SYDNEY, 19 September 2008 – Digital media migration specialists DAMsmart today announced details of their recent project migrating and archiving original master tapes for the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS).

DAMsmart Media Migration Manager Joe Kelly explained, “The AIS had what we call a ‘Typical DAMsmart! project’ consisting of old stock footage that needed to be digitally migrated and archived so that it could be viewed by a wide audience and kept safely without degrading for future generations. To get the full scope of the project we sat down with the AIS team and did a complete log of all their one inch videotape masters that they needed migrating, some dating back to 1984.”

Much of the AIS’ corporate history was held on these inaccessible masters in addition to public awareness and community service campaigns for physical activity and Women in Sport campaigns.

Kelly continued, “We proposed a very straightforward DAMsmart! digital media migration process at our Canberra facility and once approved, the entire job was seamless. The final deliverables consisted of digital copies of all original masters at 50Mb/s MPEG2 in MXF for direct import into a Final Cut Pro editing environment. We also simultaneously created WM9 streaming copies as well.”

With the AIS project complete in record time Kelly commented on the growing success of the DAMsmart! digital media migration process, “We are now undertaking projects across many industries including the media, government, corporate and broadcast markets. DAMsmart’s success lies in the fact that we are using the very latest automated technology to digitise footage. Traditionally, digitising film or video footage has meant a well-trained operator using one of the latest editing systems and completing the entire process manually. This method often takes two hours to digitise one hour of footage, is extremely expensive and thus not very practical. Using DAMsmart! the entire process is automated and scalable (with multiple inputs and feeds) significantly reducing the amount of time needed and cost involved. The automated process covers the sophisticated analysis of video and audio signals, compression, dropouts and constant monitoring and testing in real time. All of this can be done by DAMsmart or an in-house tape operator, it’s that easy and I am delighted to say that more and more clients are adopting DAMsmart! as a result.” DAMsmart Digitally Migrates and Archives Masters for Australian Institute of Sport