Canberra, May 2011 – Australia’s leading audiovisual digitisation agency, DAMsmart, has been appointed by PRIME Media to digitise and manage their vast archives held by the network that are currently being stored at Canberra, Orange, Newcastle and Wollongong locations.
 
Since the commencement of television in this country, the Prime network has been capturing the rich history of regional Australia. Prime’s archives are full of diverse and valuable footage that represents a cultural narrative of country Australia and provides a window back in time.
 
In an effort to maintain and preserve the footage, Prime has commissioned a project to ensure the archives are secure for future generations. Gerry Smith, Prime’s CTO said “Prime has been entrenched in country Australia for many years, sharing the good times and the bad with many regional communities. We have great audiovisual archives, which contain some rare and unseen footage of major events that have taken place throughout regional Australia.  We want to make this footage available in a contemporary format, while at the same time maintaining the integrity of the culturally significant collection. Smith went on to say, “to maintain the archives they need to be digitised and stored somewhere safe. We contacted DAMsmart as I knew they have been appointed to a several specialist audiovisual digitisation projects recently both in the preservation and commercial spaces. After speaking to them it was obvious they had the skills, experience and technology to digitise and manage all of our archives. They delivered an end-to-end solution that will preserve the integrity of the archive as well making it accessible across the network”
 
Joe Kelly, DAMsmart’s Media and Preservation Manager “We provided Prime with a total archive solution, from logistics to digitisation and a hosted access service. We are digitising several thousand hours of footage that is currently maintained on various videotape formats such as U-matic, Betacam and DVCPro as well as film including 16 and 35mm before making it accessible to Prime stations through our Hosted Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform. Once in a digital format the archive will reside on DAMsmart’s hosted DAM platform that allows access through a secure web client and integrates seamlessly with Prime’s internal workflows.” Not only are DAMsmart managing the technology and access component of the project, DAMsmart is logistically managing the physical requirements of the job, relocating the media from the regional network locations back to Mitchell.
 
Once all the network archives are digitised, DAMsmart will deliver the digital archive to Prime on LTO media. Using a secure web client, Prime will be able to view the footage and request shots. DAMsmart will then deliver the requested files in a production quality format via FTP or external hard drive to the editing team. Over time Prime will also build on the descriptive metadata that already exists, increasing the ability to search the collection with more meaningful and robust results.
 
Ron Anderson, Managing Director at DAMsmart, said, “It’s great to see private enterprise playing a big role in saving Australia’s cultural heritage and we are really excited to be given an opportunity to be part of it. It is going to be a challenging project for us that will touch all divisions of the business in a true end-to-end archive preservation and management solution.”   
 
The digitisation project is underway, and DAMsmart has been contracted to provide Hosted DAM services until 2018.