Digital Oscars Awarded

prostoalex writes "MSNBC covers the Academy's Scientific and Technical Awards, which generally take place before the Oscars, but recognize companies and individuals that helped the advancement of film-making with technology. This year's winners include DigiDesign, the creator of Pro Tools audio package, Bill Tondreau from Kuper Controls for robotic camera systems and Peter D. Parks, with a lifetime achievement award."

Does software count?

[Supp0rtLinux]

Too bad they make no mention of the rendering software(s), etc. used in films like LOTR and ROTK. Many times its the softwares that drive the new hardware discoveries and advancements as was the case with the movie Titanic. And with all the Linux rendering farms being used these days, I'd expect at least some mention of the softwares powering them.

Re:Does software count?

[Anonymous Coward]

Massive was not only nominated, but it won. Did you read the article?

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Does software count?

[Supp0rtLinux]

My bad... as many have pointed out, Massive won for my main rant... they won for rendering in ROTK. I guess I sped read a bit too fast. As the saying goes, "the devil is in the details".

Henrik Wann Jensen

[ankit]

Henrik Wann Jensen [ucsd.edu] (one of the winners) is a professor at UCSD. He has had numerous contributions to the area of Computer Graphics, including Photon Maps, Subsurface Scatterring, etc. Some of the animations [ucsd.edu] and images [ucsd.edu] of of his work are trully amazing.

Re:what about?

[cindy]

I'm not sure about ILM, but Pixar (Ed Catmull in particular) has won at least one of these awards for Renderman. (2001)

Re:Does software count?

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't mention it in the article but Massive [massivesoftware.com], the software used to do the battle scenes (amongst other things), won a Scientific and Engineering award:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0102385/2004/01/29.html#a 509 [weblogs.com]
http://www.oscars.org/scitech/2003/winners.html [oscars.org]

Corrections

[fuzzy12345]

They ARE Oscars, just not the glitzy ones that the media covers. Sometimes software wins, sometimes hardware (e.g. innovative camera systems, mounts, sound equipment etcetera).

Re:Where's McGiver?

[ziggles]

McGiver? Who the hell is that? If you mean MacGyver that's the worst spelling of it I've ever seen. And it doesn't make any sense. What does MacGyver have to do with technology in films? He used very basic items in clever ways to get out of a jam. And it was a television show anyway.

Although I did see this episode a couple nights ago where the Phoenix Foundation (which MacGyver worked for, in case you didn't know) was going to restore some old silent films. That's about as close as MacGyver came to film technology.

Re:Does software count?

[Anonymous Coward]

Technical Achievement or Scientific and Engineering awards have already been given to the authors (well, at least representatives) of most of the cg software you can think of. http://wwwdb.oscars.org/scitech_db/index.html

Re:Corrections

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

They're not Oscars. In special circumstances an Oscar will be awarded for technical achievement but generally you get a small plaque or a certificate. Admittedly my certificate does have a picture of an Oscar on it but it most definitely isn't actually one.

Re:Does software count?

[MidnightBrewer]

Massive is not rendering software, but crowd-simulation software. As for rendering, that was most likely done in RenderMan, which has been around for forever and a day, and therefore has already garnered all the accolades it can long ago.