CANBERRA, September 2010 – Canberra based media migration business, DAMsmart, has commenced a significant project to digitise and preserve the entire recorded video history of the Australian Parliament. DAMsmart is dedicated to the preservation of audiovisual collections and the business has developed a complex adaptive system to safely and accurately digitise large media collections. The project will be completed using DAMsmart’s advanced automated videotape handling systems and analysis and encoding systems.
DAMsmart’s Media Migration Manager, Joe Kelly says “We have been developing our key technology partnerships and testing new workflows over the past few years.
For this project DAMsmart have partnered with Fujitsu Australia and Dalet Australia to deliver an open media asset management solution, and the digitisation and preservation of 55,000 hours of broadcast videotape generated by 22 years of recordings. When completed by mid 2011, this will be one of the largest outsourced video digitisation projects ever undertaken.
The Parliament Project
The Australian Parliament project has been commissioned by the Department of Parliamentary Services (DPS), who provide broadcasting services to the Australian Parliament. Ever since the House of Representatives and the Senate first sat in new Parliament House in 1988, parliamentary proceedings have been recorded on various videotape formats, including D2, Betacam SX and S-VHS.
DPS required an organisation to provide a cost effective solution for the digitisation of the archive. Joe Kelly said, “When DPS were looking for a solution to meet their requirements for completion by mid-2011, we saw a great opportunity to utilise our expertise in automated media migration.
For the DPS project DAMsmart is providing video mass digitisation services using DAMsmart’s open adaptive system. The digitisation process will use two different forms of technology - a fully automated robotic solution to process Betacam SX tapes, and multiple streams of semi-automated SAMMA (System for Automated Migration of Media Archives) Solo systems to process the D2 and S-VHS.
In order to complete the project by mid-2011, DAMsmart will digitize approximately 40,000 hours of Betacam SX using a Betacam robot and seven streams of video digitization, run on 24/7 basis. The D2 and S-VHS collections are being migrated in a semi-automated process using four migration streams controlled by SAMMA Solo migration systems. Each VTR is configured to its own migration channel, which provides all the VTR control, video analysis and correction, quality control, metadata extraction and file encoding functions for that stream.
As much as 900 hours of Betacam SX and 350 hours of D2/S-VHS will need to be migrated each week until project completion. Each of the video streams being processed by SAMMA is monitored by specialised software that analyses every frame of video and audio. Key parameters including video input level, audio levels, black level, VTR servo lock and RF level are analysed 25 times per second, and logged into continuous metadata reports. If any single tape exhibits a condition that triggers a quality control threshold, SAMMA will report a failure for the migration of that particular tape and flag it for further inspection.
For each videotape in the DPS project, two files will be created - a DV25 MXF file and an XML file containing data generated during the digitisation process that can be used for quality assurance. All files created as part of the digitisation process will be archived to LTO4 data tapes under Xendata video archive management software. Once LTO tapes are finalized in open TAR format at DAMsmart, they are sent to DPS for ingest into the Dalet Enterprise media asset management system.
Dalet Enterprise will underpin all forms of future access to the digitsed video archive. Access to parliamentary proceedings is required by a wide range of organizations and individuals in the community including federal, state and local government, universities, public and private companies, professional bodies, schools, libraries, not for profit groups and the media.
Risks to Audiovisual Archives
As analogue recording and replay systems become obsolete or near-obsolete, analogue recording mediums, especially videotape and audiotape, become difficult or impossible to recover, due mostly to chemical decomposition of the tapes themselves. The magnitude of magnetic tape deterioration is only now being fully understood, and organizations with a responsibility to collect and preserve audiovisual collections are in need of productive, cost effective solutions. Any organisation that has a physical media archive or library must undergo a digital migration process if the collection requires preservation and future access. The twin threats of technology obsolescence and media degradation are placing media archives at real and immediate risk of permanent loss.
Migration of valuable content to the most appropriate digital file format is an absolute necessity to guarantee material longevity and access. DAMsmart’s media migration platform provides replay capabilities for a wide range of broadcast and professional image and sound formats including long obsolete technologies. The flexible architecture of DAMsmart’s media encoding platforms also gives customers a large range of options when it comes to file formats, including mathematically lossless JPEG2000, Uncompressed, all profiles of MPEG2 and MPEG4 and more. Each migration stream can produce a combination of up to 4 different file formats per stream in real time.
Andrew Martin, Digital Media Specialist, DAMsmart, said “As organisations around the world increasingly struggle to preserve their media archives, DAMsmart is well positioned to offer real solutions that work. We have completed many projects in the past 2 years and we are now able to assist any business, large or small, to preserve and manage their valuable media collections. DAMsmart can develop a bespoke solution for any media archiving requirement, no matter what systems customers are currently using, or what video codecs or file formats they require”
DAMsmart creates useable digital archives from inaccessible and expensive physical media collections to deliver safe and secure collections that no longer rely on expensive, proprietary media replay systems. As digital files are created from the media migration process, the files are written to LTO4 data cartridges in an open, non-proprietary archive format. The LTO4 collection underpins the archiving of preservation files, and two copies of all LTO4 cartridges are produced as part of DAMsmart’s standard process. This forms a fully redundant file copy of the entire media archive that customers can store offsite for disaster recovery purposes.
Once the media migration process has been completed, DAMsmart customers then have two options. They can either have the LTO4 collection returned to their facilities for easy ingest into their existing DAM or MAM systems, or they can elect to implement a fully hosted archiving and access solution from DAMsmart.
By using the DAMsmart migration process, and taking advantage of DAMsmart hosting, organisations can quickly and efficiently have access to their entire collection via a web browser, and make informed selection and content based decisions from the desktop. The DAMsmart hosting service provides full search and browse capabilities on standard web browsers and supports full logging and cataloguing of content from the desktop. This is much more cost efficient than manually wading through large collections of tapes to chose what to keep.
Customers who elect to take the digitised collections back in house are also finding the openness of the DAMsmart complex adaptive system attractive. Files can be integrated into most common broadcast and library asset management systems, or they can be restored to disk in a non-proprietary fashion using any Linux or Unix system and basic command line functions. Files created by this DAMsmart process do not lock customers into expensive, proprietary archive management systems.
DAMsmart Media Migration Manager, Joe Kelly, said “Our hosted and managed services are suitable for media collections of all sizes. Organisations can have all the workflow and productivity benefits of enterprise digital asset management without the requirement to implement and support expensive and complex digital media archiving and distribution infrastructure. We’ve already done that for you!”.
Additionally, DAMsmart hosting customers can generate and manage work orders for file transcoding, electronic delivery and many other services like DVD creation or output to hard drive. Once content is accessible on the desktop, users can catalogue, index, add valuable metadata to assist in keyword searches, shotlist, repurpose and output content in different forms for virtually any purpose, from broadcast to web streaming and everything in between.