SMPTE Progress Medal Award goes to Roderick Snell

Roderick Snell, founder and research director at Snell &
Wilcox, has been selected as the 2006 SMPTE Progress Medal Award recipient. The SMPTE Progress Medal Award honors an individual who has
made outstanding technical contributions to the progress of engineering phases
of the motion picture and/or television industries.

The award recognizes an
invention or research and development that resulted in a significant advance in
television technology. Snell
will receive the SMPTE Progress Medal Award from SMPTE President Edward P.
Hobson at the society’s Honors and Awards Ceremony and Reception during the
Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition in Hollywood, Calif.,
from Oct. 18-21.

Roderick Snell co-founded Snell & Wilcox in 1973 as a
consultancy and began, in the early 1980s, developing cost-effective television
standards-conversion for the emerging world broadcast market. Since founding
the company, he has seen it grow to become a
specialist in the art of processing the moving image. Today the company designs
and builds advanced systems for video playout, and live production switching.
The company of internationally recruited engineers has won multiple Emmy awards
for advanced processing technologies.

In 2001 Snell was presented with the esteemed John Tucker International
Award for Excellence at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC), and in
2002 he delivered the Royal Television Society’s prestigious Shoenberg Lecture
at BAFTA in commemoration of Sir Isaac Shoenberg, the “father of high
definition television.”

In addition to founding Snell & Wilcox, Snell has
co-founded Snelflight. Snelflight is a company that designs and manufactures
the tiny “Hoverfly” indoor model helicopter whose unique technology
mimics that of larger outdoor models.

Snell is also visiting professor at the Business
School of the University
of Kingston, Surrey; a fellow of the
Royal Television Society; a governor of the Society of Motion Picture &
Television Engineers (SMPTE); and a participant in a number of U.K. and
European industry initiatives. The latter includes membership on the executive
team of
the IEE’s Multimedia Communications Group and the EU’s Information Society
Technologies Advisory Group.