The Engineering Excellence Awards were created to spotlight and reward companies and individuals providing services to the professional media content industry for their outstanding technical and creative ingenuity in media, content production, finishing, distribution and archive. The HPA Awards launched in 2005 to recognize creative artistry, innovation and engineering excellence in the professional media content industry.

Winners of the 2017 HPA Awards for Engineering Excellence are:

• Colorfront Engine (Colorfront)
  A state-of-the art, automatically managed, ACES-compliant color pipeline which brings plug and play simplicity to today’s complex production requirements. Colorfront Engine's Master Look uses a partial subtractive color model and is well-suited for EFX compositing due to its neutral gray scale & offers a perceptually balanced wide range color palette with particular emphasis on good skin tones in varying conditions.
• Dolby Vision Post Production Tools (Dolby) 
  Dolby Vision Post-Production tools integrate into existing color-grading workflows for both cinema and home deliverable grading. This is achieved by unique Dolby technology and its leveraging of dynamic metadata shot by shot and frame by frame to preserve dynamic range and the wider color gamut.
• Mistika VR (SGO)
  Mistika Ultima is SGO’s turnkey offering for post production used at some of the biggest post houses in the industry. Mistika VR is SGO’s latest development and is an affordable VR focused solution with real-time stitching capabilities using SGO’s optical flow technology.
• WEAPON 8K Vista Vision (RED Digital Cinema)
  WEAPON with DRAGON 8K VV sensor delivers high resolution and image quality, creating clean and organic images that bring footage to life. At 35 Megapixels, 8K offers 17x more resolution than HD and over 4x more than 4K.

Honorable Mentions will be awarded to Canon U.S.A. for Critical Viewing Reference Displays and Eizo Inc. for ColorEdge CG318-4K.

In addition to the honors for excellence in engineering, the HPA Awards will recognize excellence in 12 craft categories including color grading, editing, sound and visual effects. Larry Chernoff will receive the lifetime achievement award. The Judges Award for Creativity and Engineering will be announced by September.