AV Digitizing and archiving specialists NOA are proud to announce delivery of their first AV preservation project in the United Arab Emirates at Sharjah Media Corporation (SMC; since then renamed to "Sharja Broadcasting Authority", SBA). Delivery of NOA’s unique Archive Asset Management (AAM) system mediARC™ has been completed in May 2017 after only four months of planning.
The facility, which is able to operate at 100% output starting from day one, will be used to digitize and manage SMC’s entire legacy video archive consisting of 140,000 hours of Betacam, DigiBeta, U-matic, One Inch, and MiniDV tapes to SMC’s enterprise datacentre.
Efficiently digitizing archive media is a number one priority for many institutions, including broadcasters and media library agencies around the world. Transfers are a time consuming and resource hungry task, and tape machines are becoming obsolete due to diminishing availability of key components such as video heads and drums. Careful assessment of these challenges has led SMC to put their trust in NOA technology.
The move to a dedicated AAM which handles 140,000 hours of digitized legacy content free from any vendor lock and in an OAIS based repository is a clear tendency we can see with broadcasters who take the ‘long-term’ really seriously. Among other advantages, the mathematically lossless FFV1 codec in use at SMC gives us the possibility to store the source code of the replayer together with the associated essence. Integration in business processes with an existing Production Asset Management (PAM) system can be performantly realized. I am happy that SMC decided to follow our recommendations based on our 18 years of archive management experience.
says Jean-Christophe Kummer, Managing Partner of NOA.
At the front end of the operation, sixteen NOA FrameLector™ channels ingest media directly from tape and simultaneously monitor ISR events and RF levels to reliably detect transfer errors caused by faulty head-tape interaction, enabling a clear differentiation between “error-on-tape” and “error-during-transfer”. This information subsequently allows for pinpoint error correction (e.g. cleaning of tape and/or replaying machine) and is also available for automatization within the workflow, to trigger or skip individual steps according to predefined error thresholds.
Integration of QC processes and metadata edit validation into production workflows is achieved with NOA’s mediARC™ built-in workflow engine, which further enhances SMC’s operation by improving efficiencies and greatly reducing the time taken for reliable digitization.
Delivering an independent archival format free from any vendor lock has been at the core of NOA’s design philosophy. To ensure SMC is building a future proof digital archive, NOA’s MediaButler™ is used to encode the final archival file in an open source FFV1 codec. Since archival storage is only as good as information retrieval, NOA’s mediARC™ Asset Archive Management system delivers comprehensive media content description with its advanced metadata tools.
In a considerably short time frame, NOA delivered a complete turnkey operation for SMC and provided an entire digitization and archiving facility. As well as implementing software installation, testing, commissioning and training, NOA also delivered and installed all the servers and workstations required to give SMC a highly efficient operation.
Excited by this installation, NOA will be actively engaging with other regional institutions who are expected to have similar digitization and archiving needs of legacy material just like SMC.
