Snell & Wilcox MXF Developer Tools and Player win IABM Peter Wayne Award

Snell & Wilcox 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 at a reception in Amsterdam during IBC 2004.
"We are honoured 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, 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.
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