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Snell & Wilcox's MXF Developer Tools and Player Win IABM Peter Wayne Award at IBC2004

Free MXF Express and MXF Desktop products have won an enthusiastic reception from users in the broadcast community

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Snell & Wilcox announced today that the company was awarded this year's prestigious Peter Wayne Award for Design and Innovation for its MXF Express developer toolset and MXF Desktop file player by the International Association of Broadcasting Manufacturers (IABM). The award was presented Sept. 12 at a reception in Amsterdam during IBC2004.

"We are honored that the IABM chose to award the international broadcasting industry's top accolade to our MXF Express and MXF Desktop products," said Bruce Devlin, Snell & Wilcox principal research engineer, who is a contributing author of the MXF File Format Specifications, chair of the MXF Implementers Group, and an active contributor to the work of the Advanced Authoring Format (AAF) open standard and SMPTE. "The Peter Wayne Award validates the effort that our team invested toward making MXF an industry standard."

The Peter Wayne Award, named after a former deputy chairman of IABM, is judged by a distinguished panel of eight industry luminaries who select one product per year for the award based on innovation, performance, ease of use, cost, and appearance. Due to the distinctiveness of this award, the intense competition to receive it, and the stature of the international judging panel, the Peter Wayne Award is one of the most coveted awards in broadcasting.

This is Snell & Wilcox's third time to receive the Peter Wayne Award, a particularly significant achievement given that no other company has won it more than once. IABM first bestowed the award to Snell & Wilcox in 1997 for its MVA 100 video analyser for MPEG, and again two years later for its Archangel real-time film and video restoration system. Kahuna, the industry's most advanced production switcher and the first ever to offer simultaneous high-definition (HD) and standard-definition (SD) operations in the same mainframe with the same control panel, was also shortlisted for this year's award.

MXF Express is a comprehensive software developer kit (SDK) designed to help broadcasters and equipment vendors ensure interoperability among file-sharing products and systems through the MXF file format. Provided free of charge, its components include Ingest Station, a high quality compression mastering system; Mosalina, an automated MPEG quality control software application; and MediaX, a powerful PCI-based hardware accelerator engine designed to deliver Snell & Wilcox core algorithms and signal processing expertise to the IT domain.MXF Desktop is a Windows®-based software application that is also available at no charge from Snell & Wilcox. It enables Microsoft's Windows Media® Player to play MXF files, with easy viewing of key metadata within an MXF file via the right-click Properties command in Windows® Explorer, and allows WAV, MPEG, and DV formats to be "wrapped" as essence into an MXF file.

Daily discussions of MXF issues and tool requirements take place on the Snell & Wilcox Web site, where an active community of users has developed. Nearly 1,000 users representing 400 companies have downloaded the tools from the Snell & Wilcox site to date.

About MXF
MXF (Material eXchange Format) is a major new building block for IT-based broadcast and post-production environments offering a unique combination of several essential key features:

- Platform independence including compression, network protocol, and operating systems
- Extensive support for metadata and improved workflows
- Packetized and streaming file-based capability
- An open industry format with broad-based support from industry vendors
- Interoperability tested between industry vendors
- Extensible for future source formats and metadata schemes

Snell & Wilcox, the leader in its field, delivers technologies and products that enable television and satellite broadcasters, post-production facilities, filmmakers, and communications professionals to move content seamlessly between analog, digital, high-definition and file-based systems and to bridge the world's multiplicity of line/field and color standards. The company provides switchers and keyers, standards conversion systems, networked infrastructure components, and products for noise reduction, image enhancement, and restoration. In business since 1973, Snell & Wilcox maintains its U.S. headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. and European headquarters in Hampshire, U.K. Additional offices are located in New York, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Lebanon, Malaysia, and Russia. Visit www.snellwilcox.com for more information.

Americas Press Contact: Laura Schoeggl, Wall Street Communications, Phone: +1 253-404-0020. Email: laura@wallstreetcom.tv.

EMEA Press Contact: Karen David, Wall Street Communications Europe, Phone: +44 (0) 1865 310422. Email: karen@wallstreetcom.tv.

Snell & Wilcox, Engineering with Vision, Alchemist, Ph.C, Kudos, Magic Dave, IQ Modular, RollCall, RollTrack, Mosalina and Kahuna are all trademarks of the Snell & Wilcox Group. All other trademarks appearing herein are the property of their respective owners.