Quantum Xcellis and Nvidia Iray won top honors in the fifth annual StudioDaily Prime Awards, announced during a special presentation on the show floor at NAB. Those two were named the most outstanding products, or “Best in Show,” by a panel of judges convened by StudioDaily to evaluate the best of production and post-production technology introduced during 2015.
Best in Show
Judges cited the performance and scalability of Quantum’s newly streamlined storage offerings. "Quantum gave its StorNext Pro line-up a necessary and thoughtful overhaul in 2015 with Xcellis,” said StudioDaily Executive Editor Bryant Frazer. “The new Xcellis hardware takes up less rack space and scales dramatically without requiring the purchase of acceleration or caching hardware. That’s crucial for customers facing a 4K/8K HDR and HFR future.”
And Nvidia’s Iray was lauded for packing a forward-looking combination of imaging quality and boundary-breaking hardware acceleration into easy-to-use plug-ins for industry workhorses like Autodesk Maya and Maxon Cinema 4D. “Iray excels at photorealistic textures and performs at blistering speed, scaling to take advantage of Nvidia’s formidable Quadro VCA,” Frazer said. “With real-time interactive visualization becoming as critical in VFX and animation as it has been for engineering and design, Iray is genuinely exciting, empowering technology with seriously broad implications for content creation.”
The Rest of the Winners
Other StudioDaily Prime Award-winning products this year include, in post-production hardware, HP’s ZBook Studio mobile workstation and the ProMAX Platform v5 shared-storage system. Winners in post-production software and services were Adobe Creative Cloud, Assimilate Scratch/Scratch Web, DaVinci Resolve 12 Studio, Dalet Amberfin v11, and Production Data Services AutoDCP.
Winners in the category of production tools were the AJA Ki Pro Ultra, the Blackmagic Ursa Mini 4K, the Sony PXW-FS5 4K Super 35 handheld camera, the Vicon Vantage motion capture platform, and the Video Devices PIX-E5 recording video monitor.
The judging panel was drawn from the ranks of StudioDaily contributors as well as from the industry at large. This year’s group included Nathan Adams, cinematographer Barry Braverman, producer-director Randall Dark, reviewer David English, DP-editor-producer-director Marc Franklin, cinematographer David Leitner, cinematographer Andrew Shulkind as well as other power users who generously shared their expertise.
“What makes the StudioDaily Prime Awards so much fun to put together is the consistently high quality of the products entered,” Frazer said. “What makes it difficult is the task of sorting through these many worthy finalists to select the best of the best. Kudos to all of the finalists for advancing the state of the art and opening up wide new avenues for wild creativity.”
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.
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Post-Production Hardware |
Post-Production |
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Post-Production Hardware — Prime Award Winners |
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"With the ZBook Studio, HP has paired an impressive array of high-end components with an unusually thin and light form factor. Unless you're editing multiple 4K video tracks or piling real-time effects into a mix, it may be all you'll need for on-the-go processing." |
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"Offering excellent integration into Premiere Pro CC and Avid Media Composer, ProMAX Platform v5 is a simple and efficient shared storage system from ingestion to archiving. The ability to share and manage assets via a simple interface from an iPad or tablet is a godsend." |
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Post-Production Software — Prime Award Winners |
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"It would be easy for a company like Adobe to rest on its laurels, but they continue to innovate — and that makes them stand head and shoulders above their competition." |
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Assimilate Scratch/Scratch Web “Unique as a 360-degree post-production tool, enabling broad VR capabilities, management and grading inside the Scratch ecosystem.” |
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Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve 12 Studio "Incredible product. Works well. Massive feature set that grows every year. Oh, and they virtually give it away." |
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“Every release is a major progression forward, and v11 is probably the biggest leap Amberfin has ever made. It works natively in 4K and has probably the most comprehensive package of closed-captioning on any transcoder I've seen.” |
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Production Data Services AutoDCP “AutoDCP is incredibly easy to use, creates absolutely the highest quality images and sound, and is unbelievably inexpensive.” |
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Production Tools — Prime Award Winners |
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“Since 2009, AJA's Ki Pro decks have earned a reputation for simplicity of operation, reliability, and versatility, and AJA has designed Ki Pro Ultra to extend this tradition.” |
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“The URSA Mini 4K digital cinema camera with Canon EF mount is perhaps best compared to a 16mm film camera. Like them, it is all-metal, weighty, with few controls outside of the basics … and the simplest, most no-hassle workflow ever.” |
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Sony PXW-FS5 4K Super 35 Handheld Camera “That rare camera that introduces several forward-thinking new functions (clear image zoom, center scan, auto variable ND and the best-ever handgrip design on a video camera) all at once — all of which someday may be standard in other cameras.” |
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"A significant redesign and an impressive step forward in every way. The Vantage line reinforces Vicon as both trend-setter and benchmark." |
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"When it comes to design, menu layout and build quality, the PIX-E5 is in a class of its own. Perfectly matched to mirrorless 4K cameras like Panasonic's Lumix DMC-GH4 and Sony's a7S II.” |
STUDIODAILY PRIME AWARDS — ALL FINALISTS
