy user-interface, coupled with powerful algorithms for segregating tonal and noise components, have resulted in it being used by dialogue editors and re-recording mixers, both independent and at all major studios, throughout our industry.

Previzion Virtual Studio System (Lightcraft Technology)

Lightcraft's Previzion Virtual Studio System combines a revolutionary technique to optically and inertially track camera movement and lens parameters with a technology for real-time keying, rendering and compositing. The system can lock foregrounds and backgrounds with nearly any kind of camera move, including crane, dolly, zoom, handheld and Steadicam shots. With it, green- or blue-screen footage can be combined with complex computer-generated models or moving HD footage using realistic focus and depth of field, with broadcast-quality results. It gives productions the ability to shoot a virtual set with the same freedom they would have in a physical set.

Engineering Plaque

The Engineering Plaque honors achievements that exhibit a high level of engineering and are important to the progress of the industry. The Engineering Plaque is not a consolation prize, but a positive recognition of engineering achievements on a different level of technology and industry importance than the Emmy statuette. This year plaques go to:

Audio networking and routing system for large scale television entertainment productions (LAWO AG)

As one of the original manufacturers of audio networking technologies, Lawo pioneered the use of telecommunication protocols such as ATM/SDH (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) making it possible to distribute broadband audio over WAN networks thousands of miles apart, in real time with transfers at the speed of light with minimum latency at each end. This breakthrough helped lead the way for audio networking and the creation of the largest matrix audio router build. The Lawo Nova 73HD routing matrix, designed as a central matrix router for audio and data with its modular construction and scalable routing capacity of up to 8192 x 8192 cross points in a single frame, is used by broadcast engineers world-wide.

Final Draft Screenwriting Software (Final Draft, Inc.)

FINAL DRAFT is a fully dedicated screenwriting software application and has become the industry standard used by television writers from concept through final production, offering powerful formatting, pagination and revision features. The software, which runs on Windows, Mac and iOS platforms, offers writers the ability to create consistent, properly formatted, industry standard results. FINAL DRAFT, first released in 1991, continues to evolve with additional features and is used almost universally by writers in the television industry.

About the 65th Primetime Emmy Engineering Awards

The 65th Primetime Emmy Engineering Awards are overseen by chair Wendy Aylsworth, SVP of Technology, Warner Bros. Committee members are Stuart Bass, A.C.E., Picture Editors Governor, Academy of Television Arts & Sciences; Chris Cookson, President, Sony Pictures Technologies; Kevin Hamburger, Sr. Supervising Producer, THE TALK; Eileen Horta, Sound Editing Governor, Academy of Television Arts & Sciences; David Jensen, Partner, Monitor; Geoff Katz, Vice President, Watchwith; Frank Morrone, C.A.S., Sound Governor, Academy of Television Arts & Sciences; John D. O'Brien, Video Control/Consultant "The Big Bang Theory"; Mark Scott Spatny, VP Digital Effects, Stargate Studios; Barry Zegel, Senior Vice President and General Manager, CBS Television City.

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