Virtual manufacturing tech developers among Engineering Emmy recipients

The developers of eight technologies used in television will receive Emmys at The Television Academy’s 75th Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Awards, which will be presented Oct. 18 in the usual time frame. Amid writers’ and actors’ strikes, the TV Academy announced last week that the Primetime Emmys would be moved to January 15 and the Creative Arts Emmy presentations to January 6 and 7.

At the ceremony on October 18, the Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to TV technology pioneer Birney Dayton, a founding member, as well as CEO and CTO of broadcast technology company NVISION, which he led for 20 years; and the Philo T. Farnsworth Corporate Achievement Award will be presented to the National Association of Broadcasters trade group.

At the ceremony, Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Awards will be presented to Chris Deighton, Richard Mead, Adrian Jeakins and Evangelos Apostolopoulos for the Brompton Technology Tessera SX40 LED video processor that has enabled the use of LED screens for virtual production; and Steve Rosenbluth, Thomas E. Burgess, Konstantin Smola, and Glen Winchester for the Concept Overdrive motion system, another virtual production and augmented reality tool.

Emmys will be awarded to Raymond Drewry and Jim Helman for the Entertainment Identifier Registry, aimed at standardizing content identification and developed by studio joint venture MovieLabs; and the International Telecommunications Union’s Radiocommunications Study Group 6, for the standardization of high dynamic range television.

Awards also include David Eubank for the pCAM Pro mobile software app with cinematography tools; Thomas Riedel, Jake Dodson, Wolfgang Fritz and Jiou-Pahn Lee for the Riedel Bolero wireless intercom; Jeffrey Gray, Russell Hocken, Barrett Phillips, Greg Smokler for the SmallHD monitor platform; and Meir Shashoua, Yaniv Alon, and Shai Fishman for the Waves Clarity Vx Pro noise reduction plug-in.

Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Dayton is credited with building the first fiber-optic transmission system for wireless television, used for the opening ceremony of the 1980 Olympic Games. In the late 1980s, he chaired the system analysis working group of the Advisory Committee on advanced television services, which tested and selected technologies to establish the digital television distribution standard that will continue throughout North America. He also helped develop the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers’ analog and digital component video standards; co-chair of the SMPTE HD electronic production working group; and was awarded SMPTE’s highest honor, the Progress Medal.