Hello guys, this is an example of digitizing video showcases RAI (Italy)
Quote:
Rai Archives and IT
A huge archive and information technologies to transform it into a working tool, into a warehouse to handle, into a familiar territory and where to operate is just a click away. Applying IT techniques in Rai Archives management is a complex goal, facing multidiscipline problems and we are undertaking them in the framework of a multiyear business plan of Rai.
This is an operation of vital importance, which invests Rai in its profile as a public service (keep and preserve a memory that is intertwined with the history of the Country), both in terms of the mode of production (archives as a resource for the television product), and in terms of putting a value on the on-line and off-line material.
Rai audiovisual archive includes more than 500,000 hours of recorded video on various types of media, broadcasted from 1954 until today, and as many hours of audio on the radio. The problems of preservation and access to content are related to the risk of decay and obsolescence of media formats and devices for recording and to the difficulty of cataloguing vast and varied assets.
The Research Centre collaborates with the Department of Archives in the study and implementation of systems that allow to optimise the process of building the Multimedia Catalogue, which now contains more than 1.3 million hours of audiovisual content (TV and radio) documented and viewable in low quality from any company computer client. The need to reduce costs while maintaining the flow of current documentation (new production and recovery of the historical archive for a total of about 100,000 hours per year) requires that process automation is applied wherever possible. In this view, ANTS is designed to help archivists in the news documentation process (see "Digitisation of News Archives for IT-based Production"), ANTS is used for the documentation of radio programmes, where metadata are automatically extracted from the acquired audio signals, and then validated and enriched by the annotators. Also, it will be soon extended to the television domain. ANTS is now integrated with Hyper Media News (HMN), an automatic system for multimodal news aggregation, indexing, recommendation and management, thus providing an integrated platform for assisting journalists in the news production, editing and distribution process.
Ditene system and Betacam material
Master Archives contains more than 500,000 Betacam and IMX master tapes, which constitute the bulk of the TV assets of Rai. With the transition to IT-based production, starting from the new newsroom, this content will be digitised. For this purpose, the Research Centre in conjunction with the Rai Archive Department have developed the DITENE system. It allows to digitize high-quality material on Betacam via a tape handling robot. The system includes the management of workflow and various tools to check the copy quality, including a module for monitoring the parameters of the video player. The system, installed at the Rai Production Centre in Turin, has started its operation in the digitisation of journalistic material of the Centre and of TG2 news department, in view of the forthcoming implementation of the new IT-based newsroom. Then, the system, appropriately upgraded, can be adopted
I removed the spammy-looking Google links, and directly linked to the content -- (1) a Youtube video and (2) a PDF. Additionally, I copied the one-page PDF text into a quote box. I had to access the site from a Mac, just to verify it was safe content.
I'm not sure I quite understand what's going on the the video (Italian is one language I don't yet speak), but the text makes for interesting reading.
