MXF Express from Snell & Wilcox has won the 2005 IEE Innovation in Engineering Award for the Information Technology category. The award was presented in September at a reception in London.
IEE Innovation in Engineering awards recognize engineering projects and products that demonstrate the application of innovative design, technology, techniques and processes. Among the criteria considered 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.
Bruce Devlin, Snell & Wilcox Vice President of Technology, 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.
MXF Express is provided free of charge by Snell & Wilcox at www.snellwilcox.com, which hosts daily discussions of MXF issues and tool requirements.
