significance just now, as one of “the steps necessary to ensure … permanent accessibility”. Our project goal is the following: make access copies into digital format that in some cases are in no way a replacement for the original – but they take pressure off the original, allowing it to be kept untouched in cold, dry conditions with very limited use of masters. Our archive copies are as close as technically possible to the originals and can be used within this digital production and logging solution for the creation of ‘new masters’. Also, the digitization scope here is to produce a ‘digital intermediate’ before finally producing a new digital master. This in order to use digital technology for restoration – because there are many defects that can be removed digitally in ways that could not be attempted by analog processing. DATA SELECTION CONSIDERATION In large scale projects, like this one, digitization strategy is the key. Selection: which material goes first? There is a lot of information about selection. Most managed collections already have considerable “Preservation is the totality of the steps necessary to ensure the permanent accessibility – forever – of an audiovisual document with the maximum integrity.” - Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Association (CCAAA) This document proposes a commercial and technological strategy in digitizing, logging, and archiving videotapes for the purpose of Digital Preservation. 01 | INTRODUCTION DIGITIZATION OVERVIEW Many activities contribute to “permanent accessibility – forever.” Just now, in the years of the 21st century, we are at a stage where much audiovisual material from the 20th century is in analog form – and most of the options for trying to obtain “permanent accessibility – forever” are digital options. So digitization is of huge Digital Preservation A GUIDE TO VIDEOTAPES DIGITIZATION, LOGGING, & ARCHIVE by Paolo Birra CTO, MediaPower
Transcript
significance just now, as one of “the steps necessary to ensure … permanent accessibility”.
Our project goal is the following: make access copies into digital format that in some cases are in no way a replacement for the original – but they take pressure off the original, allowing it to be kept untouched in cold, dry conditions with very limited use of masters.
Our archive copies are as close as technically possible to the originals and can be used within this digital production and logging solution for the creation of ‘new masters’.
Also, the digitization scope here is to produce a ‘digital intermediate’ before finally producing a new digital master. This in order to use digital technology for restoration – because there are many defects that can be removed digitally in ways that could not be attempted by analog processing.
DATA SELECTION CONSIDERATION
In large scale projects, like this one, digitization strategy is the key. Selection: which material goes first? There is a lot of information about selection. Most managed collections already have considerable
“Preservation is the totality of the steps necessary to ensure the permanent accessibility – forever – of an audiovisual document with the maximum integrity.” - Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Association (CCAAA)
This document proposes a commercial and technological strategy in digitizing, logging, and archiving videotapes for the purpose of Digital Preservation.
01 | INTRODUCTION
DIGITIZATION OVERVIEW
Many activities contribute to “permanent accessibility – forever.” Just now, in the years of the 21st century, we are at a stage where much audiovisual material from the 20th century is in analog form – and most of the options for trying to obtain “permanent accessibility – forever” are digital options. So digitization is of huge
Digital PreservationA GUIDE TO VIDEOTAPES
DIGITIZATION, LOGGING, & ARCHIVE
by Paolo BirraCTO, MediaPower
experience of selection, including:
• Selection of the material coming into the collection• Review of material at regular intervals, to decide about further retention
For a digitization and preservation process, the issue of selection begins with setting priorities. Generally, these are the following major factors to consider:
• Value of the material• Obsolescence of the format• Condition and life expectancy
For this specific project, we do expect that the Customer has already made a map of the collection – so these factors have already been assessed, and the collection has been divided into broad categories. The work that remains is to make another sort of map: a preservation plan covering the entire time necessary to deal with all your preservation needs. This can range from a 6-month plan to transfer a small amount of material from videotape to files, to a 10-year plan for the storage and metadata logging of an entire collection.
A preservation strategy is not a full preservation plan. For the strategy, the issue is sequence and timescale. All the elements in the preservation map that need attention are put in a priority sequence – and time information is added according to how long you want the work to last, or how long the funding lasts, or how long the material itself will last.
02 | USING NEW TECHNOLOGY
OPERATIONAL AREA DIVIDERS (OAD)
The purpose of the following chapter is to categorize the sub-elements (OAD = Operational Area Dividers) of the processing in four areas, as shown below:
• DIGANN: the digitization of analog media or non-native-file media
• CLEAV: clean-up of degraded audio and video signals
• MIRP: metadata ingestion, retrieval, and publication (MediaPower Arkki EVO Digital Asset Manager)
• DISAM: all of the above are sitting on a managed digital storage and asset managent platform. (this is the combination of the following elements: the local storage, the remote hybrid cloud storage, Arkki EVO, and a third archiving solution)
THEORY OF OPERATIONS
As per the design of the solution, there is a single possible scenery of operation, with a single variable, that is the optional use of an automatic video cassette preservation tool that is auspicated will run unsupervised and unattended as much as possible, night and day, so that it can transfer 24h/24 massive amounts of videotapes.
The system will be autonomous. It will transfer programs stored on cassettes without operator intervention, detect when the transfer quality is lower than expected, and take appropriate actions (re-clean, apply specific processes, try another VTR and reject if necessary).
The transferred programs will be stored on data files concurrently in multiple formats (i.e., the high-quality preservation format and browsing quality available via a web interface). They will be copied automatically into one or more (for security reasons) LTO-8 Digital Tapes.
The system will store information (PREPDATA) on the position of dropouts, RF level, and other relevant information, to prepare for possible subsequent
restoration.
System supervisor each work shift can evaluate the PREPDATA analysis and assign resources to proceed with the two following non-recursive path:
• If the digital material is badly, damaged action is taken to move it to the video editing software for the digital restoration process. After that, the “new” asset is re-inventoried into the MAM for proper metadata logging. A prompt is then shown to choose whether to maintain both the new asset as well as the original (uncut, unlogged, and unrestored) or to delete the master in favor of the new digital copy.
• If the digital material appears to be within the previously determined standards on media usability, the asset is processed directly into the Arkki EVO MAM for proper metadata logging. The entire process is applied to the low-quality proxy media, while the high-quality preservation asset is already safely stored into one or multiple LTO-8 tapes, as well as maintained online for a certain time (or indefinitely, mainly depending on the Customer investment into the online storage and Customer policies on media availability).
As mentioned earlier, the single variable in this project is the use (or not) of an automatic migration robotic tool. The following section explains in detail the solution advantages of using it. A subsequent chapter on Arkki EVO digital asset management touches on the non-use of an automatic migration robotic tool.
03 | AUTOMATIC CONTENT MIGRATION
SAVE TIME & MONEY with ROBOTIC AUTOMATIONA Robot can be integrated with Arkki EVO to migrate archival videotapes to digital files efficiently. These Robots are designed to migrate up to seven videotapes simultaneously, to one or several simultaneous digital file formats. The Robot evaluates, monitors, and documents the migration process and acts to identify and correct problems.
The final product is multiple file copies at preservation quality along with metadata that reports the quality of the original master.
Operating environment
The Robot can work on a continuous basis – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Manual labor is reduced to the simple tasks of prepping tapes for migration and loading/unloading the robotic tape handler bins. The Robot runs on standard power and requires no special
cooling.
Migration Workflow
Using the Robot, library staff will access videotapes and import their barcodes and other metadata to the Robot’s database. Metadata about the videotape collection may come from the library’s existing database(s), the Robot accession workflow, or both.
The Robot system can use the library’s existing barcodes or generate new barcodes as required.
Library staff brings groups of videotapes to the Robot and insert them in bins, removing any tapes already migrated. The operator uses the Robot application to initiate a scan of the barcodes on the tapes in the bins. When the barcodes have been read and identified in the database, the operator clicks “Start” and is then free to return to other duties.
When the tapes in the Robot have been migrated, the operator repeats the process. The Robot system can
be programmed to notify the operator by email or cell phone SMS etc. At the end of each tape’s migration, the Robot application performs post-migration commands such as calculating a SHA-1 checksum and moving the migration’s file set to long term archival storage.
We do recommend copying the output XML files and proxies to online storage, where various Arkki EVO can begin viewing them for the proper metadata logging.
Inspection of video cassettes and data entry
A user’s pre-existing data such as tape IDs, titles, barcode numbers, etc., is imported from their database into the Robot. This is useful for keeping pre-existing tape library metadata in context with the metadata created by Robot systems and importing it all back to the user’s database later. It is also useful in checking that the label of the videotape cassette is identical to that found in the imported data for a particular barcode or tape ID. SQL database is used internally, so any standard SQL query can be employed by the user. User data can even be imported to the database from a CSV file.
The first step in the tape preparation process is for the operator to select the tapes to be migrated from the media archive. Next, the operator scans the barcode on the storage media case (if there is one) and ensures that the information contained in the operator’s database matches the information on the storage media case label. An inspection process is then performed in accordance with the training provided and covers typical observable defects that can disqualify a media item from automatic processing. The operator makes a determination as to whether the storage media passes or fails each inspection step. For all storage media, the database generates a unique identifier compliant with SMPTE Unique Material Identifier (UMID) naming convention, optionally used as a barcode number. Or the user can scan any pre-existing barcode. The optional barcode is then automatically printed, and the operator affixes it to the media. The UMID barcode ties that specific videotape to the media database.
Load cassettes and upload related metadata
To begin the migration process, the operator loads prepped tapes into the robotic system. The operator closes the loading door on the Robot and begins the migration. By scanning the UMID barcode on the videotapes inside the Robot, the system verifies the contents of its internal library. This information is retrieved from the central database. Set system parameters for each job. Product ships from the factory with standard settings and templates, customized for the user if necessary. Templates can be changed but once set up, templates probably do not need to be changed by the day-to-day user, and in fact it may be undesirable to change them during the course of migrating a tape collection because the user may prefer to migrate all of the collection’s video with the same settings and workflow policiesSimple digitization process.
If any barcodes are unrecognized, or any VTRs are out of service, they are highlighted in red text with a description of the error. The system can be programmed to automatically initiate a number of functions when the tapes are finished, such as email the operator, begin a batch process to move or backup files, etc.
Monitor the system, processes, and errors
Usually, these Robots provide an Analysis Engine that can automatically monitor repair and log video and audio quality for every video frame. Analysis Engine offers signal processing:
• Full Frame Synchronizer• RF Dropout Compensation• Time Code Reader/Generator• Digital Comb Filter• AGC (Auto Gain Control)• ACC (Auto Chroma Control)• CTI (Chroma Transition Improvement)• NR (Digital Noise Reduction)
Analyze video recording for defects, create and save defect log for each recording
The Robot platform features well over 200 metrics about the analog video, analog signal, and the migration. The Robot can read a migration’s XML and graphically show its video and audio levels, dropouts and RF level, input presence, and servo lock, with scrolling and magnification. This can be useful in many ways, including logging, detecting video problems, etc. The XML graphs can be saved as PDF files and viewed later on an external computer.
Digitize the video recording
With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. The Robot can be set to automatically end migration if those levels continue beyond the user-defined duration to avoid wasting time and storage or to detect video segments for logging purposes.
The Robot performs three key functions during a migration:
1. Detect the end of programming and end the migration to save time and storage.
2. Monitor levels and log above-threshold excursions into the XML file.
3. See potential problems in the source video and, if desired, end migration as an Error.- The length of each Threshold’s ‘Duration’ effectively sets
its priority to function as a trigger. Shorter durations will trigger first, longer durations will trigger later, etc.
- ‘Servo Lock Threshold’ might be set to the shortest duration because without servo lock, the other Thresholds trigger anyway.
- ‘Input Loss Threshold’ might be set soon after Servo Lock to detect no video even if the tape is still playing.
- ‘Black Threshold’ and ‘RF Threshold’ might be set soon after Input Loss to detect the end of video recording
- ‘Audio Threshold’ might be set last to detect an audio problem when the video is OK.
- ‘Dropout Threshold’ might be set the shortest of all to detect damaged videotape or a clogged head in the source VTR.
User-selectable error correction for defectsThe Robot offers several automated error correction processes for tape and signal defects.
• ‘Comb Filter’ reduces interference between color and luminance in composite (CVBS) video. Enabling the Comb Filter reduces “hanging dots” (dot crawl) and cross-color artifacts.
• ‘Decoder AGC’ is Automatic Gain Control. The input video’s sync amplitude is measured, and the entire signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until sync levels are corrected.
• ‘Decoder ACC’ is Automatic Chroma Control. The input video’s color-burst is measured, and the chroma signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until chroma is corrected to standard levels. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder CTI’ is Chroma Transition Improvement, and sharpens the edges of colored objects.Setting Decoder CTI to ‘ON’ challenges video compression encoders to spend more bits on tracking those sharper edges so some users reserve it for higher bit rate encodings. This setting does not affect Component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder NR’ is digital noise reduction. Analog tapes, particularly U-matic and VHS, can be very noisy. Removing any portion of the noise can dramatically improve the quality of video compression, so the normal setting is ON. The user may insert external noise reduction equipment in the path between the source VTR and Solo, and in that case, Analysis Engine’s noise reduction should be set to OFF. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘RF Dropout Compensator’ – U-matic tape machines have an “RF out” which is an analog level indicating the amplitude of the RF carrier recovered from the videotape. If the RF level drops below a preset threshold, there will be no visible video, resulting in a dropout. When this occurs, the Analysis engine replaces that segment of missing video with video from the same area of the picture in the preceding frame of video.
Selectable Signal and Image Processing
At the start of a migration working shift or workday, checking that the source VTR is calibrated so a
collection of migrations will remain consistent in its video and audio levels is recommended. Calibration tapes are provided for the videotape format configured in the Robot. If the VTR calibration check returns an error message, the VTR may need service.
‘Proc Amp Controls’ are available for video adjustments. When using these controls, a waveform monitor and vectorscope are recommended to see their effects and avoid ‘illegal’ (outside standard) settings. Settings are saved in templates, which can be helpful when a collection of videotapes will benefit from consistent adjustments.
Each of the correction settings such as AGC, ACC, CTI, etc., can be switched on or off depending on the requirements of the project. These settings are retained in the Robot setup template and are used for each migration until the template is changed by someone with administrator privileges.
