Drumroll please. Now that the dust has settled and everyone has finally made it out of Schiphol Airport, hare are the winners of the RedShark IBC2026 Awards.
One of the unexpected consequences of the Iranian War and its knock-on effects on the global supply chain is a dramatic jump in the lead times of acrylic products. As such we couldn’t appear at IBC this year with our usual hefty awards and had to pivot to a Plan B. On the plus side, that meant we could carry more of them. The trophy might be different, but the award is the same and, as ever, there is no pay to play.
Here, in strict alphabetical order, is what caught our eye at the show this year.
Adobe Color Mode
As we’ve said elsewhere this year, color seems to be the new battleground when it comes to post production. Certainly the average editor and production house can do more with color tools available on NLEs than they ever could before, and high-end color manipulation is no longer the sole preserve of the client-attended hero suite.
Premiere is 35 years old this year, and celebrated by receiving an Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement at the 2026 Emmys. We liked the look of Color Mode in Premiere, when we first saw it at NAB and it’s good to see that it is still adding new features, even though technically it’s still in beta. That was always part of the plan. Color Mode was three years in the making and developed with input from hundreds of working editors during an extensive private beta. Frankly, we’re looking forward to seeing what people do with it when it hits the mainstream release as it really does move a whole set of color-related goalposts.
Canon EOS R6 V
While the world and his wife focuses on the Canon EOS R8 Mark II, which could be announced in the next few hours, the $2500 Canon R6 V video-focused mirrorless camera has been stealthily building up a reputation. Designed in the main for solo professional videographers and content creators, it’s a proper repositioning of the R6 line and borrows a lot of design language from Apple. It doesn’t provide all the bells and whistles of something like the C50 with its detachable top handle, but then not everybody is after that nor wants to spend the additional price. A camera that understands its niche and fills it well.
DJI Osmo Pocket 4P
Not sure what more we can say about this to be honest. The gimbal camera format was pioneered by DJI and has gone on to be hugely disruptive. As our review said, the Osmo Pocket 4P is not perfect, and its highly impressive sensors are somewhat stymied by some poor execution on the practical side. But most of this can be straightened out by firmware. And given that competition in the space only shows signs of intensifying, there’s already plenty of speculation about what the Pocket 5P might bring to the market perhaps as soon as next year. 17 stops is a huge leap for a device aimed at the consumer market, and to have a camera that can do all this for only $619… Maybe this isn’t the worst timeline after all.
Eddie AI v4
AI-powered edit assistants have come a long way in a very short space of time. Its a packed field, and to stay at the front of it must be exhausting for the dev teams, but Eddie AI keeps managing to pull it off. New features in V4 (native Avid and Blackmagic Cloud handoff, C2PA content credentials, and generative music, voiceover and b-roll tools) make this easily the most powerful yet. And news that an on-prem version is being trained that can occupy a tiny comparative space and still produce quality results is very much an indication of where we should be going with this. Watch for the phrase “the best data center is the one in your pocket” starting to trend in future years.
EIZO CG3200X
EIZO's ColorEdge CG3200X marks the company's first OLED monitor, a 31.5-inch 4K UHD QD-OLED panel aimed at HDR post-production and HLG/PQ/SDR mastering, with 1000 nits peak brightness (300 nits full-screen), a 1,500,000:1 contrast ratio and 99% DCI-P3 coverage. The stats are impressive enough, but we really liked its new Automatic Brightness Limiter, which features two separate modes: one maintains the overall impression of the image, the other clips only the brightest highlights while preserving midtones and shadows. “Our ABL kicks in later than others,” the company’s Christian Ohlig told us. “And when it does, you can choose the mode. Highlight dimming is very important if you want to see the mid and dark tones easily.”
Godox KNOWLED MG4KR
In the end we gave this award to the Godox KNOWLED MG4KR, partly because it looked so dang impressive on the stand. It is the most powerful RGB light the company makes, a surprisingly lightweight fixture that throws out as much light as a 6K HMI. Bit to be honest we could also have given it to the company’s PaletteLab color engine. This is a new multi-channel color engine designed to deliver continuous spectral coverage across the full visible wavelength range, which helps to eliminate spectral gaps. That means none of the drop-offs between blue and cyan, and between orange-red and deep red, that can still plague LED-based lighting. The recently released KNOWLED PL600 RF and PL1200 RF showcased what it can do, and we’re looking forward to the company building out its range.
Litepanels Astra IP
Sometimes it’s the evolution of product that maintains its excellence. That’s vey much the case with the Astra IP LED lighting fixtures, which started off with a strong USP of being IP-rated when they were launched and are now expanding their form and function across a whole slew of lighting use cases. The new IP Rated Kits take waterproofing to the nth degree with weather-resistant lighting setups housed in a waterproof Pelican case, but we were really taken with the Pole Operated Yoke. This features a brass gearbox that lets you tilt and pan overhead fixtures from the floor in permanent studio grids without a ladder or re-rig. We don’t do categories, but if we had one for “Best Studio Workflow Accessory,” this would win it hands down.
QScan
QScan makes this list for a similar reason to some of the bigger names here, even though it's solving a completely different problem: continuous product innovation. QScan AQC does what it sounds like it should do, and handles a huge range of automated technical checks across video, audio, IMF, MXF, HDR and other delivery parameters, QScan Verify adds proper SDR/HDR playback, scopes, comparative analysis and manual event tagging, and QScan One packages AQC and Verify together on a single workstation. QC isn't glamorous, but there are few worse conversations you will have in your professional life than a broadcaster or streamer rejecting the master you thought was finished.
Teradek Bolt 7
Lastly, but by no means least, Teradek Bolt 7 adds an all-new 900 MHz RF pipeline which runs in tandem with the existing Bolt zero-delay video link, so camera control data now shares the same wireless backbone as the picture itself rather than needing a separate radio system added on. That comes packaged into a housing roughly 20% smaller than the outgoing Bolt 6, without giving up range or latency .Bolt 7 has been in development for roughly two and a half years, undergoing extensive internal testing before being placed with early customers, and is a genuinely clever piece of engineering.