The Television Academy announced that Apple and CODEX are among the recipients of the 72nd Engineering Emmy Award for their technologies: The ProRes codec for the excellent preservation of sources video quality and innovative algorithm design, and the CODEX RAW Workflow for its High-Density Encoding. 

72nd Engineering Emmy Awards

The Television Academy announced the recipients of the 72nd Engineering Emmy Awards honoring an individual, company or organization for developments in broadcast technology. Engineering Emmys are presented to an individual, company or organization for developments in engineering that are either so extensive an improvement on existing methods or so innovative in nature that they materially affect the production, recording, transmission or reception of television. This year the Academy is recognizing nine companies and five individuals with the prestigious award. This article focuses on two technologies that are more relevant to our readers: The CODEX HDE and Apple ProRes.

Apple ProRes gets the Engineering Emmy Award

Introduced in 2007, Apple ProRes has become a ubiquitous video codec in the film and television industry. It offers excellent preservation of source video quality and, thanks to innovative algorithm design, fast encoding, and ultra-fast decoding. According to the Television Academy, these two properties—combined with Apple’s industry licensing and certification support—make ProRes among the most widely used codecs for end-to-end content-creation workflows: from high-quality acquisition to high-performance editing, color correction, broadcast ingest and play-out, and FX creation to master content distribution and archiving. However, It’s not specified if the new codec ProRes RAW is included in that achievement. The Television Academy should define the specific codecs, or at least clarify if ProRes RAW is included.

CODEX HDE (High-Density Encoding)

CODEX, an X2X Media Group company, has also been honored with a 2020 Engineering Emmy Award, recognizing the engineering excellence behind the CODEX RAW Workflow with High-Density Encoding. CODEX was previously awarded an Engineering Emmy Award in 2018 for its “Recording Platform and Capture Media”. When enabled with High-Density Encoding (HDE) for ARRIRAW files, a reduction in the data footprint of up to 50% can be realized with no loss in image quality. HDE encoding reduces the storage costs from production through to post and saves time in data migration and file transfers and during the final archive to tape or the cloud. It also saves time during post-production processing, as the data files are smaller in size by 50%.

Television shows that have deployed a CODEX RAW Workflow include The Mandalorian (Disney+), El Camino (A Breaking Bad Movie), Daybreak, Altered Carbon (Netflix), Good Omens and Troop Zero (Prime Video), and Big Little Lies (HBO).To learn more about CODEX HDE technology, make sure to read our article about the company’s latest announcement about the new HDE compatibility of the ARRI Mini and AMIRA (ALEXA Mini and AMIRA are now HDE Technology Compatible: Reducing ARRIRAW File Size by 40%).

The ceremony will stream (for the first time) live on Emmys.com on Thursday, Oct. 29, at 5:00 p.m. PDT.