Output digital video
Source video and audio is digitized to the CCIR 601 standard (SDI), frame-synchronized and time-base corrected. This SDI signal is internally routed to video encoders along with a stream of the source analog video and analog audio source for monitoring.
Short-term storage of digital files produced during migration of digital video files and data is cached on Robot’s internal E: drive. The user can choose to monitor the migrating video and audio for logging or other reasons, or attend to other duties and return when the migration is complete, letting the Robot determine when the migration should end according to user settings like a long time of black, a time code mark out, a preset duration, a threshold of time with no video or servo lock, etc.
When the user agrees that the migration is complete, the cached files are wrapped and written to a “success folder” on Robot’s internal RAID disk array for retrieval by the Arkki EVO’s deeper storage and asset management system. The Robot can also write finished files to any networked destination. All encoded files can be “pulled” from the “Success directory” or “pushed”
by Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) to any directory of the user’s choosing, local or remote. With the Deep Archiving software (provided), the user can archive files into the tape library and automatically get some of the metadata into a Library.
Track entire process and create/save an audit trail or log file documenting each step and the entire process for each recording
The Robot creates more than 200 metadata fields during a videotape migration, plus 38 metadata fields about every video frame. When saved as an XML file, a typical video migration’s metadata file size can be 30 MB or more.
The robot metadata types include:
• Configurations and template (.sxt) used for this migration
• Analysis Engine and video encoder settings for this migration
• Tape Details about this migration, such as barcode, tape ID, description, user name, sequence (# of #), comments, cleaning and inspection status, migration results (log), etc.
• Settings and information about the output files (video and XML) generated during this migration, including Locations, names, sizes, elapsed time, SHA-1 checksum values, etc.
• Settings and information about the Source VTR used for this migration
• Settings and information about the Dub VTR and/or external encoder used for this migration (if any)
• Networking information about the Robot current connection and directories
• Information about the Robot’s factory build (software versions etc.)
• Number of video frames sampled in this migration, and frame-by-frame data about each:
- Frame index, frame count- Input presence, color presence- Time code, time code user groups
MEDIA FOUNDATION COMBINED WITH OFF-THE-SHELF TECHNOLOGIES
At the core of our offer is Arkki EVO, a powerful Digital Asset Management designed for large-scale, highly-configurable implementations. It manages assets, tracks metadata across the entire production workflow, and consistently drives both human and media workflows. Arkki EVO can be configured to address the full range of broadcast and content workflows, including archives, news, sports production, programs, new media content distribution, and VOD delivery.
Data-centric Digital Asset Manager
In this digital age, where the sheer amount and demand for content are unprecedented, and content access requires ubiquity, every organization faces the challenge of addressing explosive content growth while effectively managing libraries and adding value to their digital assets by making them available anywhere.
Simply put, the proliferation of content necessitates better ways to store and manage digital content—whether that be media files, branded materials, or documentation. MediaPower takes asset management to new heights with Arkki EVO, a powerful and innovative digital asset manager that enables you to store, catalog, share, edit, retrieve, and distribute digital assets quickly and efficiently.
Arkki EVO is a global content platform that lets you
manage all types of assets and asset correlations effectively.Built on a dynamic and scalable architecture, Arkki EVO lets you take control of your digital content through its data-driven and user-centered features, so that you can focus on your core business and less time on searching and managing the right digital asset.
Arkki EVO provides an online proxy library of digital content with enterprise-level features and powerful tools accessible from any web browser or mobile device. Users can upload, process, edit, download, and share multiple assets and projects, proofed with version history that enables monitoring and analysis of a digital asset’s updates and duplications.
An enterprise platform that meets the requirements of any media needs
At the core of Arkki EVO, is a robust document database server that combines a powerful multimedia Enterprise search, and multiple layers of application servers to handle several back-office processes. This is combined with a wide range of workflow and media management tools, as well as monitoring applications and fully integrated production tools.
Unique and Powerful Features
Arkki EVO incorporates a robust set of features from the types of files it supports, to unique and powerful data structures, built-in video editing capabilities, and OTT streaming capability.
Asset Collections
With Arkki EVO asset collections, you can easily create, edit, and share collections of assets between users. You can create dynamic data connected silos based on search criteria or static catalogs of assets, folders, and collections, and share them with multiple users while ensuring access levels and editing privileges.
File Types Supported
Arkki EVO supports a full range of multimedia files, images, and documents. It also provides an OCR feature for PDFs and Images:
• Video and Audio• JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, and other image file types
(OCR supported)• InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator• PDFs - raster and vector (OCR supported)• Microsoft Office - Word and Excel
Graph Database and Link Object
Arkki EVO uses a NoSQL graph database to manage infinite collections, documents, and custom fields. This provides ultimate flexibility in managing custom
metadata, categories, nested subcategories, and cascading objects. Combined with this, Arkki EVO features an innovative element—the Link Object, a particular type of data used to bond an asset to a network of objects inside the platform, creating dynamic and deep graph networks.
Storage Management
Arkki EVO supports heterogeneous disk spaces. Assets can be stored and managed in different storage and archive tiers for optimal balance of usage and performance requirements.
Standalone or Cloud-based
Arkki EVO orchestrates a number of distributed services following a true Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) that is simple to integrate with external ecosystems via API. Arkki EVO is developed to be hosted onto a single Virtual Machine— giving it the flexibility to be used as a standalone DAM-in-a-box” or forming part of a complex cloud infrastructure that features both horizontal and vertical scalability.
Semantic Search Engine
Arkki EVO incorporates a powerful search engine to
find any asset imported into the system quickly. It features an Elastic Graph engine that uses a semantic algorithm to contextualize data stored into the Arkki EVO platform and find correlations between assets.
Built-in Video Editing and Transcoding
Arkki EVO incorporates various video editing functions that help users handle and process raw video material. These include mark in/out, single frame extraction, sub-clips generation, adding metadata information to clips/sub-clips, uploading sub-clips as main clips, exporting to or downloading low-res or high-res, merging clips to single videos, exporting video frames as images, and even sending video clips to FTP of Public Cloud services.
It also features a built-in transcoding engine that accepts any standard video format (such as MPEG-2, XDCAM, DV, DNxHD, AVC-Intra, IMX, MPEG4, ApplePro Res, WMV wrapped MXF, MOV, and AVI, including MOV or MXF-wrapped 4K files), automatically generates low-resolution proxies in MPEG4, and allows users to create different file formats with optional watermarks.
Digital Asset Management Workflows
Arkki EVO streamlines your digital asset workflows – from importing, organizing, classifying, to delivering your digital assets, and even enabling triggers that automate workflow functions.
Collaboration Tools
Arkki EVO provides a full set of tools that allow different teams and user groups to work collaboratively on asset creation, licensing, marketing, down to distribution. These tools include rating and commenting, email and social media sharing, overlay video commenting, advanced tagging, and much more.
Multi-user and Sharing-friendly
Arkki EVO provides a complete user management system that allows administrators to define users and groups and assign different roles and access rights. Users also get their own user pages for tracking their
activities (such as uploads, edits, creation of groups or projects). Asset and project categories can also be assigned to certain users to control access to specific material.
Arkki EVO can also organize different assets into projects that can be made private, made available to selected users, and be assigned searchable metadata information. It can also generate public links to projects and to individual assets, making them shareable over the Internet. These links allow recipients to view and download low-res copies or for registered users, work directly on the linked project and its contents.
Rights Management Plugin
Ensuring control of copyrighted/licensed material is made easy with Arkki EVO’s Rights Management plugin. It lets you maintain control over assets and their data rights and enforce rules automatically from a single interface. Plugin features include:
• Ownership, permissions, restrictions• Retention and expiration• Licensing• Status and Notification triggers
Multi-tenancy
Sharing your digital assets outside your organization could be a tedious process, but that is made easy with Arkki EVO’s support for multi-tenancy. Arkki EVO lets you selectively share or distribute digital assets (or even collections) to user groups and external organizations (such as teams, subsidiaries, related companies, reseller networks, agency partners) while ensuring security and protecting confidential information.
Resource Optimization
Arkki EVO smartly utilizes the computing resources available to the system. Resource-intensive transcoding and processing tasks generally employ 100% of all CPU cores, rendering other functions virtually unusable. To combat this issue, Arkki EVO ensures that CPU and RAM resources are available for other services, providing a consistently fast response
from the system to users. Moreover, Arkki can also work in virtualized environments, significantly increasing its adaptability.
GDPR compliant
MediaPower fully respects the GDPR directives on privacy by design and by default. Thus, Arkki EVO has been developed to support this. Tokenization, cryptography, and advanced data management are core pillars in the design and development of Arkki EVO.
OTT Delivery
Each video asset imported into and managed by Arkki EVO can be delivered via OTT connector, a middleware that publishes VoD content to an IPTV, WebTV, or over the most important social networks through Mpeg-Dash protocol, HLS, and RTSP.
A.I. Integration
Arkki EVO provides connectors to Google, Amazon
Web Services, Microsoft and IBM Artificial Intelligence infrastructures which include, but not limited to, face recognition, brand presence, advanced OCR, speech-to-text, pedestrian detection, sensitive content detection, sports action classification, setting detection, and content, audio, and video classification.
Flexible and Configurable
Arkki EVO is structured to manage several types of assets and processes pipeline. Arkki EVO’s graph database, Link Object, advanced tagging, and the robust processing engine all work in tandem to let you create complex nested data collections, and customize and control the entire platform as appropriate—from a simple MAM, or large DAM, to archive libraries. For example, a media company can use Arkki EVO as simple Media Asset Manager, a large corporation can use the platform as personal cloud share, or a museum applies Arkki EVO as archive manager following the standard Dublin Core and EAD (Encoded Archival Description) and Berkeley Finding Aids Project (BFAP).
significance just now, as one of “the steps necessary to ensure … permanent accessibility”.
Our project goal is the following: make access copies into digital format that in some cases are in no way a replacement for the original – but they take pressure off the original, allowing it to be kept untouched in cold, dry conditions with very limited use of masters.
Our archive copies are as close as technically possible to the originals and can be used within this digital production and logging solution for the creation of ‘new masters’.
Also, the digitization scope here is to produce a ‘digital intermediate’ before finally producing a new digital master. This in order to use digital technology for restoration – because there are many defects that can be removed digitally in ways that could not be attempted by analog processing.
DATA SELECTION CONSIDERATION
In large scale projects, like this one, digitization strategy is the key. Selection: which material goes first? There is a lot of information about selection. Most managed collections already have considerable
“Preservation is the totality of the steps necessary to ensure the permanent accessibility – forever – of an audiovisual document with the maximum integrity.” - Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Association (CCAAA)
This document proposes a commercial and technological strategy in digitizing, logging, and archiving videotapes for the purpose of Digital Preservation.
01 | INTRODUCTION
DIGITIZATION OVERVIEW
Many activities contribute to “permanent accessibility – forever.” Just now, in the years of the 21st century, we are at a stage where much audiovisual material from the 20th century is in analog form – and most of the options for trying to obtain “permanent accessibility – forever” are digital options. So digitization is of huge
experience of selection, including:
• Selection of the material coming into the collection• Review of material at regular intervals, to decide about further retention
For a digitization and preservation process, the issue of selection begins with setting priorities. Generally, these are the following major factors to consider:
• Value of the material• Obsolescence of the format• Condition and life expectancy
For this specific project, we do expect that the Customer has already made a map of the collection – so these factors have already been assessed, and the collection has been divided into broad categories. The work that remains is to make another sort of map: a preservation plan covering the entire time necessary to deal with all your preservation needs. This can range from a 6-month plan to transfer a small amount of material from videotape to files, to a 10-year plan for the storage and metadata logging of an entire collection.
A preservation strategy is not a full preservation plan. For the strategy, the issue is sequence and timescale. All the elements in the preservation map that need attention are put in a priority sequence – and time information is added according to how long you want the work to last, or how long the funding lasts, or how long the material itself will last.
02 | USING NEW TECHNOLOGY
OPERATIONAL AREA DIVIDERS (OAD)
The purpose of the following chapter is to categorize the sub-elements (OAD = Operational Area Dividers) of the processing in four areas, as shown below:
• DIGANN: the digitization of analog media or non-native-file media
• CLEAV: clean-up of degraded audio and video signals
• MIRP: metadata ingestion, retrieval, and publication (MediaPower Arkki EVO Digital Asset Manager)
• DISAM: all of the above are sitting on a managed digital storage and asset managent platform. (this is the combination of the following elements: the local storage, the remote hybrid cloud storage, Arkki EVO, and a third archiving solution)
THEORY OF OPERATIONS
As per the design of the solution, there is a single possible scenery of operation, with a single variable, that is the optional use of an automatic video cassette preservation tool that is auspicated will run unsupervised and unattended as much as possible, night and day, so that it can transfer 24h/24 massive amounts of videotapes.
The system will be autonomous. It will transfer programs stored on cassettes without operator intervention, detect when the transfer quality is lower than expected, and take appropriate actions (re-clean, apply specific processes, try another VTR and reject if necessary).
The transferred programs will be stored on data files concurrently in multiple formats (i.e., the high-quality preservation format and browsing quality available via a web interface). They will be copied automatically into one or more (for security reasons) LTO-8 Digital Tapes.
The system will store information (PREPDATA) on the position of dropouts, RF level, and other relevant information, to prepare for possible subsequent
02
DIGITAL PRESERVATION: A Guide to Videotapes Digitization, Logging, and Archive
restoration.
System supervisor each work shift can evaluate the PREPDATA analysis and assign resources to proceed with the two following non-recursive path:
• If the digital material is badly, damaged action is taken to move it to the video editing software for the digital restoration process. After that, the “new” asset is re-inventoried into the MAM for proper metadata logging. A prompt is then shown to choose whether to maintain both the new asset as well as the original (uncut, unlogged, and unrestored) or to delete the master in favor of the new digital copy.
• If the digital material appears to be within the previously determined standards on media usability, the asset is processed directly into the Arkki EVO MAM for proper metadata logging. The entire process is applied to the low-quality proxy media, while the high-quality preservation asset is already safely stored into one or multiple LTO-8 tapes, as well as maintained online for a certain time (or indefinitely, mainly depending on the Customer investment into the online storage and Customer policies on media availability).
