1998: IBC Awards - Video R&D Engineer of the Year (jointly with Mike Knee, Snell & Wilcox)

Nick Wells.

The judges found it impossible to split two entries which were for contributions to the same field of activity. Nick Wells and Mike Knee's work were both concerned with ways to prevent quality loss caused by the cascading of compression processing.

It was Nick Wells who launched the ATLANTIC project - A European collaboration which developed ways of switching and mixing low bit-rate MPEG video and audio signals without degradation from cascaded decoding. Knee was also involved with that project for which he specified and defined the architecture of the award-winning MBA100 MPEG Video Analyser and the MPE2000 high-end MPEG-2 encoder.

Subsequently, he led Snell and Wilcox's development of Mole as a way of passing the Information Bus through standard studio equipment. The judges described the combined efforts of the two teams involved as "truly revolutionary. Five years ago no one would have believed we could have made copies of such quality in MPEG."