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Snell & Wilcox MXF Express Captures IEE Innovation in Engineering Award for Information Technology

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MXF Express from Snell & Wilcox has been recognized with yet another prestigious industry award, winning the 2005 IEE Innovation in Engineering Award for the Information Technology category. The award was presented earlier this month at a reception in London.

IEE Innovation in Engineering awards showcase engineering projects and products that demonstrate the application of innovative design, technology, techniques, and processes. Among the criteria conAsidered by judges are the social, economic, and personal impact of the product; the ways in which it contributes to the industry’s existing body of knowledge; and its innovation in creating an effective working process, environment, or culture. The awards are also intended to recognize those projects that represent innovative organizational groupings designed to achieve one or more common aims.

Winner in the IT category, MXF Express is a comprehensive set of software developer tools designed to help broadcasters and equipment vendors ensure interoperability among file-sharing products and systems through the MXF file format. The technology inside MXF Express makes it easier for people working in the film and TV industries to use one file format to store and transfer a wide variety of multimedia files.

Judges for the competition noted the innovative technology Snell & Wilcox used to build a toolkit that provides access to the multimedia stored in the standard MXF format, plus the way in which Snell & Wilcox has worked to build a common infrastructure for the entire industry by licensing its IPR freely. As a result, they acknowledged, the software has seen widespread adoption and lies at the heart of many other systems.

“We are very pleased and honored that the IEE judges found MXF Express to meet the high standards that this award represents: genuine technological novelty and significant technological advancement with significant associated technical risks and challenges for the IT sector,” said Snell & Wilcox Vice President of Technology, Bruce Devlin, who is a contributing author of the MXF File Format Specifications and an active contributor to the work of the Advanced Authoring Format (AAF) open standard and SMPTE.

Snell & Wilcox research engineers played a critical role in the definition and standardization of MXF. MFX Express was developed as part of this standardization work ― hundreds of hours over several years ― to facilitate creation of products that conform to the MXF standard. MXF Express is provided free of charge by Snell & Wilcox at www.snellwilcox.com, which hosts daily discussions of MXF issues and tool requirements.

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 Burbank, 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.

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