Hindi
Avid customers drive creative achievement at Oscar Awards
MUMBAI: Avid Technology has announced that at last week‘s Oscar Awards all of the nominated and award-winning films in the Best Motion Picture, Directing, Film Editing, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Visual Effects, Documentary Feature and Original Score categories at the 80th Annual Academy Awards® were created using at least one Avid, Digidesign, Sibelius or Softimagesystem.
Nearly two-thirds of these nominees employed workflows consisting of multiple systems from the various Avid brands, and for the eighth-consecutive year, every nominee for a Sound Editing Oscar used Digidesign Pro Tools systems. In addition, the award-winning Animated Feature used both Avid and Digidesign systems, the Visual Effects winner used SoftimageXSI for pre- and post-visualization as well as Avid systems, and the majority of the nominees for Original Song were scored using Sibelius 5.
Christopher Rouse who an Oscar for editing The Bourne Ultimatum says, “The most difficult thing about editing this film was dealing with the overall story and structure. We shot for a fair amount of time, starting in September 2006 and ending in July 2007. We added scenes…we took them out…we cannibalized scenes. We were constantly manipulating the footage – not only as it was originally intended, but often re-inventing the material to tell a stronger story.”
While the editing team remained focussed on the creative aspects of the cut, an Avid editing and shared-storage setup helped them keep pace with more practical concerns such as inputting and organizing the massive amount of footage and keeping track of constant revisions. As many as eight Windows-based Media Composer® Adrenaline systems were connected to a 16-terabyte Avid Unity MediaNetwork shared-storage system at one time.
“An Avid system is far and away the most comfortable tool for me to work with. There are zero barriers between me and the material. That for me makes all the difference,” adds Rouse.
Digidesign Pro Tools was instrumental in the film also being awarded the Sound Editing and Sound Mixing Oscars. Scott Millan, rerecording mixer on The Bourne Ultimatum points out the critical role that Pro Tools played in helping the team meet complex audio demands and a tight production schedule. “I knew how difficult this project was going to be from the beginning so I strongly recommended that we use Pro Tools. It was to our benefit, hugely because the post-production process was very fluid. We had a lot of conforms and a lot of new material coming in frequently. Pro Tools gave us the flexibility to work very quickly and overall we were served very well by it. It was pretty much a prerequisite on this project and key to our creative process.”
Dario Marianelli who won an Oscar for composing the score for Atonement, revealed how Sibelius 5 was used as part of his creative process in composing the score. “I knew that Atonement needed two distinct musical themes. There is the relentlessness of Briony – we called her the girl with faulty brakes, she just can’t stop until she’s wrecked everyone’s lives. And then there’s the intense love story between Keira Knightley’s character, Cecilia, and Robbie played by James McAvoy.”
To create the first of these two themes, Marianelli built up an evolving, percussive composition, and then amplified the tension further by adding the metronomic sound of Briony’s typewriter keys over each beat. “That was just one of those crazy ideas, and it really worked,” he noted.
For the love story theme, the composer used a more traditional, strings-based approach, which matched the mood and also the wartime period of the film. “Panorama view in Sibelius 5 really helped me with arrangements of both these themes because I don’t think in pages, I just think in music. With Panorama, there are no breaks in your thinking, you can think more laterally,” Marianelli added. Panorama view hides page breaks in scores, instead, displaying them on an infinitely wide page. Avid and Digidesign systems were also used in creating Atonement.
Avid Technology CEO Gary Greenfield says, “We congratulate our customers for being recognized as the best in the industry. We’re fully committed to providing them with ground-breaking tools—from music composition, audio editing and mixing to 3D animation, video editing and visual effects—that enable them to unleash their creativity and produce the world’s most compelling content.”
Hindi
Remembering Gyan Sahay, the lens behind film, television and advertising
From a puppet rabbit selling poppadums to Hindi cinema, he framed it all.
MUMBAI: There are careers, and then there are canvases. Gyan Sahay, the veteran cinematographer, director, and producer who passed away on 10 March 2026 in Mumbai, had one of the latter. Over several decades in the Indian film and television industry, he turned lenses, lights, and the occasional puppet rabbit into something approaching art.
A graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Sahay built his reputation as a director of photography across a career that stretched from the early 1970s all the way to the digital age. He was the kind of craftsman who understood that a well-composed shot is not merely a technical achievement but a quiet act of storytelling.
For most Indians of a certain age, however, Sahay will forever be the man behind the rabbit. His direction of the iconic long-running television commercial for Lijjat Papad, featuring its now-legendary puppet bunny, gave the country one of its most cheerfully persistent advertising images. It was the sort of work that sneaks into the national subconscious and takes up permanent residence.
His big-screen credits as cinematographer include Anokhi Pehchan (1972), Pagli (1974), Pas de Deux (1981), and Hum Farishte Nahin (1988). In 1999, he stepped behind a different kind of camera altogether, making his directorial debut with Sar Ankhon Par, a drama that featured Vikas Bhalla and Shruti Ulfat, with a cameo by Shah Rukh Khan for good measure.
On television, Sahay was particularly prized for his command of multi-camera production setups, a skill that made him a go-to technician for large-scale shows and reality programmes. In an industry that has never been especially patient with complexity, he was the calm hand on the rig.
In later life, Sahay turned teacher. He participated regularly in masterclasses and Digi-Talks, often hosted by organisations such as Bharatiya Chitra Sadhna, sharing hard-won wisdom on cinematography, the comedy of timing in a shot, and the sweeping changes brought by the shift from celluloid to digital. He was also said to have been involved in a project concerning a biographical film on Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy.
Tributes from the film industry poured in following the news of his passing, with colleagues remembering him as a senior cameraman who served as a rare bridge between two entirely different eras of Indian cinema. That is, perhaps, the finest thing one can say of any craftsman: he kept up, and he brought others along with him.
