Snell & Wilcox and TransMedia Dynamics announce partnership

Snell & Wilcox and TransMedia Dynamics (TMD) have announced a new partnership, which combines two separate products to create a powerful and standards-compliant ingest and management solution for digital content.
Snell & Wilcox Ingest Station is being coupled with TMD's Mediaflex management system to provide broadcasters and media-centric companies with the ability not just to ingest and digitise media in a variety of formats, but to manage both the process and the resulting files as part of a wider digital workflow.
An important aspect of the integration is its support for and use of the emerging MXF file and metadata format, which much of the industry is in the process of adopting for exchange of digital media.
This MXF support was a factor in the decision of two of the UK's leading broadcasters, the BBC and Channel 4, to select the Ingest Station/Mediaflex integration for their very different requirements.
The BBC has chosen the Ingest Station/Mediaflex integration as part of pilot deployment within One Vision, its pioneering technology project designed to implement a tapeless environment which will streamline production, encourage collaborative working, and allow flexible delivery of content across a variety of delivery channels. The BBC One Vision design incorporates a central repository, codenamed Atlas, within which the Ingest Station/Mediaflex integration will provide ingest, cataloguing, and playout capabilities.
Channel 4 will use the Ingest Station/Mediaflex integration to secure the future of their archive, much of which is currently on 1-inch. videotape. The content on these tapes will be ingested, digitised, and stored onto LTO data tapes in MXF format, with metadata being recorded in the MXF file wrapper. The process will be largely automated with minimal operator intervention. The aim is to secure Channel 4's programme heritage, while allowing future and as yet unspecified exploitation of the programme material.
At NAB2004 Snell & Wilcox released a free set of software developer tools,
MXF Express, designed to help broadcasters and equipment vendors ensure interoperability among file-sharing products and systems. It also released
MXF Desktop, a free software-based MXF file player that will bring MXF compatibility to any Windows PC desktop.
(KmcA)