Possibilities and difficulties when different projects must interact within a system developed for archiving and digitization
In 2006, Swedish Broadcasting Resources SRF was appointed as the prime contractor for a large preservation work of analogue video from the Swedish Television SVT, the Swedish National Sound and Video archive SLBA and the Educational Radio UR. A total of 140.000 hours needed to be migrated into videofiles during a three year´s period and stocked within SRF´s storage together with a delivery towards the clients in differently requested formats.
It was decided to set up a specific migration factory in Ange, a small town in the middle of Sweden near Sundsvallá 400 km away of Stockholm - on the one hand to emphasize the employment situation in a less developed rural structure and on the other hand to create a facility for a specific task, which has not yet been existing within the premises of any of the clients.
By then the existing NOA Mediarc archival system for digitized material from the sound archives has been used since several years for the digitization, quality control, cataloguing, archiving and the exploitation of various audio formats.
The architecture of the Mediarc system has driven the decision within SRF to extend the Mediarc "audio" archive with video ingest capabilities, video workflow specialities and video file delivery, as it has been already well established as central data - workflow and essence repository.
The paper will therefore give an overview about the achieved developments which enabled the following system functionality within the Mediarc system at SRF,
- decentralised file ingest
- video quality control
- search and retrieval over WAN
- delivery of videosegments towards the WAN in HiRes
- flexible viewing modules for the unified presentation of quality information of video and audio ingest modules
- cached local file ingest with asynchronous 3TB-6TB per day replication towards one central repository with MD5 checksums
- retranscoding capabilities with open interfaces
- central data management of essence files
- central data management of metadata information
- dedicated access layers for different user planes.
It will also give an overview about the challenge, when dealing with four stakeholders with defined targets, and where problems do arise, when extending a fully running audioworkflow system by video components running on the same IT infrastructure within definite timelines.