IBC Awards look back 00 years and forward to the cloud

IBC celebrated its awards on Sunday 15 September, with honours going to post production and asset management, cloud delivery and advanced networking. Top awards looked back on 100 years of Indian cinema, and to one of the most creative and technically demanding movie directors of today. The audience enjoyed a huge variety of clips on the IBC Big Screen, ranging from the batsman's view of cricket to Bollywood song and dance.

The IBC2013 International Honour for Excellence, the highest award IBC presents, went to Sir Peter Jackson. Ever since I was a child I wanted to make movies, he said. Sometimes people don't regard imagination and technology as being one and the same, and supporting each other. In the case of the film industry and particularly the films I make I cannot exercise my imagination without the support of technology.

The IBC Judges' Prize recognised 100 years of Indian cinema, looking all the way back to the release of Raja Harishchandra' in 1913. Today the Indian movie industry sees more than 1,000 new movies a year and its impact on world cinema cannot be underestimated.

Probably the leading superstar in Indian cinema is Amitabh Bachchan, and he was on hand to receive the award on behalf of the industry. It is a great privilege to be here, a great privilege to be a proud member of my fraternity, he told the audience. I accept this very humbly on behalf of the Indian film industry.

IBC Innovation Awards now highly recognised in the industry because they celebrate collaboration between vendors and users went to Park Road Post Production in New Zealand, national broadcaster RT in Ireland, and the Japan Commercial Broadcasters' Association. A Special Award was presented to a European Union collaborative project, Vision Cloud, working on the practicalities of handling and processing media in the cloud.

The IBC Best Conference Paper, for the most significant and stylish technical paper, went to Mike Knee of Snell for his presentation on scalable motion estimation. This was the second time that Knee had won this award, a remarkable achievement. The IBC Exhibition Design Awards went to the stands of Limecraft for best use of Shell Scheme space, ActiveVideo for Best Small Free Design and Nikon Europe for Best Large Free Design.

The landscape of our industry has been transformed, and continues to develop, from traditional broadcasting to content everywhere, said Michael Crimp, IBC's CEO. We make our awards a central part of IBC because it is a good way of charting those transformations. This year's winners reflect some of the key themes like advanced presentation formats beyond HD and big data content in the cloud which dominate the whole of IBC.

IBC2013 Innovation Awards

Underlining the global reach of IBC, this year's 10 finalists in the IBC Innovation Awards came from nine different countries across three continents. Each were competing for these highly sought-after awards which go not to a vendor with a new product but to a broadcaster or media business which is using that technology to gain a creative, technical or commercial edge.

Park Road Post Production in Wellington, New Zealand, was faced with a real challenge when Sir Peter Jackson decided to make his Hobbit movies in high frame rate 3D, often shooting on multiple cameras simultaneously. They needed to bridge high standards of creativity with managing vast amounts of data. Their solution, with technology partner SGO Mistika, won them the IBC2013 Innovation Award for Content Creation.

We wanted to create a complete pipeline, based on one platform, from rushes through dailies screenings and on to final online, stereo and colour grading, said Park Road's Head of Technology Phil Oatley. SGO's Mistika provided a platform that we flexible and robust and so good that the film-makers never noticed that we were dealing with four times the data of a normal feature.

Highly commended projects in the creation category were BBC News & Sport for its coverage of last year's Olympic Torch Relay with technology partners Antares, Bradley Engineering, Cobham, LiveU and Mobile Viewpoint; ITV with Adobe for a new approach to production management on dramas; and Fox Sports in Australia which worked with Globecast to put live cameras on batsmen's helmets to get close to Big Bash cricket action.

Irish national broadcaster RT took the IBC2013 Innovation Award for Content Management. It needed to move away from tape as part of its transition to HD. Recognising that the transition to FAST File Acquisition and Server Technology, as they called the project would be hugely disruptive, they adopted the clever protocol of investing in a small system from technology partners TMD and Eurotek, which they used for development by the staff who would become super-users. These people then became advocates not just to their colleagues but to the board of RT to demonstrate the potential of the full system.

It is a huge honour to receive such a recognised award, said RT 's Gillian Byrne. My thanks go to the super-users: their support, enthusiasm and engagement from the very beginning contributed to the success of the largest broadcast/IT project in RT in recent years, fully realised from effective collaboration between suppliers and users.

Also welcomed to the stage to receive certificates of high commendation from the judges were T-2 in Slovenia, for its seamless IPTV platform for delivery to any device developed with Vision 247 and Fora; and Belgian broadcaster RTBF for its Gems semantic archive searching, with technology partners Perfect Memory and Memnon.

The final category is the IBC2013 Innovation Award for Content Delivery, and this time the trophy went to the Japan Commercial Broadcasters' Association. It took the bold step of creating a network

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