Our presence at CABSAT 2018 coincides with some important large-scale projects in the region that will be completed this year. We’ll be showing our cutting-edge and easy-to-use archiving innovations.
says Christophe Kummer, Managing Partner of NOA
Many institutions, including broadcasters and media library agencies have come to realize transferring archive media can be a time consuming and resource hungry task. Tape machines capable of playing legacy tape formats are becoming obsolete as manufacturers decommission their production lines and stop providing spares. Replacement heads and parts are difficult to come by and the race is on to transfer media to secure archives before replaying of tapes becomes impossible.
The massive volume of tape material and film stored is becoming apparent as institutions comprehend the task ahead, especially when they consider their storage vaults. However, transferring from tape is only half the story as many assets were recorded before proper metadata annotation was introduced and in many cases the existing information describing archived content is disjointed and minimal at best.
In response to these needs and in collaboration with broadcasters, NOA has developed tools to automate and simplify the process of digitization, storage and retrieval of media content as well as appropriate metadata annotation and management. Sustainable long term preservation of media content is guaranteed and continuous checks for transfer integrity during digitization ensure that only highest possible quality of audio and video content is going into the archive.
The mediARC™ system includes the three fundamental areas of an archive project; metadata (description of the media content), media storage and conversion, and workflows (controlling, creating and processing information).
Open Archival Information System (OASIS), a framework designed to future proof archives, is at the core of NOA’s database design. Part of its application is the use of open source resources, especially concerning video encoding, to ensure that archival content remains accessible for decades to come; high performance open source video codec FFV1 provides mathematically lossless intra-frame compression with competitive bit rates while ensuring longevity of archival content.
Archive storage is only as good as information retrieval and there is no point in storing anything if we cannot recover it later. Metadata is the key to asset retrieval and NOA has gone to great lengths to make our database work with many different data types and metadata standards.
says Christophe Kummer, Managing Partner of NOA
Integration of QC processes and metadata edit validation into production workflows is another core feature. Both mediARC™ and jobDB™ provide a highly flexible workflow engine which is used for all basic input/output tasks around the archive, including ingestion and exporting. Therein, workflows can be adjusted manually to create individual sets of specialized workflows.
NOA’s systems easily scale to meet the needs of broadcasters as their libraries and archives expand, either in your own datacentre or cloud.
To date, more than 7,000 users worldwide successfully digitized and archived over 3.5 million hours of legacy video and audio material using NOA technology, which is installed in more than thirty international institutions including Austria’s ORF, Sweden Radio (SRF), Yleisradio Finland (YLS) and Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroep (VRT) to name but a few.