The Codex One workflow, the Panasonic AU-EVA1 cinema camera, and the Rotolight Anova Pro 2 earned top honors in the seventh annual StudioDaily Prime Awards, announced during a special presentation at The Studio-B&H on the show floor at NAB. Those were named the most outstanding, or “Best in Show,” by a panel of judges convened by StudioDaily to evaluate the best of production and post-production technology introduced over the last year.
Also honored during the presentation were this year’s honorees named to the StudioDaily 50, a group of industry professionals selected to highlight the breadth and depth of creativity and experience at work in our industry. Read about all of their accomplishments, and their outlook on the industry, at our StudioDaily 50 minisite celebrating their work.
Best in Show
Three different products received especially high marks this year and were classified as Best in Show. Judges were impressed by the robustness and widespread use of the continually in-development Codex One Workflow, including the Codex Vault hardware and Codex Production Suite software, which was used on demanding 2017 film releases including Ghost in the Shell, Kong: Skull Island and War for the Planet of the Apes. Also earning Best in Show honors was Panasonic’s AU-EVA1 5.7K compact cinema camera, which was applauded for bringing powerful features from the VariCam line to a much less expensive, very high-resolution compact camera. And the Rotolight Anova Pro 2 was hailed as a great lighting fixture that became even better with this year’s upgrade.
“These three Best in Show winners truly exemplify innovation, value and reliability in the creative marketplace,” said StudioDaily Editorial Director and Associate Publisher Bryant Frazer. “They enhance creativity through technical ingenuity and a focus on customer needs — and therefore they make great business sense.”
On the Bleeding Edge
StudioDaily instituted a new category this year — the Bleeding Edge Awards, recognizing products advancing the state of the art in still-emerging media formats including 360/VR/AR, HDR, and ultra-high-resolution production and post. Winners of the first StudioDaily Prime Bleeding Edge Awards were AJA FS-HDR, Global Imagination VR Sphere, Boris FX Mocha VR, and the Z CAM S1 VR Camera/Assimilate Scratch VR Z Software integrated workflow.
Also new this year is the Technology On Screen award, honoring specific real-world results achieved by using the latest filmmaking technology and other resources. Winning the first Studio Prime Award for Technology On Screen was Adobe After Effects: Screens Help Define the World of Blade Runner 2049. The award honors Adobe’s software engineering as well as the designs by Territory Studio, which leveraged Adobe Photoshop CC and Adobe After Effects CC to quickly experiment with different visual elements to create a surprising and counter-intuitive future environment for the film. In the video above, Territory Creative Lead Peter Eszenyi discusses the company’s work, and how it revolved around After Effects.
The Rest of the Winners
Other StudioDaily Prime Award-winning products this year include, in the category of Post-Production, Adobe Character Animator, Blackmagic Da Vinci Resolve 14, and Imagine Products PrimeTranscoder. In the Collaborative Workflow category, judges selected Aspera Files and Elements Click as winners, and cited in the category of Storage and Infrastructure was the Nevion Virtuoso Software-Defined Media Node.
Winners in the largest category, incorporating all manner of Production tools, were the ARRI SkyPanel S360-C lighting fixture, the Canon EOS C200 Cinema Camera, the Ross Graphite All-in-One Production System, the Sony CineAlta Venice Full-Frame Digital Motion Picture Camera System, and the Versa-Flex Mobile Rolling Studio.
The judging panel included StudioDaily editors and contributors as well as input from our colleagues elsewhere in the industry. This year’s group included producer and post supervisor Nathan Adams, cinematographer Barry Braverman, producer-director Randall Dark, DP-editor-producer-director Marc Franklin, cinematographer David Leitner, and other power users who generously shared their expertise.
“It’s always gratifying to dig into the slate of finalists for the Studio Prime Awards, which represent, year after year, the most accomplished and forward-looking products the industry has to offer,” Frazer said. “Every finalist is absolutely worthy of attention, but the products chosen as winners are those that have been ranked most highly by the judges for their feature set, innovative qualities, ease of use, and value for money.”
A full list of winners follows, with supporting quotes from the Prime Awards judging panel, along with the original slate of finalists in each category.
