Conserving the world’s videotape treasures

Major content producers such as Walt Disney as well as other Hollywood and Bollywood studios still grapple with stacks of tape that have been collecting dust on their racks. Unless these firms decide to digitise their footage, many of the old classics will no longer be available for posterity.

Traditionally, it has taken so much time and labour to migrate video content from videotape to digital files that most production houses and other media organisations have yet to attempt it with any meaningful portion of their archives.

This is a shame. Estimates are that as much as five percent of the world's video content is irretrievably lost each year. Fortunately, a fast and comparatively easy-to-use videotape-migration technology has since come into the market.

The successful application of this technology could have far-reaching implications not only for improving the efficiency and revenue potential of media operations but, at the most fundamental level, for preserving global cultural heritage.

According to industry estimates, there are some six billion videotape cassettes in existence, a billion of which contain historic, rare, or otherwise valuable content. That is the equivalent of 7.5 exabytes of high-value data stored only on videocassette. In Europe, the estimate is that there are 300 million of these valuable cassettes.

Serviceable as it has been since its introduction in 1953, videotape is an imperfect storage medium. Its most basic flaw - as anyone who works with it knows - is that it is inherently unstable, deteriorating as a result of humidity, temperature, dirt, and simply time itself. Besides its vulnerability, videotape is also heavy and voluminous; and its opacity makes finding, retrieving, and using content stored on it time- and labor-intensive - even when that content has been meticulously indexed, labeled, and stored.

In the last few years, the advent of digital workflows and in particular of media asset management and content storage management (CSM) technologies has stemmed the accumulation of videotape.

Content ingested into a digitised workflow relying in most cases on a combination of video servers and Linear Tape-Open (LTO) tape libraries can be tagged with a comprehensive set of metadata, copied, transcoded, and transferred where needed when needed, and browsed and retrieved from workstations.

The workflow processes run automatically once they have been configured by the user - greatly reducing staff time in comparison to a videotape-based system. A good CSM system further protects content because it recognises potential deterioration of LTO tapes and moves clips as necessary.

These management technologies have been proven in many applications. Until recently, however, the formidable challenge of migrating the content stored in legacy videotape archives to digital files has been addressed mainly on an ad hoc level by content owners themselves.

Now, however, new integrated videotape-migration systems that can be semi-automated or fully automated in a robot are available. These systems dramatically speed-up the formerly cumbersome process and relieve the burden on staff time. They are becoming available in single-track format for smaller operations, and in multi-track format for larger ones.

For the largest applications, there are robots that accommodate cassettes in VHS, U-Matic, or Betacam formats large and small, feeding up to seven VTRs simultaneously. Their loading capacities of as many as 48 U-Matic or 60 Betacam or VHS cassettes enable automatic eight-hour shift migration and 24/7 operation.

In addition, there are new systems available that take the operation a step further - bringing newly digitised content into the managed storage environment.

These new systems feature signal analysis that automates much of the evaluation, monitoring, and documenting process so that problems are identified and corrected with little or no staff time. They also integrate complementary functions into a single solution.

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