As mentioned earlier, the single variable in this project is the use (or not) of an automatic migration robotic tool. The following section explains in detail the solution advantages of using it. A subsequent chapter on Arkki EVO digital asset management touches on the non-use of an automatic migration robotic tool.
03 | AUTOMATIC CONTENT MIGRATION
SAVE TIME & MONEY with ROBOTIC AUTOMATIONA Robot can be integrated with Arkki EVO to migrate archival videotapes to digital files efficiently. These Robots are designed to migrate up to seven videotapes simultaneously, to one or several simultaneous digital file formats. The Robot evaluates, monitors, and documents the migration process and acts to identify and correct problems.
The final product is multiple file copies at preservation quality along with metadata that reports the quality of the original master.
Operating environment
The Robot can work on a continuous basis – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Manual labor is reduced to the simple tasks of prepping tapes for migration and loading/unloading the robotic tape handler bins. The Robot runs on standard power and requires no special
cooling.
Migration Workflow
Using the Robot, library staff will access videotapes and import their barcodes and other metadata to the Robot’s database. Metadata about the videotape collection may come from the library’s existing database(s), the Robot accession workflow, or both.
The Robot system can use the library’s existing barcodes or generate new barcodes as required.
Library staff brings groups of videotapes to the Robot and insert them in bins, removing any tapes already migrated. The operator uses the Robot application to initiate a scan of the barcodes on the tapes in the bins. When the barcodes have been read and identified in the database, the operator clicks “Start” and is then free to return to other duties.
When the tapes in the Robot have been migrated, the operator repeats the process. The Robot system can
be programmed to notify the operator by email or cell phone SMS etc. At the end of each tape’s migration, the Robot application performs post-migration commands such as calculating a SHA-1 checksum and moving the migration’s file set to long term archival storage.
We do recommend copying the output XML files and proxies to online storage, where various Arkki EVO can begin viewing them for the proper metadata logging.
Inspection of video cassettes and data entry
A user’s pre-existing data such as tape IDs, titles, barcode numbers, etc., is imported from their database into the Robot. This is useful for keeping pre-existing tape library metadata in context with the metadata created by Robot systems and importing it all back to the user’s database later. It is also useful in checking that the label of the videotape cassette is identical to that found in the imported data for a particular barcode or tape ID. SQL database is used internally, so any standard SQL query can be employed by the user. User data can even be imported to the database from a CSV file.
The first step in the tape preparation process is for the operator to select the tapes to be migrated from the media archive. Next, the operator scans the barcode on the storage media case (if there is one) and ensures that the information contained in the operator’s database matches the information on the storage media case label. An inspection process is then performed in accordance with the training provided and covers typical observable defects that can disqualify a media item from automatic processing. The operator makes a determination as to whether the storage media passes or fails each inspection step. For all storage media, the database generates a unique identifier compliant with SMPTE Unique Material Identifier (UMID) naming convention, optionally used as a barcode number. Or the user can scan any pre-existing barcode. The optional barcode is then automatically printed, and the operator affixes it to the media. The UMID barcode ties that specific videotape to the media database.
Load cassettes and upload related metadata
To begin the migration process, the operator loads prepped tapes into the robotic system. The operator closes the loading door on the Robot and begins the migration. By scanning the UMID barcode on the videotapes inside the Robot, the system verifies the contents of its internal library. This information is retrieved from the central database. Set system parameters for each job. Product ships from the factory with standard settings and templates, customized for the user if necessary. Templates can be changed but once set up, templates probably do not need to be changed by the day-to-day user, and in fact it may be undesirable to change them during the course of migrating a tape collection because the user may prefer to migrate all of the collection’s video with the same settings and workflow policiesSimple digitization process.
If any barcodes are unrecognized, or any VTRs are out of service, they are highlighted in red text with a description of the error. The system can be programmed to automatically initiate a number of functions when the tapes are finished, such as email the operator, begin a batch process to move or backup files, etc.
Monitor the system, processes, and errors
Usually, these Robots provide an Analysis Engine that can automatically monitor repair and log video and audio quality for every video frame. Analysis Engine offers signal processing:
• Full Frame Synchronizer• RF Dropout Compensation• Time Code Reader/Generator• Digital Comb Filter• AGC (Auto Gain Control)• ACC (Auto Chroma Control)• CTI (Chroma Transition Improvement)• NR (Digital Noise Reduction)
Analyze video recording for defects, create and save defect log for each recording
The Robot platform features well over 200 metrics about the analog video, analog signal, and the migration. The Robot can read a migration’s XML and graphically show its video and audio levels, dropouts and RF level, input presence, and servo lock, with scrolling and magnification. This can be useful in many ways, including logging, detecting video problems, etc. The XML graphs can be saved as PDF files and viewed later on an external computer.
Digitize the video recording
With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. The Robot can be set to automatically end migration if those levels continue beyond the user-defined duration to avoid wasting time and storage or to detect video segments for logging purposes.
The Robot performs three key functions during a migration:
1. Detect the end of programming and end the migration to save time and storage.
2. Monitor levels and log above-threshold excursions into the XML file.
3. See potential problems in the source video and, if desired, end migration as an Error.- The length of each Threshold’s ‘Duration’ effectively sets
its priority to function as a trigger. Shorter durations will trigger first, longer durations will trigger later, etc.
- ‘Servo Lock Threshold’ might be set to the shortest duration because without servo lock, the other Thresholds trigger anyway.
- ‘Input Loss Threshold’ might be set soon after Servo Lock to detect no video even if the tape is still playing.
- ‘Black Threshold’ and ‘RF Threshold’ might be set soon after Input Loss to detect the end of video recording
- ‘Audio Threshold’ might be set last to detect an audio problem when the video is OK.
- ‘Dropout Threshold’ might be set the shortest of all to detect damaged videotape or a clogged head in the source VTR.
User-selectable error correction for defectsThe Robot offers several automated error correction processes for tape and signal defects.
• ‘Comb Filter’ reduces interference between color and luminance in composite (CVBS) video. Enabling the Comb Filter reduces “hanging dots” (dot crawl) and cross-color artifacts.
• ‘Decoder AGC’ is Automatic Gain Control. The input video’s sync amplitude is measured, and the entire signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until sync levels are corrected.
• ‘Decoder ACC’ is Automatic Chroma Control. The input video’s color-burst is measured, and the chroma signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until chroma is corrected to standard levels. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder CTI’ is Chroma Transition Improvement, and sharpens the edges of colored objects.Setting Decoder CTI to ‘ON’ challenges video compression encoders to spend more bits on tracking those sharper edges so some users reserve it for higher bit rate encodings. This setting does not affect Component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder NR’ is digital noise reduction. Analog tapes, particularly U-matic and VHS, can be very noisy. Removing any portion of the noise can dramatically improve the quality of video compression, so the normal setting is ON. The user may insert external noise reduction equipment in the path between the source VTR and Solo, and in that case, Analysis Engine’s noise reduction should be set to OFF. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘RF Dropout Compensator’ – U-matic tape machines have an “RF out” which is an analog level indicating the amplitude of the RF carrier recovered from the videotape. If the RF level drops below a preset threshold, there will be no visible video, resulting in a dropout. When this occurs, the Analysis engine replaces that segment of missing video with video from the same area of the picture in the preceding frame of video.
Selectable Signal and Image Processing
At the start of a migration working shift or workday, checking that the source VTR is calibrated so a
collection of migrations will remain consistent in its video and audio levels is recommended. Calibration tapes are provided for the videotape format configured in the Robot. If the VTR calibration check returns an error message, the VTR may need service.
‘Proc Amp Controls’ are available for video adjustments. When using these controls, a waveform monitor and vectorscope are recommended to see their effects and avoid ‘illegal’ (outside standard) settings. Settings are saved in templates, which can be helpful when a collection of videotapes will benefit from consistent adjustments.
Each of the correction settings such as AGC, ACC, CTI, etc., can be switched on or off depending on the requirements of the project. These settings are retained in the Robot setup template and are used for each migration until the template is changed by someone with administrator privileges.
Output digital video
Source video and audio is digitized to the CCIR 601 standard (SDI), frame-synchronized and time-base corrected. This SDI signal is internally routed to video encoders along with a stream of the source analog video and analog audio source for monitoring.
Short-term storage of digital files produced during migration of digital video files and data is cached on Robot’s internal E: drive. The user can choose to monitor the migrating video and audio for logging or other reasons, or attend to other duties and return when the migration is complete, letting the Robot determine when the migration should end according to user settings like a long time of black, a time code mark out, a preset duration, a threshold of time with no video or servo lock, etc.
When the user agrees that the migration is complete, the cached files are wrapped and written to a “success folder” on Robot’s internal RAID disk array for retrieval by the Arkki EVO’s deeper storage and asset management system. The Robot can also write finished files to any networked destination. All encoded files can be “pulled” from the “Success directory” or “pushed”
by Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) to any directory of the user’s choosing, local or remote. With the Deep Archiving software (provided), the user can archive files into the tape library and automatically get some of the metadata into a Library.
Track entire process and create/save an audit trail or log file documenting each step and the entire process for each recording
The Robot creates more than 200 metadata fields during a videotape migration, plus 38 metadata fields about every video frame. When saved as an XML file, a typical video migration’s metadata file size can be 30 MB or more.
The robot metadata types include:
• Configurations and template (.sxt) used for this migration
• Analysis Engine and video encoder settings for this migration
• Tape Details about this migration, such as barcode, tape ID, description, user name, sequence (# of #), comments, cleaning and inspection status, migration results (log), etc.
• Settings and information about the output files (video and XML) generated during this migration, including Locations, names, sizes, elapsed time, SHA-1 checksum values, etc.
• Settings and information about the Source VTR used for this migration
• Settings and information about the Dub VTR and/or external encoder used for this migration (if any)
• Networking information about the Robot current connection and directories
• Information about the Robot’s factory build (software versions etc.)
• Number of video frames sampled in this migration, and frame-by-frame data about each:
- Frame index, frame count- Input presence, color presence- Time code, time code user groups
MEDIA FOUNDATION COMBINED WITH OFF-THE-SHELF TECHNOLOGIES
At the core of our offer is Arkki EVO, a powerful Digital Asset Management designed for large-scale, highly-configurable implementations. It manages assets, tracks metadata across the entire production workflow, and consistently drives both human and media workflows. Arkki EVO can be configured to address the full range of broadcast and content workflows, including archives, news, sports production, programs, new media content distribution, and VOD delivery.
Data-centric Digital Asset Manager
In this digital age, where the sheer amount and demand for content are unprecedented, and content access requires ubiquity, every organization faces the challenge of addressing explosive content growth while effectively managing libraries and adding value to their digital assets by making them available anywhere.
Simply put, the proliferation of content necessitates better ways to store and manage digital content—whether that be media files, branded materials, or documentation. MediaPower takes asset management to new heights with Arkki EVO, a powerful and innovative digital asset manager that enables you to store, catalog, share, edit, retrieve, and distribute digital assets quickly and efficiently.
Arkki EVO is a global content platform that lets you
manage all types of assets and asset correlations effectively.Built on a dynamic and scalable architecture, Arkki EVO lets you take control of your digital content through its data-driven and user-centered features, so that you can focus on your core business and less time on searching and managing the right digital asset.
Arkki EVO provides an online proxy library of digital content with enterprise-level features and powerful tools accessible from any web browser or mobile device. Users can upload, process, edit, download, and share multiple assets and projects, proofed with version history that enables monitoring and analysis of a digital asset’s updates and duplications.
An enterprise platform that meets the requirements of any media needs
At the core of Arkki EVO, is a robust document database server that combines a powerful multimedia Enterprise search, and multiple layers of application servers to handle several back-office processes. This is combined with a wide range of workflow and media management tools, as well as monitoring applications and fully integrated production tools.
Unique and Powerful Features
Arkki EVO incorporates a robust set of features from the types of files it supports, to unique and powerful data structures, built-in video editing capabilities, and OTT streaming capability.
Asset Collections
With Arkki EVO asset collections, you can easily create, edit, and share collections of assets between users. You can create dynamic data connected silos based on search criteria or static catalogs of assets, folders, and collections, and share them with multiple users while ensuring access levels and editing privileges.
File Types Supported
Arkki EVO supports a full range of multimedia files, images, and documents. It also provides an OCR feature for PDFs and Images:
• Video and Audio• JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, and other image file types
(OCR supported)• InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator• PDFs - raster and vector (OCR supported)• Microsoft Office - Word and Excel
Graph Database and Link Object
Arkki EVO uses a NoSQL graph database to manage infinite collections, documents, and custom fields. This provides ultimate flexibility in managing custom
metadata, categories, nested subcategories, and cascading objects. Combined with this, Arkki EVO features an innovative element—the Link Object, a particular type of data used to bond an asset to a network of objects inside the platform, creating dynamic and deep graph networks.
Storage Management
Arkki EVO supports heterogeneous disk spaces. Assets can be stored and managed in different storage and archive tiers for optimal balance of usage and performance requirements.
Standalone or Cloud-based
Arkki EVO orchestrates a number of distributed services following a true Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) that is simple to integrate with external ecosystems via API. Arkki EVO is developed to be hosted onto a single Virtual Machine— giving it the flexibility to be used as a standalone DAM-in-a-box” or forming part of a complex cloud infrastructure that features both horizontal and vertical scalability.
Semantic Search Engine
Arkki EVO incorporates a powerful search engine to
find any asset imported into the system quickly. It features an Elastic Graph engine that uses a semantic algorithm to contextualize data stored into the Arkki EVO platform and find correlations between assets.
Built-in Video Editing and Transcoding
Arkki EVO incorporates various video editing functions that help users handle and process raw video material. These include mark in/out, single frame extraction, sub-clips generation, adding metadata information to clips/sub-clips, uploading sub-clips as main clips, exporting to or downloading low-res or high-res, merging clips to single videos, exporting video frames as images, and even sending video clips to FTP of Public Cloud services.