Best in Show |
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Codex One Workflow “There’s a reason why the Codex workflow remains so popular on ambitious productions — the workflow is essentially bomb-proof, and it works the same way across camera types, making DPs and their crews comfortable when shooting raw. No one does production workflow better.” |
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Panasonic AU-EVA1 5.7K Compact Cinema Camera “In a crowded market where users this year expect to see twice the camera at half the price compared to last year, the Panasonic AU-EVA1 fulfills this loftiest of expectations — and then some. It has a new ISO 800/2500 5,7K sensor, oversampled 4K recording, all-I-frame recording at 400 Mbps, and the best focus assist in the business.” |
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Rotolight Anova Pro 2 “Rotolight’s Anova Pro 2 is love at first sight. Beyond its 70% increase in output, it retains all the advantages of previous Rotolight models — pleasing circular shape, smooth shadows free of multiple edges, solid build, bright red alphanumeric display, integrated driver and low 72W draw. Why mess with a good thing? That is already such fun to use?” |
StudioDaily Prime Award Winners: Bleeding Edge Awards |
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AJA FS-HDR “AJA went to the experts and incorporated Colorfront technology into its latest magic converter box, the FS-HDR. It’s an incredibly handy piece of kit for HDR production, easily bridging that yawning gap between different color gamuts.” |
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Global Imagination VR Sphere “Wow! A truly incredible product and experience.””A way to display a 360-degree VR image in a collaborative environment for multiple people to see and interact with the VR world…. For the right user, it’s a home run.” |
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Mocha VR by Boris FX “An impressive, and incredibly useful extension of the refined Mocha tracking technology into VR and 360 video, it’s an indispensable toolset for compositors and VFX artists adapting their techniques to immersive environments.” |
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Z CAM S1 VR Camera/Assimilate Scratch VR Z Software Integrated Workflow “Shooting 6K VR and streaming it live to Facebook or YouTube has to be one of the most daunting tasks imaginable, yet somehow the combined Z CAM S1 camera and Scratch VR Z software is able to pull it off with a minimum of hassle. If you need a high-end VR streaming solution with real-time grading and compositing, this is the most elegant and capable solution around.” |
StudioDaily Prime Award Winners: Collaborative Workflow
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Aspera Files “This extremely efficient data transport system delivers very high speeds regardless of network conditions, at high levels of security and reliability. If you’re working and playing in the highest echelons of film and TV, chances are you’re already using Aspera.” |
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Elements Click “Elements took a sleek, no-nonsense approach to media sharing for post-production. Riding on top of an Elements SAN or NAS system, Click automatically generates watermarked proxies, uploads them to cloud for review and annotation, then syncs everything back to the facility’s MAM. For Elements customers, this is integration done right.” |
StudioDaily Prime Award Winners: Production
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ARRI SkyPanel S360-C “Resets our expectations of what a flat-panel LED softlight can do. Shadows are perfectly soft and color rendition is gorgeous. Its simulations of a randomly flickering fireplace or the red-blue flashes of a stopped police car are jaw-dropping. Who wouldn’t want a handful of these on their set, always?” |
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Canon EOS C200 Cinema Camera “Great features at a midrange price, with well-placed, intuitive controls. Working in dark rooms with a high ISO, you get a pretty clean picture, and in post you can tweak the footage to perfection.” |
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Ross Graphite All-in-One Production System “Don’t let the compact 4RU chassis or the ‘all-in-one’ description fool you — the Ross Graphite is a hefty hunk of powerful, PCIe-based hardware, packing a 2 ME Carbonite production switcher, XPression 3D Graphics, and the 24-bit Rave Audio Engine under the hood, all running on a dedicated, failure-resistant OS. Powerful, reliable, uncompromising.” |
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Sony CineAlta Venice Full-Frame Digital Motion Picture Camera System “Sony has taken everything they learned from designing the F5, F55, and F65 and channeled all of it into their new flagship camera, Venice, throwing in a larger full-frame sensor for good measure. Providing a choice of 4K S35, 4K anamorphic, or 6K full frame, the result is an instant classic.” |
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Versa-Flex Mobile Rolling Studio “A very big, soft, rolling case that you can stick lots of gear in, with larger wheels that get through grass and up steps easily. I loaded it with two light kits and 200 feet of extension cords and almost couldn’t get it into my Suburban!” |
StudioDaily Prime Award Winners: Post-Production
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Adobe Character Animator “A fresh approach to animation software that enables live and almost live production techniques. In fact, with Stephen Colbert and Showtime’s Our Cartoon President Adobe’s interactive animation process has even enabled a new kind of TV show.” |
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Blackmagic Da Vinci Resolve 14
“Continues to evolve as the tool that can do everything, and then some.” “Blackmagic continues to amaze me. I’m thrilled that they are focusing on the audio, collaborative and editorial features in resolve. The bin-locking that Resolve is offering now is better than Avid.” “The single most capable post app ever.” |
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Imagine Products PrimeTranscoder “Not just a rehash or rebranding of the company’s Proxy Mill utility, PrimeTranscoder is much faster, taking advantage of GPU acceleration and core CPU distribution to support virtually every professional camera format, from Avid, GoPro, and RED, to MXF, 4K and even 8K resolution files.” |
StudioDaily Prime Award Winners: Storage and Infrastructure
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Nevion Virtuoso Software-Defined Media Node “Designed for media transport and conversion in IP-based live production, Nevion’s box is incredibly versatile, supporting a broad variety of formats and codecs, and its functions can be quickly changed in software, so the same hardware can adress productions with widely varying encoding requirements. The cleverly named Virtuoso points the way to the inevitable virtualization of live production, with all the transformations and consolidations in infrastructure it portends.” |
StudioDaily Prime Award Winners: Technology On Screen
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Adobe After Effects: Screens Help Define the World of Blade Runner 2049 This award honors Adobe’s software engineering as well as the designs by Territory Studio, which leveraged Adobe Photoshop CC and Adobe After Effects CC to quickly experiment with different visual elements to create a surprising and counter-intuitive future environment for the film. |
