Based in Budapest, the National Audiovisual Archive of Hungary is responsible for safeguarding the audiovisual heritage of the country’s public broadcasting service. After successfully digitizing large parts of its audio holdings using NOA technology in recent years, the institution turned to NOA once again - this time to tackle the systematic transfer of its video archive.
Following a European public tender awarded in Q4 2025, NOA, together with its long-standing Hungarian integration partner Broadmax, delivered a complete video ingest factory tailored to the archive's required digitization throughput. The system was configured with three ingest stations, enabling the parallel digitization of twelve video inputs, while retaining the flexibility to scale to larger or smaller capacities as project requirements evolve. Installed and commissioned in January 2026, the solution was followed by comprehensive operator training and has been running in full production ever since.
The deployment includes NOA FrameLector for quality-controlled video ingest across twelve simultaneous SDI streams, QualityChecker for downstream picture- and sound-quality verification, BarcodeStation for tape identification and logistics management, and UniversalDialoger to support carrier preparation steps such as creation of optical scans as well as logging of baking and other condition-handling tasks. The entire process is orchestrated by NOA jobDB, which already runs the institution’s audio digitization lines - meaning the new video workflow plugs into the same workflow- and production-management knowledge the team has been using successfully for years.
We needed a system that covers every step of the preservation workflow and that integrates cleanly into our existing IT environment - the file-based interfacing was something our IT team specifically appreciated. The workflow had to cover the full chain, including logistics to and from the archive, and it had to deliver reliable, high-quality transfers. NOA’s solution does exactly that.
said László Sárkány, Technical Project Manager at the National Audiovisual Archive of Hungary.
Particular emphasis was placed on transfer-error detection and process stability. FrameLector continuously monitors ISR events and analyses the RF signal coming directly from each VTR’s video head, giving operators an immediate, unambiguous indicator of tape or machine condition. Combined with the QualityChecker stations further down the workflow, this enables a strict separation between transfer and quality control - a labor-division principle that has proven essential for high-throughput migration projects across NOA’s reference base.
A further point that weighed heavily in the customer’s decision was integration. The new video ingest factory talks to the institution’s surrounding IT environment via clean, file-based interfaces - a deliberate choice that minimizes coupling and keeps the system maintainable for the customer’s own IT department over the long term.
Independently of this project, NOA also extended the existing audio digitization system with additional external CD ingest drives and is providing technical support for both the legacy audio platform and the newly deployed video factory, ensuring continuity of operations through the years to come.
It is a real pleasure to support a long-standing client - one we have been working with on their audio archive for many years now - also on the video side. We are looking forward to helping make this part of the national broadcaster’s archive accessible for future generations.
said Manuel Corn, VP Global Sales & Marketing at NOA.