It also features a built-in transcoding engine that accepts any standard video format (such as MPEG-2, XDCAM, DV, DNxHD, AVC-Intra, IMX, MPEG4, ApplePro Res, WMV wrapped MXF, MOV, and AVI, including MOV or MXF-wrapped 4K files), automatically generates low-resolution proxies in MPEG4, and allows users to create different file formats with optional watermarks.
Digital Asset Management Workflows
Arkki EVO streamlines your digital asset workflows – from importing, organizing, classifying, to delivering your digital assets, and even enabling triggers that automate workflow functions.
Collaboration Tools
Arkki EVO provides a full set of tools that allow different teams and user groups to work collaboratively on asset creation, licensing, marketing, down to distribution. These tools include rating and commenting, email and social media sharing, overlay video commenting, advanced tagging, and much more.
Multi-user and Sharing-friendly
Arkki EVO provides a complete user management system that allows administrators to define users and groups and assign different roles and access rights. Users also get their own user pages for tracking their
activities (such as uploads, edits, creation of groups or projects). Asset and project categories can also be assigned to certain users to control access to specific material.
Arkki EVO can also organize different assets into projects that can be made private, made available to selected users, and be assigned searchable metadata information. It can also generate public links to projects and to individual assets, making them shareable over the Internet. These links allow recipients to view and download low-res copies or for registered users, work directly on the linked project and its contents.
Rights Management Plugin
Ensuring control of copyrighted/licensed material is made easy with Arkki EVO’s Rights Management plugin. It lets you maintain control over assets and their data rights and enforce rules automatically from a single interface. Plugin features include:
• Ownership, permissions, restrictions• Retention and expiration• Licensing• Status and Notification triggers
Multi-tenancy
Sharing your digital assets outside your organization could be a tedious process, but that is made easy with Arkki EVO’s support for multi-tenancy. Arkki EVO lets you selectively share or distribute digital assets (or even collections) to user groups and external organizations (such as teams, subsidiaries, related companies, reseller networks, agency partners) while ensuring security and protecting confidential information.
Resource Optimization
Arkki EVO smartly utilizes the computing resources available to the system. Resource-intensive transcoding and processing tasks generally employ 100% of all CPU cores, rendering other functions virtually unusable. To combat this issue, Arkki EVO ensures that CPU and RAM resources are available for other services, providing a consistently fast response
from the system to users. Moreover, Arkki can also work in virtualized environments, significantly increasing its adaptability.
GDPR compliant
MediaPower fully respects the GDPR directives on privacy by design and by default. Thus, Arkki EVO has been developed to support this. Tokenization, cryptography, and advanced data management are core pillars in the design and development of Arkki EVO.
OTT Delivery
Each video asset imported into and managed by Arkki EVO can be delivered via OTT connector, a middleware that publishes VoD content to an IPTV, WebTV, or over the most important social networks through Mpeg-Dash protocol, HLS, and RTSP.
A.I. Integration
Arkki EVO provides connectors to Google, Amazon
Web Services, Microsoft and IBM Artificial Intelligence infrastructures which include, but not limited to, face recognition, brand presence, advanced OCR, speech-to-text, pedestrian detection, sensitive content detection, sports action classification, setting detection, and content, audio, and video classification.
Flexible and Configurable
Arkki EVO is structured to manage several types of assets and processes pipeline. Arkki EVO’s graph database, Link Object, advanced tagging, and the robust processing engine all work in tandem to let you create complex nested data collections, and customize and control the entire platform as appropriate—from a simple MAM, or large DAM, to archive libraries. For example, a media company can use Arkki EVO as simple Media Asset Manager, a large corporation can use the platform as personal cloud share, or a museum applies Arkki EVO as archive manager following the standard Dublin Core and EAD (Encoded Archival Description) and Berkeley Finding Aids Project (BFAP).
significance just now, as one of “the steps necessary to ensure … permanent accessibility”.
Our project goal is the following: make access copies into digital format that in some cases are in no way a replacement for the original – but they take pressure off the original, allowing it to be kept untouched in cold, dry conditions with very limited use of masters.
Our archive copies are as close as technically possible to the originals and can be used within this digital production and logging solution for the creation of ‘new masters’.
Also, the digitization scope here is to produce a ‘digital intermediate’ before finally producing a new digital master. This in order to use digital technology for restoration – because there are many defects that can be removed digitally in ways that could not be attempted by analog processing.
DATA SELECTION CONSIDERATION
In large scale projects, like this one, digitization strategy is the key. Selection: which material goes first? There is a lot of information about selection. Most managed collections already have considerable
“Preservation is the totality of the steps necessary to ensure the permanent accessibility – forever – of an audiovisual document with the maximum integrity.” - Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Association (CCAAA)
This document proposes a commercial and technological strategy in digitizing, logging, and archiving videotapes for the purpose of Digital Preservation.
01 | INTRODUCTION
DIGITIZATION OVERVIEW
Many activities contribute to “permanent accessibility – forever.” Just now, in the years of the 21st century, we are at a stage where much audiovisual material from the 20th century is in analog form – and most of the options for trying to obtain “permanent accessibility – forever” are digital options. So digitization is of huge
experience of selection, including:
• Selection of the material coming into the collection• Review of material at regular intervals, to decide about further retention
For a digitization and preservation process, the issue of selection begins with setting priorities. Generally, these are the following major factors to consider:
• Value of the material• Obsolescence of the format• Condition and life expectancy
For this specific project, we do expect that the Customer has already made a map of the collection – so these factors have already been assessed, and the collection has been divided into broad categories. The work that remains is to make another sort of map: a preservation plan covering the entire time necessary to deal with all your preservation needs. This can range from a 6-month plan to transfer a small amount of material from videotape to files, to a 10-year plan for the storage and metadata logging of an entire collection.
A preservation strategy is not a full preservation plan. For the strategy, the issue is sequence and timescale. All the elements in the preservation map that need attention are put in a priority sequence – and time information is added according to how long you want the work to last, or how long the funding lasts, or how long the material itself will last.
02 | USING NEW TECHNOLOGY
OPERATIONAL AREA DIVIDERS (OAD)
The purpose of the following chapter is to categorize the sub-elements (OAD = Operational Area Dividers) of the processing in four areas, as shown below:
• DIGANN: the digitization of analog media or non-native-file media
• CLEAV: clean-up of degraded audio and video signals
• MIRP: metadata ingestion, retrieval, and publication (MediaPower Arkki EVO Digital Asset Manager)
• DISAM: all of the above are sitting on a managed digital storage and asset managent platform. (this is the combination of the following elements: the local storage, the remote hybrid cloud storage, Arkki EVO, and a third archiving solution)
THEORY OF OPERATIONS
As per the design of the solution, there is a single possible scenery of operation, with a single variable, that is the optional use of an automatic video cassette preservation tool that is auspicated will run unsupervised and unattended as much as possible, night and day, so that it can transfer 24h/24 massive amounts of videotapes.
The system will be autonomous. It will transfer programs stored on cassettes without operator intervention, detect when the transfer quality is lower than expected, and take appropriate actions (re-clean, apply specific processes, try another VTR and reject if necessary).
The transferred programs will be stored on data files concurrently in multiple formats (i.e., the high-quality preservation format and browsing quality available via a web interface). They will be copied automatically into one or more (for security reasons) LTO-8 Digital Tapes.
The system will store information (PREPDATA) on the position of dropouts, RF level, and other relevant information, to prepare for possible subsequent
03
restoration.
System supervisor each work shift can evaluate the PREPDATA analysis and assign resources to proceed with the two following non-recursive path:
• If the digital material is badly, damaged action is taken to move it to the video editing software for the digital restoration process. After that, the “new” asset is re-inventoried into the MAM for proper metadata logging. A prompt is then shown to choose whether to maintain both the new asset as well as the original (uncut, unlogged, and unrestored) or to delete the master in favor of the new digital copy.
• If the digital material appears to be within the previously determined standards on media usability, the asset is processed directly into the Arkki EVO MAM for proper metadata logging. The entire process is applied to the low-quality proxy media, while the high-quality preservation asset is already safely stored into one or multiple LTO-8 tapes, as well as maintained online for a certain time (or indefinitely, mainly depending on the Customer investment into the online storage and Customer policies on media availability).
As mentioned earlier, the single variable in this project is the use (or not) of an automatic migration robotic tool. The following section explains in detail the solution advantages of using it. A subsequent chapter on Arkki EVO digital asset management touches on the non-use of an automatic migration robotic tool.
03 | AUTOMATIC CONTENT MIGRATION
SAVE TIME & MONEY with ROBOTIC AUTOMATIONA Robot can be integrated with Arkki EVO to migrate archival videotapes to digital files efficiently. These Robots are designed to migrate up to seven videotapes simultaneously, to one or several simultaneous digital file formats. The Robot evaluates, monitors, and documents the migration process and acts to identify and correct problems.
The final product is multiple file copies at preservation quality along with metadata that reports the quality of the original master.
Operating environment
The Robot can work on a continuous basis – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Manual labor is reduced to the simple tasks of prepping tapes for migration and loading/unloading the robotic tape handler bins. The Robot runs on standard power and requires no special
cooling.
Migration Workflow
Using the Robot, library staff will access videotapes and import their barcodes and other metadata to the Robot’s database. Metadata about the videotape collection may come from the library’s existing database(s), the Robot accession workflow, or both.
The Robot system can use the library’s existing barcodes or generate new barcodes as required.
Library staff brings groups of videotapes to the Robot and insert them in bins, removing any tapes already migrated. The operator uses the Robot application to initiate a scan of the barcodes on the tapes in the bins. When the barcodes have been read and identified in the database, the operator clicks “Start” and is then free to return to other duties.
When the tapes in the Robot have been migrated, the operator repeats the process. The Robot system can
be programmed to notify the operator by email or cell phone SMS etc. At the end of each tape’s migration, the Robot application performs post-migration commands such as calculating a SHA-1 checksum and moving the migration’s file set to long term archival storage.
We do recommend copying the output XML files and proxies to online storage, where various Arkki EVO can begin viewing them for the proper metadata logging.
Inspection of video cassettes and data entry
A user’s pre-existing data such as tape IDs, titles, barcode numbers, etc., is imported from their database into the Robot. This is useful for keeping pre-existing tape library metadata in context with the metadata created by Robot systems and importing it all back to the user’s database later. It is also useful in checking that the label of the videotape cassette is identical to that found in the imported data for a particular barcode or tape ID. SQL database is used internally, so any standard SQL query can be employed by the user. User data can even be imported to the database from a CSV file.
The first step in the tape preparation process is for the operator to select the tapes to be migrated from the media archive. Next, the operator scans the barcode on the storage media case (if there is one) and ensures that the information contained in the operator’s database matches the information on the storage media case label. An inspection process is then performed in accordance with the training provided and covers typical observable defects that can disqualify a media item from automatic processing. The operator makes a determination as to whether the storage media passes or fails each inspection step. For all storage media, the database generates a unique identifier compliant with SMPTE Unique Material Identifier (UMID) naming convention, optionally used as a barcode number. Or the user can scan any pre-existing barcode. The optional barcode is then automatically printed, and the operator affixes it to the media. The UMID barcode ties that specific videotape to the media database.
Load cassettes and upload related metadata
To begin the migration process, the operator loads prepped tapes into the robotic system. The operator closes the loading door on the Robot and begins the migration. By scanning the UMID barcode on the videotapes inside the Robot, the system verifies the contents of its internal library. This information is retrieved from the central database. Set system parameters for each job. Product ships from the factory with standard settings and templates, customized for the user if necessary. Templates can be changed but once set up, templates probably do not need to be changed by the day-to-day user, and in fact it may be undesirable to change them during the course of migrating a tape collection because the user may prefer to migrate all of the collection’s video with the same settings and workflow policiesSimple digitization process.
If any barcodes are unrecognized, or any VTRs are out of service, they are highlighted in red text with a description of the error. The system can be programmed to automatically initiate a number of functions when the tapes are finished, such as email the operator, begin a batch process to move or backup files, etc.
Monitor the system, processes, and errors
Usually, these Robots provide an Analysis Engine that can automatically monitor repair and log video and audio quality for every video frame. Analysis Engine offers signal processing:
• Full Frame Synchronizer• RF Dropout Compensation• Time Code Reader/Generator• Digital Comb Filter• AGC (Auto Gain Control)• ACC (Auto Chroma Control)• CTI (Chroma Transition Improvement)• NR (Digital Noise Reduction)
Analyze video recording for defects, create and save defect log for each recording
DIGITAL PRESERVATION: A Guide to Videotapes Digitization, Logging, and Archive
The Robot platform features well over 200 metrics about the analog video, analog signal, and the migration. The Robot can read a migration’s XML and graphically show its video and audio levels, dropouts and RF level, input presence, and servo lock, with scrolling and magnification. This can be useful in many ways, including logging, detecting video problems, etc. The XML graphs can be saved as PDF files and viewed later on an external computer.
Digitize the video recording
With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. The Robot can be set to automatically end migration if those levels continue beyond the user-defined duration to avoid wasting time and storage or to detect video segments for logging purposes.
The Robot performs three key functions during a migration:
1. Detect the end of programming and end the migration to save time and storage.
2. Monitor levels and log above-threshold excursions into the XML file.
3. See potential problems in the source video and, if desired, end migration as an Error.- The length of each Threshold’s ‘Duration’ effectively sets
its priority to function as a trigger. Shorter durations will trigger first, longer durations will trigger later, etc.
- ‘Servo Lock Threshold’ might be set to the shortest duration because without servo lock, the other Thresholds trigger anyway.
- ‘Input Loss Threshold’ might be set soon after Servo Lock to detect no video even if the tape is still playing.
- ‘Black Threshold’ and ‘RF Threshold’ might be set soon after Input Loss to detect the end of video recording
- ‘Audio Threshold’ might be set last to detect an audio problem when the video is OK.
- ‘Dropout Threshold’ might be set the shortest of all to detect damaged videotape or a clogged head in the source VTR.
User-selectable error correction for defectsThe Robot offers several automated error correction processes for tape and signal defects.
