The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced the 15 winners of Scientific and Technical Academy Awards, which will be presented at the Beverly Wilshire hotel on Feb 10.

Awards Administration Director Rich Miller said that unlike other Academy Awards, achievements receiving Scientific and Technical Awards do not have to have been developed and introduced during 2006. “The achievement can be a device or a discovery, a formula or a method, but it must demonstrate a proven record of contributing significant value to the process of making motion pictures,” Miller said. 

Academy Awards for Scientific and Technical achievements for 2006 are:

Technical Achievement Awards (Academy Certificate)

To Joshua Pines and Chris Kutcka of Technicolor Digital Intermediates for the design and development of the TDI process for creating archival separations from digital image data.

To Bill Feightner and Chris Edwards of E-Film for the design and development of the E-Film process for creating archival separations from digital image data.

To Albert Ridilla, Papken Shahbazian, Ronald Belknap and Jay McGarrigle for the design and development of the Hollywood Film Company Brumagic MPST Densitometer.

To Klemens Kehrer, Josef Handler, Thomas Smidek and Marc Shipman Mueller for the design and development of the Arriflex 235 Camera System.

To Florian Kainz for the design and engineering of OpenEXR, a software package implementing 16-bit, floating-point, high dynamic range image files.

To Walter Trauniger and Ernst Tschida for the design and engineering of the Arri WRC wireless remote lens control system.To Christian Tschida and Martin Waitz of cmotion for the design and engineering of the cmotion Wireless Remote System.

To Peter Litwinowicz and Pierre Jasmin for the design and development of the RE: Vision Effects family of software tools for optical flow-based image manipulation.

Scientific and Engineering Awards(Academy Plaque)

To Phillip J. Feiner, Jim Houston, Denis Leconte and Chris Bushman of Pacific Title and Art Studio for the design and development of the Rosetta process for creating digital YCM archival masters for digital film restoration.

To Steve Sullivan, Colin Davidson, Max Chen and Francesco Callari for the design and development of the ILM Image-based Modeling System.To Dr. Bill Collis, Simon Robinson, Ben Kent and Dr. Anil Kokaram for the design and development of the Furnace integrated suite of software tools that robustly utilizes temporal coherence for enhancing visual effects in motion picture sequences.To Howard Preston and Mirko Kovacevic for the design and engineering of the Preston Cinema Systems FI+Z wireless remote system.

Award of Commendation (Special Award) 

To Ioan Allen, J. Wayne Anderson, Mary Ann Anderson, Ted Costas, Paul R. Goldberg, Shawn Jones, Thomas Kuhn, Dr. Alan Masson, Colin Mossman, Martin Richards, Frank Ricotta and Richard C. Sehlin for their contributions to the environmentally responsible industry conversion from silver-based to cyan dye analog soundtracks.

John A. Bonner Medal of Commendation (Medallion)

To Richard Edlund for his “outstanding service and dedication in upholding the high standards of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Gordon E. Sawyer Award (Oscar® Statuette) 

To Ray Feeney for his “technological contributions, which have brought credit to the motion picture industry.