to perform a 600.000 DigiBeta cassette digitization service to national broadcater ORF
The NOA solution offered key benefits for the ORF initiative, with low-level analysis of transfer QC (RF and ISR), MXF analysis fully integrated with the central workflow engine, and access via API to the jobDB database being among the most important.
“NOA offered the best solution to Atos for this project with our customer ORF.
The combined qualities of robustness, performance, exceptional quality control, and comprehensive integration potential add up to a platform that we can be confident with for the duration of a major cultural and commercial project.”
Thomas Eibl, Client Executive, Atos IT Solutions and Services GmbH
Christoph Bauer, System Manager of the DIMI project, and
Jean-Christophe Kummer, CEO NOA
Most of the 600.000 IMX and Digibeta tapes are the result of a primary digitization, meaning that initially UMatic, 2”, 1” and Betacam tapes had already been transferred to these formats. ORF faced the situation of several copies in the archive – in some cases up to three: a 2” Quadruplex, a Betacam copy, and a Digibeta copy of the same content.
Besides the fact that all of these historical archives had been already migrated to DigiBeta and IMX, they also took up a huge amount of space in the range of several thousands of square meters in different deposits, which all needed to be rented, cooled, cleaned and maintained.
Account Manager, ATOS/ORF
“The scalability is an advantage which we didn’t find in other products. We can tell in each moment where each tape is currently located.”
During the rollout of the project, it became clear that indeed tapes - and in fact all generations of the same content - would be disposed of after successful intake to the ESYS Storage (Essence Storage system of ORF based on different replicated (3) and dislocated (3) storage technologies). This led to the setup of five quality gates:
The Workflow Control system of jobDB ensured that no single item/carrier or segment would get lost from its position and from its file location. Processing around 30 tasks for around 200-400 carriers per day (100-200 hours per day) led to a total of 6000 tasks that were processed per day - partly by users and partly by systems. Data security via MD5 checksum comparisons on successful uploads was as important as a complete statistical overview of achievements per day.
The Transfer Control procedure from NOA FrameLector revealed immediately issues that might have been caused by the interaction between tape and head. As a matter of fact - it must not be allowed to introduce a new error through preservation. NOA systems have been known for decades to focus on exactly this procedure: Be it azimuth control, DAT BLER logging, or ISR & RF logging from VTRs: If the machine is faulty, if the tape or the head is not well cleaned - the system will tell you and ask you for measures. At ATOS, based on transfer quality, up to 3 transfers are then made, to be sure that the best transfer is taken.
As all files need to be delivered to a dedicated MXF wrapper, ORF was very sensitive about taking care of wrapper consistency. An independent wrapper consistency tool has been integrated via NOA DBScripter, which would reveal errors from wrongly written MXF files.
As we have here a situation of a secondary migration, ORF wanted to know - besides the fact whether the best transfer has been tried - whether previous migrations have led to artifacts.
Back then in the late 80s, no intelligent software-driven QC was applied, so you could face DigiBeta or IMX tapes that do NOT have any transfer problems, but a jammed video signal, or smeared heads coming from not well maintained legacy VTR machines in the 80s/90s.
Different tools on the market exist - here a tool from the Austrian University Joanneum has been chosen to be integrated via NOA CLIP to the NOA jobDB solution. Finally, it turned out that such a minor amount of tapes really answered the initial user story, most of the checks were concentrating on lip sync, correct in and out markers, unexpected content, and of course also jammed video signals.
User Checks were finally performed by users from ORF on a sample basis to make sure that what was considered "OK" from ATOS was also considered "OK" from ORF. Here a certain minimum percentage was set, which also regulated the throughput.
The playtime of a machine is influenced by different factors, such as the type of tape (abrasive versus sticky), the degree of tape cleaning, and the consequent VTR cleaning during maintenance procedures. Therefore, the SONY target time for the upper drum head of a playback machine is "recommended" to be around 5000 hours in case of proactive maintenance before replacement.
SONY has set this number with the goal of playout stability in mind: A player that goes on air must not produce a faulty video signal. Needless to say, this was a very profitable source of income from the replacement of spare parts.
With several racks being sent back and forth between the preservation center and the ORF, a complete tracking system was set up to know where exactly each carrier currently was.
NOA's Carrier Positioning System powerd by jobDB Archive Workflow Management system checked tapes to lots, lots to racks, and racks to locations even if they were moving. This created not only a thorough handling of items along the process, but also confidence and true knowledge of the actual position of a video tape in case of the need for a fast broadcast access.
Besides the industrial shape of NOA products, which did not need to be built on purpose but just configured to the needs for the processes, and the possibility to be able to rely on hundreds of years of experience of NOA engineers, it was a win-win for both sides.
The process optimization especially led to a huge internal financial success for ATOS, who could save millions of euros and turn its preservation factory into a very successful cost center.
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