• ‘Comb Filter’ reduces interference between color and luminance in composite (CVBS) video. Enabling the Comb Filter reduces “hanging dots” (dot crawl) and cross-color artifacts.
• ‘Decoder AGC’ is Automatic Gain Control. The input video’s sync amplitude is measured, and the entire signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until sync levels are corrected.
• ‘Decoder ACC’ is Automatic Chroma Control. The input video’s color-burst is measured, and the chroma signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until chroma is corrected to standard levels. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder CTI’ is Chroma Transition Improvement, and sharpens the edges of colored objects.Setting Decoder CTI to ‘ON’ challenges video compression encoders to spend more bits on tracking those sharper edges so some users reserve it for higher bit rate encodings. This setting does not affect Component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder NR’ is digital noise reduction. Analog tapes, particularly U-matic and VHS, can be very noisy. Removing any portion of the noise can dramatically improve the quality of video compression, so the normal setting is ON. The user may insert external noise reduction equipment in the path between the source VTR and Solo, and in that case, Analysis Engine’s noise reduction should be set to OFF. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘RF Dropout Compensator’ – U-matic tape machines have an “RF out” which is an analog level indicating the amplitude of the RF carrier recovered from the videotape. If the RF level drops below a preset threshold, there will be no visible video, resulting in a dropout. When this occurs, the Analysis engine replaces that segment of missing video with video from the same area of the picture in the preceding frame of video.
Selectable Signal and Image Processing
At the start of a migration working shift or workday, checking that the source VTR is calibrated so a
collection of migrations will remain consistent in its video and audio levels is recommended. Calibration tapes are provided for the videotape format configured in the Robot. If the VTR calibration check returns an error message, the VTR may need service.
‘Proc Amp Controls’ are available for video adjustments. When using these controls, a waveform monitor and vectorscope are recommended to see their effects and avoid ‘illegal’ (outside standard) settings. Settings are saved in templates, which can be helpful when a collection of videotapes will benefit from consistent adjustments.
Each of the correction settings such as AGC, ACC, CTI, etc., can be switched on or off depending on the requirements of the project. These settings are retained in the Robot setup template and are used for each migration until the template is changed by someone with administrator privileges.
Output digital video
Source video and audio is digitized to the CCIR 601 standard (SDI), frame-synchronized and time-base corrected. This SDI signal is internally routed to video encoders along with a stream of the source analog video and analog audio source for monitoring.
Short-term storage of digital files produced during migration of digital video files and data is cached on Robot’s internal E: drive. The user can choose to monitor the migrating video and audio for logging or other reasons, or attend to other duties and return when the migration is complete, letting the Robot determine when the migration should end according to user settings like a long time of black, a time code mark out, a preset duration, a threshold of time with no video or servo lock, etc.
When the user agrees that the migration is complete, the cached files are wrapped and written to a “success folder” on Robot’s internal RAID disk array for retrieval by the Arkki EVO’s deeper storage and asset management system. The Robot can also write finished files to any networked destination. All encoded files can be “pulled” from the “Success directory” or “pushed”
by Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) to any directory of the user’s choosing, local or remote. With the Deep Archiving software (provided), the user can archive files into the tape library and automatically get some of the metadata into a Library.
Track entire process and create/save an audit trail or log file documenting each step and the entire process for each recording
The Robot creates more than 200 metadata fields during a videotape migration, plus 38 metadata fields about every video frame. When saved as an XML file, a typical video migration’s metadata file size can be 30 MB or more.
The robot metadata types include:
• Configurations and template (.sxt) used for this migration
• Analysis Engine and video encoder settings for this migration
• Tape Details about this migration, such as barcode, tape ID, description, user name, sequence (# of #), comments, cleaning and inspection status, migration results (log), etc.
• Settings and information about the output files (video and XML) generated during this migration, including Locations, names, sizes, elapsed time, SHA-1 checksum values, etc.
• Settings and information about the Source VTR used for this migration
• Settings and information about the Dub VTR and/or external encoder used for this migration (if any)
• Networking information about the Robot current connection and directories
• Information about the Robot’s factory build (software versions etc.)
• Number of video frames sampled in this migration, and frame-by-frame data about each:
- Frame index, frame count- Input presence, color presence- Time code, time code user groups
MEDIA FOUNDATION COMBINED WITH OFF-THE-SHELF TECHNOLOGIES
At the core of our offer is Arkki EVO, a powerful Digital Asset Management designed for large-scale, highly-configurable implementations. It manages assets, tracks metadata across the entire production workflow, and consistently drives both human and media workflows. Arkki EVO can be configured to address the full range of broadcast and content workflows, including archives, news, sports production, programs, new media content distribution, and VOD delivery.
Data-centric Digital Asset Manager
In this digital age, where the sheer amount and demand for content are unprecedented, and content access requires ubiquity, every organization faces the challenge of addressing explosive content growth while effectively managing libraries and adding value to their digital assets by making them available anywhere.
Simply put, the proliferation of content necessitates better ways to store and manage digital content—whether that be media files, branded materials, or documentation. MediaPower takes asset management to new heights with Arkki EVO, a powerful and innovative digital asset manager that enables you to store, catalog, share, edit, retrieve, and distribute digital assets quickly and efficiently.
Arkki EVO is a global content platform that lets you
manage all types of assets and asset correlations effectively.Built on a dynamic and scalable architecture, Arkki EVO lets you take control of your digital content through its data-driven and user-centered features, so that you can focus on your core business and less time on searching and managing the right digital asset.
Arkki EVO provides an online proxy library of digital content with enterprise-level features and powerful tools accessible from any web browser or mobile device. Users can upload, process, edit, download, and share multiple assets and projects, proofed with version history that enables monitoring and analysis of a digital asset’s updates and duplications.
An enterprise platform that meets the requirements of any media needs
At the core of Arkki EVO, is a robust document database server that combines a powerful multimedia Enterprise search, and multiple layers of application servers to handle several back-office processes. This is combined with a wide range of workflow and media management tools, as well as monitoring applications and fully integrated production tools.
Unique and Powerful Features
Arkki EVO incorporates a robust set of features from the types of files it supports, to unique and powerful data structures, built-in video editing capabilities, and OTT streaming capability.
Asset Collections
With Arkki EVO asset collections, you can easily create, edit, and share collections of assets between users. You can create dynamic data connected silos based on search criteria or static catalogs of assets, folders, and collections, and share them with multiple users while ensuring access levels and editing privileges.
File Types Supported
Arkki EVO supports a full range of multimedia files, images, and documents. It also provides an OCR feature for PDFs and Images:
• Video and Audio• JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, and other image file types
(OCR supported)• InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator• PDFs - raster and vector (OCR supported)• Microsoft Office - Word and Excel
Graph Database and Link Object
Arkki EVO uses a NoSQL graph database to manage infinite collections, documents, and custom fields. This provides ultimate flexibility in managing custom
metadata, categories, nested subcategories, and cascading objects. Combined with this, Arkki EVO features an innovative element—the Link Object, a particular type of data used to bond an asset to a network of objects inside the platform, creating dynamic and deep graph networks.
Storage Management
Arkki EVO supports heterogeneous disk spaces. Assets can be stored and managed in different storage and archive tiers for optimal balance of usage and performance requirements.
Standalone or Cloud-based
Arkki EVO orchestrates a number of distributed services following a true Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) that is simple to integrate with external ecosystems via API. Arkki EVO is developed to be hosted onto a single Virtual Machine— giving it the flexibility to be used as a standalone DAM-in-a-box” or forming part of a complex cloud infrastructure that features both horizontal and vertical scalability.
Semantic Search Engine
Arkki EVO incorporates a powerful search engine to
find any asset imported into the system quickly. It features an Elastic Graph engine that uses a semantic algorithm to contextualize data stored into the Arkki EVO platform and find correlations between assets.
Built-in Video Editing and Transcoding
Arkki EVO incorporates various video editing functions that help users handle and process raw video material. These include mark in/out, single frame extraction, sub-clips generation, adding metadata information to clips/sub-clips, uploading sub-clips as main clips, exporting to or downloading low-res or high-res, merging clips to single videos, exporting video frames as images, and even sending video clips to FTP of Public Cloud services.
It also features a built-in transcoding engine that accepts any standard video format (such as MPEG-2, XDCAM, DV, DNxHD, AVC-Intra, IMX, MPEG4, ApplePro Res, WMV wrapped MXF, MOV, and AVI, including MOV or MXF-wrapped 4K files), automatically generates low-resolution proxies in MPEG4, and allows users to create different file formats with optional watermarks.
Digital Asset Management Workflows
Arkki EVO streamlines your digital asset workflows – from importing, organizing, classifying, to delivering your digital assets, and even enabling triggers that automate workflow functions.
Collaboration Tools
Arkki EVO provides a full set of tools that allow different teams and user groups to work collaboratively on asset creation, licensing, marketing, down to distribution. These tools include rating and commenting, email and social media sharing, overlay video commenting, advanced tagging, and much more.
Multi-user and Sharing-friendly
Arkki EVO provides a complete user management system that allows administrators to define users and groups and assign different roles and access rights. Users also get their own user pages for tracking their
activities (such as uploads, edits, creation of groups or projects). Asset and project categories can also be assigned to certain users to control access to specific material.
Arkki EVO can also organize different assets into projects that can be made private, made available to selected users, and be assigned searchable metadata information. It can also generate public links to projects and to individual assets, making them shareable over the Internet. These links allow recipients to view and download low-res copies or for registered users, work directly on the linked project and its contents.
Rights Management Plugin
Ensuring control of copyrighted/licensed material is made easy with Arkki EVO’s Rights Management plugin. It lets you maintain control over assets and their data rights and enforce rules automatically from a single interface. Plugin features include:
• Ownership, permissions, restrictions• Retention and expiration• Licensing• Status and Notification triggers
Multi-tenancy
Sharing your digital assets outside your organization could be a tedious process, but that is made easy with Arkki EVO’s support for multi-tenancy. Arkki EVO lets you selectively share or distribute digital assets (or even collections) to user groups and external organizations (such as teams, subsidiaries, related companies, reseller networks, agency partners) while ensuring security and protecting confidential information.
Resource Optimization
Arkki EVO smartly utilizes the computing resources available to the system. Resource-intensive transcoding and processing tasks generally employ 100% of all CPU cores, rendering other functions virtually unusable. To combat this issue, Arkki EVO ensures that CPU and RAM resources are available for other services, providing a consistently fast response
from the system to users. Moreover, Arkki can also work in virtualized environments, significantly increasing its adaptability.
GDPR compliant
MediaPower fully respects the GDPR directives on privacy by design and by default. Thus, Arkki EVO has been developed to support this. Tokenization, cryptography, and advanced data management are core pillars in the design and development of Arkki EVO.
OTT Delivery
Each video asset imported into and managed by Arkki EVO can be delivered via OTT connector, a middleware that publishes VoD content to an IPTV, WebTV, or over the most important social networks through Mpeg-Dash protocol, HLS, and RTSP.
A.I. Integration
Arkki EVO provides connectors to Google, Amazon
Web Services, Microsoft and IBM Artificial Intelligence infrastructures which include, but not limited to, face recognition, brand presence, advanced OCR, speech-to-text, pedestrian detection, sensitive content detection, sports action classification, setting detection, and content, audio, and video classification.
Flexible and Configurable
Arkki EVO is structured to manage several types of assets and processes pipeline. Arkki EVO’s graph database, Link Object, advanced tagging, and the robust processing engine all work in tandem to let you create complex nested data collections, and customize and control the entire platform as appropriate—from a simple MAM, or large DAM, to archive libraries. For example, a media company can use Arkki EVO as simple Media Asset Manager, a large corporation can use the platform as personal cloud share, or a museum applies Arkki EVO as archive manager following the standard Dublin Core and EAD (Encoded Archival Description) and Berkeley Finding Aids Project (BFAP).
significance just now, as one of “the steps necessary to ensure … permanent accessibility”.
Our project goal is the following: make access copies into digital format that in some cases are in no way a replacement for the original – but they take pressure off the original, allowing it to be kept untouched in cold, dry conditions with very limited use of masters.
Our archive copies are as close as technically possible to the originals and can be used within this digital production and logging solution for the creation of ‘new masters’.
Also, the digitization scope here is to produce a ‘digital intermediate’ before finally producing a new digital master. This in order to use digital technology for restoration – because there are many defects that can be removed digitally in ways that could not be attempted by analog processing.
DATA SELECTION CONSIDERATION
In large scale projects, like this one, digitization strategy is the key. Selection: which material goes first? There is a lot of information about selection. Most managed collections already have considerable
“Preservation is the totality of the steps necessary to ensure the permanent accessibility – forever – of an audiovisual document with the maximum integrity.” - Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Association (CCAAA)
This document proposes a commercial and technological strategy in digitizing, logging, and archiving videotapes for the purpose of Digital Preservation.
01 | INTRODUCTION
DIGITIZATION OVERVIEW
Many activities contribute to “permanent accessibility – forever.” Just now, in the years of the 21st century, we are at a stage where much audiovisual material from the 20th century is in analog form – and most of the options for trying to obtain “permanent accessibility – forever” are digital options. So digitization is of huge
experience of selection, including:
• Selection of the material coming into the collection• Review of material at regular intervals, to decide about further retention
For a digitization and preservation process, the issue of selection begins with setting priorities. Generally, these are the following major factors to consider:
• Value of the material• Obsolescence of the format• Condition and life expectancy
For this specific project, we do expect that the Customer has already made a map of the collection – so these factors have already been assessed, and the collection has been divided into broad categories. The work that remains is to make another sort of map: a preservation plan covering the entire time necessary to deal with all your preservation needs. This can range from a 6-month plan to transfer a small amount of material from videotape to files, to a 10-year plan for the storage and metadata logging of an entire collection.
A preservation strategy is not a full preservation plan. For the strategy, the issue is sequence and timescale. All the elements in the preservation map that need attention are put in a priority sequence – and time information is added according to how long you want the work to last, or how long the funding lasts, or how long the material itself will last.
