Snell & Wilcox recently announced that it plans to demonstrate its Comet open standards ingest system at NAB2004. Taking advantage of the recent standardization of MXF and SMPTE RP-210 as well as the latest AAF protocol, Comet is expected to improve interoperability among the products from many vendors.
Comet was developed for broadcasters and post production facilities, and it incorporates metadata technologies in conjunction with open standards-based storage and asset management systems.
Also debuting at NAB2004 from Snell & Wilcox will be the CPP1000 Prefix-HD, a multistandard HD compression preprocessor that the company says improves image quality and reduces the bandwidth needed for broadcasters and cable distribution. By reducing noise-related artifacts in the image, the CPP1000 can save 3 Mbps of bandwidth at a relatively low processing setting.
The same technology lets the CPP1000 reduce film grain in film-to-HD transfers. Snell & Wilcox estimates that selecting a more aggressive setting on the CPP1000 Prefix-HD can save as much as 5 Mbps of digital bandwidth.