02 | USING NEW TECHNOLOGY
OPERATIONAL AREA DIVIDERS (OAD)
The purpose of the following chapter is to categorize the sub-elements (OAD = Operational Area Dividers) of the processing in four areas, as shown below:
• DIGANN: the digitization of analog media or non-native-file media
• CLEAV: clean-up of degraded audio and video signals
• MIRP: metadata ingestion, retrieval, and publication (MediaPower Arkki EVO Digital Asset Manager)
• DISAM: all of the above are sitting on a managed digital storage and asset managent platform. (this is the combination of the following elements: the local storage, the remote hybrid cloud storage, Arkki EVO, and a third archiving solution)
THEORY OF OPERATIONS
As per the design of the solution, there is a single possible scenery of operation, with a single variable, that is the optional use of an automatic video cassette preservation tool that is auspicated will run unsupervised and unattended as much as possible, night and day, so that it can transfer 24h/24 massive amounts of videotapes.
The system will be autonomous. It will transfer programs stored on cassettes without operator intervention, detect when the transfer quality is lower than expected, and take appropriate actions (re-clean, apply specific processes, try another VTR and reject if necessary).
The transferred programs will be stored on data files concurrently in multiple formats (i.e., the high-quality preservation format and browsing quality available via a web interface). They will be copied automatically into one or more (for security reasons) LTO-8 Digital Tapes.
The system will store information (PREPDATA) on the position of dropouts, RF level, and other relevant information, to prepare for possible subsequent
restoration.
System supervisor each work shift can evaluate the PREPDATA analysis and assign resources to proceed with the two following non-recursive path:
• If the digital material is badly, damaged action is taken to move it to the video editing software for the digital restoration process. After that, the “new” asset is re-inventoried into the MAM for proper metadata logging. A prompt is then shown to choose whether to maintain both the new asset as well as the original (uncut, unlogged, and unrestored) or to delete the master in favor of the new digital copy.
• If the digital material appears to be within the previously determined standards on media usability, the asset is processed directly into the Arkki EVO MAM for proper metadata logging. The entire process is applied to the low-quality proxy media, while the high-quality preservation asset is already safely stored into one or multiple LTO-8 tapes, as well as maintained online for a certain time (or indefinitely, mainly depending on the Customer investment into the online storage and Customer policies on media availability).
As mentioned earlier, the single variable in this project is the use (or not) of an automatic migration robotic tool. The following section explains in detail the solution advantages of using it. A subsequent chapter on Arkki EVO digital asset management touches on the non-use of an automatic migration robotic tool.
03 | AUTOMATIC CONTENT MIGRATION
SAVE TIME & MONEY with ROBOTIC AUTOMATIONA Robot can be integrated with Arkki EVO to migrate archival videotapes to digital files efficiently. These Robots are designed to migrate up to seven videotapes simultaneously, to one or several simultaneous digital file formats. The Robot evaluates, monitors, and documents the migration process and acts to identify and correct problems.
The final product is multiple file copies at preservation quality along with metadata that reports the quality of the original master.
Operating environment
The Robot can work on a continuous basis – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Manual labor is reduced to the simple tasks of prepping tapes for migration and loading/unloading the robotic tape handler bins. The Robot runs on standard power and requires no special
cooling.
Migration Workflow
Using the Robot, library staff will access videotapes and import their barcodes and other metadata to the Robot’s database. Metadata about the videotape collection may come from the library’s existing database(s), the Robot accession workflow, or both.
The Robot system can use the library’s existing barcodes or generate new barcodes as required.
Library staff brings groups of videotapes to the Robot and insert them in bins, removing any tapes already migrated. The operator uses the Robot application to initiate a scan of the barcodes on the tapes in the bins. When the barcodes have been read and identified in the database, the operator clicks “Start” and is then free to return to other duties.
When the tapes in the Robot have been migrated, the operator repeats the process. The Robot system can
be programmed to notify the operator by email or cell phone SMS etc. At the end of each tape’s migration, the Robot application performs post-migration commands such as calculating a SHA-1 checksum and moving the migration’s file set to long term archival storage.
We do recommend copying the output XML files and proxies to online storage, where various Arkki EVO can begin viewing them for the proper metadata logging.
Inspection of video cassettes and data entry
A user’s pre-existing data such as tape IDs, titles, barcode numbers, etc., is imported from their database into the Robot. This is useful for keeping pre-existing tape library metadata in context with the metadata created by Robot systems and importing it all back to the user’s database later. It is also useful in checking that the label of the videotape cassette is identical to that found in the imported data for a particular barcode or tape ID. SQL database is used internally, so any standard SQL query can be employed by the user. User data can even be imported to the database from a CSV file.
The first step in the tape preparation process is for the operator to select the tapes to be migrated from the media archive. Next, the operator scans the barcode on the storage media case (if there is one) and ensures that the information contained in the operator’s database matches the information on the storage media case label. An inspection process is then performed in accordance with the training provided and covers typical observable defects that can disqualify a media item from automatic processing. The operator makes a determination as to whether the storage media passes or fails each inspection step. For all storage media, the database generates a unique identifier compliant with SMPTE Unique Material Identifier (UMID) naming convention, optionally used as a barcode number. Or the user can scan any pre-existing barcode. The optional barcode is then automatically printed, and the operator affixes it to the media. The UMID barcode ties that specific videotape to the media database.
Load cassettes and upload related metadata
To begin the migration process, the operator loads prepped tapes into the robotic system. The operator closes the loading door on the Robot and begins the migration. By scanning the UMID barcode on the videotapes inside the Robot, the system verifies the contents of its internal library. This information is retrieved from the central database. Set system parameters for each job. Product ships from the factory with standard settings and templates, customized for the user if necessary. Templates can be changed but once set up, templates probably do not need to be changed by the day-to-day user, and in fact it may be undesirable to change them during the course of migrating a tape collection because the user may prefer to migrate all of the collection’s video with the same settings and workflow policiesSimple digitization process.
If any barcodes are unrecognized, or any VTRs are out of service, they are highlighted in red text with a description of the error. The system can be programmed to automatically initiate a number of functions when the tapes are finished, such as email the operator, begin a batch process to move or backup files, etc.
Monitor the system, processes, and errors
Usually, these Robots provide an Analysis Engine that can automatically monitor repair and log video and audio quality for every video frame. Analysis Engine offers signal processing:
• Full Frame Synchronizer• RF Dropout Compensation• Time Code Reader/Generator• Digital Comb Filter• AGC (Auto Gain Control)• ACC (Auto Chroma Control)• CTI (Chroma Transition Improvement)• NR (Digital Noise Reduction)
Analyze video recording for defects, create and save defect log for each recording
DIGITAL PRESERVATION: A Guide to Videotapes Digitization, Logging, and Archive
04
The Robot platform features well over 200 metrics about the analog video, analog signal, and the migration. The Robot can read a migration’s XML and graphically show its video and audio levels, dropouts and RF level, input presence, and servo lock, with scrolling and magnification. This can be useful in many ways, including logging, detecting video problems, etc. The XML graphs can be saved as PDF files and viewed later on an external computer.
Digitize the video recording
With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. The Robot can be set to automatically end migration if those levels continue beyond the user-defined duration to avoid wasting time and storage or to detect video segments for logging purposes.
The Robot performs three key functions during a migration:
1. Detect the end of programming and end the migration to save time and storage.
2. Monitor levels and log above-threshold excursions into the XML file.
3. See potential problems in the source video and, if desired, end migration as an Error.- The length of each Threshold’s ‘Duration’ effectively sets
its priority to function as a trigger. Shorter durations will trigger first, longer durations will trigger later, etc.
- ‘Servo Lock Threshold’ might be set to the shortest duration because without servo lock, the other Thresholds trigger anyway.
- ‘Input Loss Threshold’ might be set soon after Servo Lock to detect no video even if the tape is still playing.
- ‘Black Threshold’ and ‘RF Threshold’ might be set soon after Input Loss to detect the end of video recording
- ‘Audio Threshold’ might be set last to detect an audio problem when the video is OK.
- ‘Dropout Threshold’ might be set the shortest of all to detect damaged videotape or a clogged head in the source VTR.
User-selectable error correction for defectsThe Robot offers several automated error correction processes for tape and signal defects.
• ‘Comb Filter’ reduces interference between color and luminance in composite (CVBS) video. Enabling the Comb Filter reduces “hanging dots” (dot crawl) and cross-color artifacts.
• ‘Decoder AGC’ is Automatic Gain Control. The input video’s sync amplitude is measured, and the entire signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until sync levels are corrected.
• ‘Decoder ACC’ is Automatic Chroma Control. The input video’s color-burst is measured, and the chroma signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until chroma is corrected to standard levels. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder CTI’ is Chroma Transition Improvement, and sharpens the edges of colored objects.Setting Decoder CTI to ‘ON’ challenges video compression encoders to spend more bits on tracking those sharper edges so some users reserve it for higher bit rate encodings. This setting does not affect Component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder NR’ is digital noise reduction. Analog tapes, particularly U-matic and VHS, can be very noisy. Removing any portion of the noise can dramatically improve the quality of video compression, so the normal setting is ON. The user may insert external noise reduction equipment in the path between the source VTR and Solo, and in that case, Analysis Engine’s noise reduction should be set to OFF. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘RF Dropout Compensator’ – U-matic tape machines have an “RF out” which is an analog level indicating the amplitude of the RF carrier recovered from the videotape. If the RF level drops below a preset threshold, there will be no visible video, resulting in a dropout. When this occurs, the Analysis engine replaces that segment of missing video with video from the same area of the picture in the preceding frame of video.
Selectable Signal and Image Processing
At the start of a migration working shift or workday, checking that the source VTR is calibrated so a
collection of migrations will remain consistent in its video and audio levels is recommended. Calibration tapes are provided for the videotape format configured in the Robot. If the VTR calibration check returns an error message, the VTR may need service.
‘Proc Amp Controls’ are available for video adjustments. When using these controls, a waveform monitor and vectorscope are recommended to see their effects and avoid ‘illegal’ (outside standard) settings. Settings are saved in templates, which can be helpful when a collection of videotapes will benefit from consistent adjustments.
Each of the correction settings such as AGC, ACC, CTI, etc., can be switched on or off depending on the requirements of the project. These settings are retained in the Robot setup template and are used for each migration until the template is changed by someone with administrator privileges.
Output digital video
Source video and audio is digitized to the CCIR 601 standard (SDI), frame-synchronized and time-base corrected. This SDI signal is internally routed to video encoders along with a stream of the source analog video and analog audio source for monitoring.
Short-term storage of digital files produced during migration of digital video files and data is cached on Robot’s internal E: drive. The user can choose to monitor the migrating video and audio for logging or other reasons, or attend to other duties and return when the migration is complete, letting the Robot determine when the migration should end according to user settings like a long time of black, a time code mark out, a preset duration, a threshold of time with no video or servo lock, etc.
When the user agrees that the migration is complete, the cached files are wrapped and written to a “success folder” on Robot’s internal RAID disk array for retrieval by the Arkki EVO’s deeper storage and asset management system. The Robot can also write finished files to any networked destination. All encoded files can be “pulled” from the “Success directory” or “pushed”
by Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) to any directory of the user’s choosing, local or remote. With the Deep Archiving software (provided), the user can archive files into the tape library and automatically get some of the metadata into a Library.
Track entire process and create/save an audit trail or log file documenting each step and the entire process for each recording
The Robot creates more than 200 metadata fields during a videotape migration, plus 38 metadata fields about every video frame. When saved as an XML file, a typical video migration’s metadata file size can be 30 MB or more.
The robot metadata types include:
• Configurations and template (.sxt) used for this migration
• Analysis Engine and video encoder settings for this migration
• Tape Details about this migration, such as barcode, tape ID, description, user name, sequence (# of #), comments, cleaning and inspection status, migration results (log), etc.
• Settings and information about the output files (video and XML) generated during this migration, including Locations, names, sizes, elapsed time, SHA-1 checksum values, etc.
• Settings and information about the Source VTR used for this migration
• Settings and information about the Dub VTR and/or external encoder used for this migration (if any)
• Networking information about the Robot current connection and directories
• Information about the Robot’s factory build (software versions etc.)
• Number of video frames sampled in this migration, and frame-by-frame data about each:
- Frame index, frame count- Input presence, color presence- Time code, time code user groups
MEDIA FOUNDATION COMBINED WITH OFF-THE-SHELF TECHNOLOGIES
At the core of our offer is Arkki EVO, a powerful Digital Asset Management designed for large-scale, highly-configurable implementations. It manages assets, tracks metadata across the entire production workflow, and consistently drives both human and media workflows. Arkki EVO can be configured to address the full range of broadcast and content workflows, including archives, news, sports production, programs, new media content distribution, and VOD delivery.
Data-centric Digital Asset Manager
In this digital age, where the sheer amount and demand for content are unprecedented, and content access requires ubiquity, every organization faces the challenge of addressing explosive content growth while effectively managing libraries and adding value to their digital assets by making them available anywhere.
Simply put, the proliferation of content necessitates better ways to store and manage digital content—whether that be media files, branded materials, or documentation. MediaPower takes asset management to new heights with Arkki EVO, a powerful and innovative digital asset manager that enables you to store, catalog, share, edit, retrieve, and distribute digital assets quickly and efficiently.
Arkki EVO is a global content platform that lets you
manage all types of assets and asset correlations effectively.Built on a dynamic and scalable architecture, Arkki EVO lets you take control of your digital content through its data-driven and user-centered features, so that you can focus on your core business and less time on searching and managing the right digital asset.
Arkki EVO provides an online proxy library of digital content with enterprise-level features and powerful tools accessible from any web browser or mobile device. Users can upload, process, edit, download, and share multiple assets and projects, proofed with version history that enables monitoring and analysis of a digital asset’s updates and duplications.
An enterprise platform that meets the requirements of any media needs
At the core of Arkki EVO, is a robust document database server that combines a powerful multimedia Enterprise search, and multiple layers of application servers to handle several back-office processes. This is combined with a wide range of workflow and media management tools, as well as monitoring applications and fully integrated production tools.
Unique and Powerful Features
Arkki EVO incorporates a robust set of features from the types of files it supports, to unique and powerful data structures, built-in video editing capabilities, and OTT streaming capability.
Asset Collections
With Arkki EVO asset collections, you can easily create, edit, and share collections of assets between users. You can create dynamic data connected silos based on search criteria or static catalogs of assets, folders, and collections, and share them with multiple users while ensuring access levels and editing privileges.
File Types Supported
Arkki EVO supports a full range of multimedia files, images, and documents. It also provides an OCR feature for PDFs and Images:
• Video and Audio• JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, and other image file types
(OCR supported)• InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator• PDFs - raster and vector (OCR supported)• Microsoft Office - Word and Excel
Graph Database and Link Object
Arkki EVO uses a NoSQL graph database to manage infinite collections, documents, and custom fields. This provides ultimate flexibility in managing custom
metadata, categories, nested subcategories, and cascading objects. Combined with this, Arkki EVO features an innovative element—the Link Object, a particular type of data used to bond an asset to a network of objects inside the platform, creating dynamic and deep graph networks.
Storage Management
Arkki EVO supports heterogeneous disk spaces. Assets can be stored and managed in different storage and archive tiers for optimal balance of usage and performance requirements.
Standalone or Cloud-based
Arkki EVO orchestrates a number of distributed services following a true Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) that is simple to integrate with external ecosystems via API. Arkki EVO is developed to be hosted onto a single Virtual Machine— giving it the flexibility to be used as a standalone DAM-in-a-box” or forming part of a complex cloud infrastructure that features both horizontal and vertical scalability.
Semantic Search Engine
Arkki EVO incorporates a powerful search engine to
find any asset imported into the system quickly. It features an Elastic Graph engine that uses a semantic algorithm to contextualize data stored into the Arkki EVO platform and find correlations between assets.
Built-in Video Editing and Transcoding
Arkki EVO incorporates various video editing functions that help users handle and process raw video material. These include mark in/out, single frame extraction, sub-clips generation, adding metadata information to clips/sub-clips, uploading sub-clips as main clips, exporting to or downloading low-res or high-res, merging clips to single videos, exporting video frames as images, and even sending video clips to FTP of Public Cloud services.
It also features a built-in transcoding engine that accepts any standard video format (such as MPEG-2, XDCAM, DV, DNxHD, AVC-Intra, IMX, MPEG4, ApplePro Res, WMV wrapped MXF, MOV, and AVI, including MOV or MXF-wrapped 4K files), automatically generates low-resolution proxies in MPEG4, and allows users to create different file formats with optional watermarks.
Digital Asset Management Workflows
Arkki EVO streamlines your digital asset workflows – from importing, organizing, classifying, to delivering your digital assets, and even enabling triggers that automate workflow functions.
Collaboration Tools
Arkki EVO provides a full set of tools that allow different teams and user groups to work collaboratively on asset creation, licensing, marketing, down to distribution. These tools include rating and commenting, email and social media sharing, overlay video commenting, advanced tagging, and much more.
Multi-user and Sharing-friendly
Arkki EVO provides a complete user management system that allows administrators to define users and groups and assign different roles and access rights. Users also get their own user pages for tracking their
activities (such as uploads, edits, creation of groups or projects). Asset and project categories can also be assigned to certain users to control access to specific material.
Arkki EVO can also organize different assets into projects that can be made private, made available to selected users, and be assigned searchable metadata information. It can also generate public links to projects and to individual assets, making them shareable over the Internet. These links allow recipients to view and download low-res copies or for registered users, work directly on the linked project and its contents.
Rights Management Plugin
Ensuring control of copyrighted/licensed material is made easy with Arkki EVO’s Rights Management plugin. It lets you maintain control over assets and their data rights and enforce rules automatically from a single interface. Plugin features include:
• Ownership, permissions, restrictions• Retention and expiration• Licensing• Status and Notification triggers
Multi-tenancy
Sharing your digital assets outside your organization could be a tedious process, but that is made easy with Arkki EVO’s support for multi-tenancy. Arkki EVO lets you selectively share or distribute digital assets (or even collections) to user groups and external organizations (such as teams, subsidiaries, related companies, reseller networks, agency partners) while ensuring security and protecting confidential information.
Resource Optimization
Arkki EVO smartly utilizes the computing resources available to the system. Resource-intensive transcoding and processing tasks generally employ 100% of all CPU cores, rendering other functions virtually unusable. To combat this issue, Arkki EVO ensures that CPU and RAM resources are available for other services, providing a consistently fast response
from the system to users. Moreover, Arkki can also work in virtualized environments, significantly increasing its adaptability.
GDPR compliant
MediaPower fully respects the GDPR directives on privacy by design and by default. Thus, Arkki EVO has been developed to support this. Tokenization, cryptography, and advanced data management are core pillars in the design and development of Arkki EVO.
OTT Delivery
Each video asset imported into and managed by Arkki EVO can be delivered via OTT connector, a middleware that publishes VoD content to an IPTV, WebTV, or over the most important social networks through Mpeg-Dash protocol, HLS, and RTSP.
A.I. Integration
Arkki EVO provides connectors to Google, Amazon
Web Services, Microsoft and IBM Artificial Intelligence infrastructures which include, but not limited to, face recognition, brand presence, advanced OCR, speech-to-text, pedestrian detection, sensitive content detection, sports action classification, setting detection, and content, audio, and video classification.
Flexible and Configurable
Arkki EVO is structured to manage several types of assets and processes pipeline. Arkki EVO’s graph database, Link Object, advanced tagging, and the robust processing engine all work in tandem to let you create complex nested data collections, and customize and control the entire platform as appropriate—from a simple MAM, or large DAM, to archive libraries. For example, a media company can use Arkki EVO as simple Media Asset Manager, a large corporation can use the platform as personal cloud share, or a museum applies Arkki EVO as archive manager following the standard Dublin Core and EAD (Encoded Archival Description) and Berkeley Finding Aids Project (BFAP).
significance just now, as one of “the steps necessary to ensure … permanent accessibility”.
Our project goal is the following: make access copies into digital format that in some cases are in no way a replacement for the original – but they take pressure off the original, allowing it to be kept untouched in cold, dry conditions with very limited use of masters.
Our archive copies are as close as technically possible to the originals and can be used within this digital production and logging solution for the creation of ‘new masters’.
Also, the digitization scope here is to produce a ‘digital intermediate’ before finally producing a new digital master. This in order to use digital technology for restoration – because there are many defects that can be removed digitally in ways that could not be attempted by analog processing.
DATA SELECTION CONSIDERATION
In large scale projects, like this one, digitization strategy is the key. Selection: which material goes first? There is a lot of information about selection. Most managed collections already have considerable
“Preservation is the totality of the steps necessary to ensure the permanent accessibility – forever – of an audiovisual document with the maximum integrity.” - Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Association (CCAAA)
This document proposes a commercial and technological strategy in digitizing, logging, and archiving videotapes for the purpose of Digital Preservation.
01 | INTRODUCTION
DIGITIZATION OVERVIEW
Many activities contribute to “permanent accessibility – forever.” Just now, in the years of the 21st century, we are at a stage where much audiovisual material from the 20th century is in analog form – and most of the options for trying to obtain “permanent accessibility – forever” are digital options. So digitization is of huge
experience of selection, including:
• Selection of the material coming into the collection• Review of material at regular intervals, to decide about further retention
For a digitization and preservation process, the issue of selection begins with setting priorities. Generally, these are the following major factors to consider:
• Value of the material• Obsolescence of the format• Condition and life expectancy
For this specific project, we do expect that the Customer has already made a map of the collection – so these factors have already been assessed, and the collection has been divided into broad categories. The work that remains is to make another sort of map: a preservation plan covering the entire time necessary to deal with all your preservation needs. This can range from a 6-month plan to transfer a small amount of material from videotape to files, to a 10-year plan for the storage and metadata logging of an entire collection.
A preservation strategy is not a full preservation plan. For the strategy, the issue is sequence and timescale. All the elements in the preservation map that need attention are put in a priority sequence – and time information is added according to how long you want the work to last, or how long the funding lasts, or how long the material itself will last.
02 | USING NEW TECHNOLOGY
OPERATIONAL AREA DIVIDERS (OAD)
The purpose of the following chapter is to categorize the sub-elements (OAD = Operational Area Dividers) of the processing in four areas, as shown below:
• DIGANN: the digitization of analog media or non-native-file media
• CLEAV: clean-up of degraded audio and video signals
• MIRP: metadata ingestion, retrieval, and publication (MediaPower Arkki EVO Digital Asset Manager)
• DISAM: all of the above are sitting on a managed digital storage and asset managent platform. (this is the combination of the following elements: the local storage, the remote hybrid cloud storage, Arkki EVO, and a third archiving solution)
THEORY OF OPERATIONS
As per the design of the solution, there is a single possible scenery of operation, with a single variable, that is the optional use of an automatic video cassette preservation tool that is auspicated will run unsupervised and unattended as much as possible, night and day, so that it can transfer 24h/24 massive amounts of videotapes.
The system will be autonomous. It will transfer programs stored on cassettes without operator intervention, detect when the transfer quality is lower than expected, and take appropriate actions (re-clean, apply specific processes, try another VTR and reject if necessary).
The transferred programs will be stored on data files concurrently in multiple formats (i.e., the high-quality preservation format and browsing quality available via a web interface). They will be copied automatically into one or more (for security reasons) LTO-8 Digital Tapes.
The system will store information (PREPDATA) on the position of dropouts, RF level, and other relevant information, to prepare for possible subsequent
restoration.
System supervisor each work shift can evaluate the PREPDATA analysis and assign resources to proceed with the two following non-recursive path:
• If the digital material is badly, damaged action is taken to move it to the video editing software for the digital restoration process. After that, the “new” asset is re-inventoried into the MAM for proper metadata logging. A prompt is then shown to choose whether to maintain both the new asset as well as the original (uncut, unlogged, and unrestored) or to delete the master in favor of the new digital copy.
• If the digital material appears to be within the previously determined standards on media usability, the asset is processed directly into the Arkki EVO MAM for proper metadata logging. The entire process is applied to the low-quality proxy media, while the high-quality preservation asset is already safely stored into one or multiple LTO-8 tapes, as well as maintained online for a certain time (or indefinitely, mainly depending on the Customer investment into the online storage and Customer policies on media availability).
As mentioned earlier, the single variable in this project is the use (or not) of an automatic migration robotic tool. The following section explains in detail the solution advantages of using it. A subsequent chapter on Arkki EVO digital asset management touches on the non-use of an automatic migration robotic tool.
03 | AUTOMATIC CONTENT MIGRATION
SAVE TIME & MONEY with ROBOTIC AUTOMATIONA Robot can be integrated with Arkki EVO to migrate archival videotapes to digital files efficiently. These Robots are designed to migrate up to seven videotapes simultaneously, to one or several simultaneous digital file formats. The Robot evaluates, monitors, and documents the migration process and acts to identify and correct problems.
The final product is multiple file copies at preservation quality along with metadata that reports the quality of the original master.
Operating environment
The Robot can work on a continuous basis – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Manual labor is reduced to the simple tasks of prepping tapes for migration and loading/unloading the robotic tape handler bins. The Robot runs on standard power and requires no special
cooling.
Migration Workflow
Using the Robot, library staff will access videotapes and import their barcodes and other metadata to the Robot’s database. Metadata about the videotape collection may come from the library’s existing database(s), the Robot accession workflow, or both.
The Robot system can use the library’s existing barcodes or generate new barcodes as required.
Library staff brings groups of videotapes to the Robot and insert them in bins, removing any tapes already migrated. The operator uses the Robot application to initiate a scan of the barcodes on the tapes in the bins. When the barcodes have been read and identified in the database, the operator clicks “Start” and is then free to return to other duties.
When the tapes in the Robot have been migrated, the operator repeats the process. The Robot system can
be programmed to notify the operator by email or cell phone SMS etc. At the end of each tape’s migration, the Robot application performs post-migration commands such as calculating a SHA-1 checksum and moving the migration’s file set to long term archival storage.
We do recommend copying the output XML files and proxies to online storage, where various Arkki EVO can begin viewing them for the proper metadata logging.
Inspection of video cassettes and data entry
A user’s pre-existing data such as tape IDs, titles, barcode numbers, etc., is imported from their database into the Robot. This is useful for keeping pre-existing tape library metadata in context with the metadata created by Robot systems and importing it all back to the user’s database later. It is also useful in checking that the label of the videotape cassette is identical to that found in the imported data for a particular barcode or tape ID. SQL database is used internally, so any standard SQL query can be employed by the user. User data can even be imported to the database from a CSV file.
The first step in the tape preparation process is for the operator to select the tapes to be migrated from the media archive. Next, the operator scans the barcode on the storage media case (if there is one) and ensures that the information contained in the operator’s database matches the information on the storage media case label. An inspection process is then performed in accordance with the training provided and covers typical observable defects that can disqualify a media item from automatic processing. The operator makes a determination as to whether the storage media passes or fails each inspection step. For all storage media, the database generates a unique identifier compliant with SMPTE Unique Material Identifier (UMID) naming convention, optionally used as a barcode number. Or the user can scan any pre-existing barcode. The optional barcode is then automatically printed, and the operator affixes it to the media. The UMID barcode ties that specific videotape to the media database.
Load cassettes and upload related metadata
To begin the migration process, the operator loads prepped tapes into the robotic system. The operator closes the loading door on the Robot and begins the migration. By scanning the UMID barcode on the videotapes inside the Robot, the system verifies the contents of its internal library. This information is retrieved from the central database. Set system parameters for each job. Product ships from the factory with standard settings and templates, customized for the user if necessary. Templates can be changed but once set up, templates probably do not need to be changed by the day-to-day user, and in fact it may be undesirable to change them during the course of migrating a tape collection because the user may prefer to migrate all of the collection’s video with the same settings and workflow policiesSimple digitization process.
If any barcodes are unrecognized, or any VTRs are out of service, they are highlighted in red text with a description of the error. The system can be programmed to automatically initiate a number of functions when the tapes are finished, such as email the operator, begin a batch process to move or backup files, etc.
Monitor the system, processes, and errors
Usually, these Robots provide an Analysis Engine that can automatically monitor repair and log video and audio quality for every video frame. Analysis Engine offers signal processing:
• Full Frame Synchronizer• RF Dropout Compensation• Time Code Reader/Generator• Digital Comb Filter• AGC (Auto Gain Control)• ACC (Auto Chroma Control)• CTI (Chroma Transition Improvement)• NR (Digital Noise Reduction)
Analyze video recording for defects, create and save defect log for each recording
05
DIGITAL PRESERVATION: A Guide to Videotapes Digitization, Logging, and Archive
The Robot platform features well over 200 metrics about the analog video, analog signal, and the migration. The Robot can read a migration’s XML and graphically show its video and audio levels, dropouts and RF level, input presence, and servo lock, with scrolling and magnification. This can be useful in many ways, including logging, detecting video problems, etc. The XML graphs can be saved as PDF files and viewed later on an external computer.
Digitize the video recording
With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. The Robot can be set to automatically end migration if those levels continue beyond the user-defined duration to avoid wasting time and storage or to detect video segments for logging purposes.
The Robot performs three key functions during a migration:
1. Detect the end of programming and end the migration to save time and storage.
2. Monitor levels and log above-threshold excursions into the XML file.
3. See potential problems in the source video and, if desired, end migration as an Error.- The length of each Threshold’s ‘Duration’ effectively sets
its priority to function as a trigger. Shorter durations will trigger first, longer durations will trigger later, etc.
- ‘Servo Lock Threshold’ might be set to the shortest duration because without servo lock, the other Thresholds trigger anyway.
- ‘Input Loss Threshold’ might be set soon after Servo Lock to detect no video even if the tape is still playing.
- ‘Black Threshold’ and ‘RF Threshold’ might be set soon after Input Loss to detect the end of video recording
- ‘Audio Threshold’ might be set last to detect an audio problem when the video is OK.
- ‘Dropout Threshold’ might be set the shortest of all to detect damaged videotape or a clogged head in the source VTR.
User-selectable error correction for defectsThe Robot offers several automated error correction processes for tape and signal defects.
• ‘Comb Filter’ reduces interference between color and luminance in composite (CVBS) video. Enabling the Comb Filter reduces “hanging dots” (dot crawl) and cross-color artifacts.
• ‘Decoder AGC’ is Automatic Gain Control. The input video’s sync amplitude is measured, and the entire signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until sync levels are corrected.
• ‘Decoder ACC’ is Automatic Chroma Control. The input video’s color-burst is measured, and the chroma signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until chroma is corrected to standard levels. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder CTI’ is Chroma Transition Improvement, and sharpens the edges of colored objects.Setting Decoder CTI to ‘ON’ challenges video compression encoders to spend more bits on tracking those sharper edges so some users reserve it for higher bit rate encodings. This setting does not affect Component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder NR’ is digital noise reduction. Analog tapes, particularly U-matic and VHS, can be very noisy. Removing any portion of the noise can dramatically improve the quality of video compression, so the normal setting is ON. The user may insert external noise reduction equipment in the path between the source VTR and Solo, and in that case, Analysis Engine’s noise reduction should be set to OFF. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘RF Dropout Compensator’ – U-matic tape machines have an “RF out” which is an analog level indicating the amplitude of the RF carrier recovered from the videotape. If the RF level drops below a preset threshold, there will be no visible video, resulting in a dropout. When this occurs, the Analysis engine replaces that segment of missing video with video from the same area of the picture in the preceding frame of video.
Selectable Signal and Image Processing
At the start of a migration working shift or workday, checking that the source VTR is calibrated so a
collection of migrations will remain consistent in its video and audio levels is recommended. Calibration tapes are provided for the videotape format configured in the Robot. If the VTR calibration check returns an error message, the VTR may need service.
‘Proc Amp Controls’ are available for video adjustments. When using these controls, a waveform monitor and vectorscope are recommended to see their effects and avoid ‘illegal’ (outside standard) settings. Settings are saved in templates, which can be helpful when a collection of videotapes will benefit from consistent adjustments.
Each of the correction settings such as AGC, ACC, CTI, etc., can be switched on or off depending on the requirements of the project. These settings are retained in the Robot setup template and are used for each migration until the template is changed by someone with administrator privileges.
Output digital video
Source video and audio is digitized to the CCIR 601 standard (SDI), frame-synchronized and time-base corrected. This SDI signal is internally routed to video encoders along with a stream of the source analog video and analog audio source for monitoring.
Short-term storage of digital files produced during migration of digital video files and data is cached on Robot’s internal E: drive. The user can choose to monitor the migrating video and audio for logging or other reasons, or attend to other duties and return when the migration is complete, letting the Robot determine when the migration should end according to user settings like a long time of black, a time code mark out, a preset duration, a threshold of time with no video or servo lock, etc.
When the user agrees that the migration is complete, the cached files are wrapped and written to a “success folder” on Robot’s internal RAID disk array for retrieval by the Arkki EVO’s deeper storage and asset management system. The Robot can also write finished files to any networked destination. All encoded files can be “pulled” from the “Success directory” or “pushed”
by Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) to any directory of the user’s choosing, local or remote. With the Deep Archiving software (provided), the user can archive files into the tape library and automatically get some of the metadata into a Library.
Track entire process and create/save an audit trail or log file documenting each step and the entire process for each recording
The Robot creates more than 200 metadata fields during a videotape migration, plus 38 metadata fields about every video frame. When saved as an XML file, a typical video migration’s metadata file size can be 30 MB or more.
The robot metadata types include:
• Configurations and template (.sxt) used for this migration
• Analysis Engine and video encoder settings for this migration
• Tape Details about this migration, such as barcode, tape ID, description, user name, sequence (# of #), comments, cleaning and inspection status, migration results (log), etc.
• Settings and information about the output files (video and XML) generated during this migration, including Locations, names, sizes, elapsed time, SHA-1 checksum values, etc.
• Settings and information about the Source VTR used for this migration
• Settings and information about the Dub VTR and/or external encoder used for this migration (if any)
• Networking information about the Robot current connection and directories
• Information about the Robot’s factory build (software versions etc.)
• Number of video frames sampled in this migration, and frame-by-frame data about each:
- Frame index, frame count- Input presence, color presence- Time code, time code user groups
MEDIA FOUNDATION COMBINED WITH OFF-THE-SHELF TECHNOLOGIES
At the core of our offer is Arkki EVO, a powerful Digital Asset Management designed for large-scale, highly-configurable implementations. It manages assets, tracks metadata across the entire production workflow, and consistently drives both human and media workflows. Arkki EVO can be configured to address the full range of broadcast and content workflows, including archives, news, sports production, programs, new media content distribution, and VOD delivery.
Data-centric Digital Asset Manager
In this digital age, where the sheer amount and demand for content are unprecedented, and content access requires ubiquity, every organization faces the challenge of addressing explosive content growth while effectively managing libraries and adding value to their digital assets by making them available anywhere.
Simply put, the proliferation of content necessitates better ways to store and manage digital content—whether that be media files, branded materials, or documentation. MediaPower takes asset management to new heights with Arkki EVO, a powerful and innovative digital asset manager that enables you to store, catalog, share, edit, retrieve, and distribute digital assets quickly and efficiently.
Arkki EVO is a global content platform that lets you
manage all types of assets and asset correlations effectively.Built on a dynamic and scalable architecture, Arkki EVO lets you take control of your digital content through its data-driven and user-centered features, so that you can focus on your core business and less time on searching and managing the right digital asset.
Arkki EVO provides an online proxy library of digital content with enterprise-level features and powerful tools accessible from any web browser or mobile device. Users can upload, process, edit, download, and share multiple assets and projects, proofed with version history that enables monitoring and analysis of a digital asset’s updates and duplications.
An enterprise platform that meets the requirements of any media needs
At the core of Arkki EVO, is a robust document database server that combines a powerful multimedia Enterprise search, and multiple layers of application servers to handle several back-office processes. This is combined with a wide range of workflow and media management tools, as well as monitoring applications and fully integrated production tools.
Unique and Powerful Features
Arkki EVO incorporates a robust set of features from the types of files it supports, to unique and powerful data structures, built-in video editing capabilities, and OTT streaming capability.
Asset Collections
With Arkki EVO asset collections, you can easily create, edit, and share collections of assets between users. You can create dynamic data connected silos based on search criteria or static catalogs of assets, folders, and collections, and share them with multiple users while ensuring access levels and editing privileges.
File Types Supported
Arkki EVO supports a full range of multimedia files, images, and documents. It also provides an OCR feature for PDFs and Images:
• Video and Audio• JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, and other image file types
(OCR supported)• InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator• PDFs - raster and vector (OCR supported)• Microsoft Office - Word and Excel
Graph Database and Link Object
Arkki EVO uses a NoSQL graph database to manage infinite collections, documents, and custom fields. This provides ultimate flexibility in managing custom
metadata, categories, nested subcategories, and cascading objects. Combined with this, Arkki EVO features an innovative element—the Link Object, a particular type of data used to bond an asset to a network of objects inside the platform, creating dynamic and deep graph networks.
Storage Management
Arkki EVO supports heterogeneous disk spaces. Assets can be stored and managed in different storage and archive tiers for optimal balance of usage and performance requirements.
Standalone or Cloud-based
Arkki EVO orchestrates a number of distributed services following a true Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) that is simple to integrate with external ecosystems via API. Arkki EVO is developed to be hosted onto a single Virtual Machine— giving it the flexibility to be used as a standalone DAM-in-a-box” or forming part of a complex cloud infrastructure that features both horizontal and vertical scalability.
Semantic Search Engine
Arkki EVO incorporates a powerful search engine to
find any asset imported into the system quickly. It features an Elastic Graph engine that uses a semantic algorithm to contextualize data stored into the Arkki EVO platform and find correlations between assets.
Built-in Video Editing and Transcoding
Arkki EVO incorporates various video editing functions that help users handle and process raw video material. These include mark in/out, single frame extraction, sub-clips generation, adding metadata information to clips/sub-clips, uploading sub-clips as main clips, exporting to or downloading low-res or high-res, merging clips to single videos, exporting video frames as images, and even sending video clips to FTP of Public Cloud services.
It also features a built-in transcoding engine that accepts any standard video format (such as MPEG-2, XDCAM, DV, DNxHD, AVC-Intra, IMX, MPEG4, ApplePro Res, WMV wrapped MXF, MOV, and AVI, including MOV or MXF-wrapped 4K files), automatically generates low-resolution proxies in MPEG4, and allows users to create different file formats with optional watermarks.
Digital Asset Management Workflows
Arkki EVO streamlines your digital asset workflows – from importing, organizing, classifying, to delivering your digital assets, and even enabling triggers that automate workflow functions.
Collaboration Tools
Arkki EVO provides a full set of tools that allow different teams and user groups to work collaboratively on asset creation, licensing, marketing, down to distribution. These tools include rating and commenting, email and social media sharing, overlay video commenting, advanced tagging, and much more.
Multi-user and Sharing-friendly
Arkki EVO provides a complete user management system that allows administrators to define users and groups and assign different roles and access rights. Users also get their own user pages for tracking their
activities (such as uploads, edits, creation of groups or projects). Asset and project categories can also be assigned to certain users to control access to specific material.
Arkki EVO can also organize different assets into projects that can be made private, made available to selected users, and be assigned searchable metadata information. It can also generate public links to projects and to individual assets, making them shareable over the Internet. These links allow recipients to view and download low-res copies or for registered users, work directly on the linked project and its contents.
Rights Management Plugin
Ensuring control of copyrighted/licensed material is made easy with Arkki EVO’s Rights Management plugin. It lets you maintain control over assets and their data rights and enforce rules automatically from a single interface. Plugin features include:
• Ownership, permissions, restrictions• Retention and expiration• Licensing• Status and Notification triggers
Multi-tenancy
Sharing your digital assets outside your organization could be a tedious process, but that is made easy with Arkki EVO’s support for multi-tenancy. Arkki EVO lets you selectively share or distribute digital assets (or even collections) to user groups and external organizations (such as teams, subsidiaries, related companies, reseller networks, agency partners) while ensuring security and protecting confidential information.
Resource Optimization
Arkki EVO smartly utilizes the computing resources available to the system. Resource-intensive transcoding and processing tasks generally employ 100% of all CPU cores, rendering other functions virtually unusable. To combat this issue, Arkki EVO ensures that CPU and RAM resources are available for other services, providing a consistently fast response
from the system to users. Moreover, Arkki can also work in virtualized environments, significantly increasing its adaptability.
GDPR compliant
MediaPower fully respects the GDPR directives on privacy by design and by default. Thus, Arkki EVO has been developed to support this. Tokenization, cryptography, and advanced data management are core pillars in the design and development of Arkki EVO.
OTT Delivery
Each video asset imported into and managed by Arkki EVO can be delivered via OTT connector, a middleware that publishes VoD content to an IPTV, WebTV, or over the most important social networks through Mpeg-Dash protocol, HLS, and RTSP.
A.I. Integration
Arkki EVO provides connectors to Google, Amazon
Web Services, Microsoft and IBM Artificial Intelligence infrastructures which include, but not limited to, face recognition, brand presence, advanced OCR, speech-to-text, pedestrian detection, sensitive content detection, sports action classification, setting detection, and content, audio, and video classification.
Flexible and Configurable
Arkki EVO is structured to manage several types of assets and processes pipeline. Arkki EVO’s graph database, Link Object, advanced tagging, and the robust processing engine all work in tandem to let you create complex nested data collections, and customize and control the entire platform as appropriate—from a simple MAM, or large DAM, to archive libraries. For example, a media company can use Arkki EVO as simple Media Asset Manager, a large corporation can use the platform as personal cloud share, or a museum applies Arkki EVO as archive manager following the standard Dublin Core and EAD (Encoded Archival Description) and Berkeley Finding Aids Project (BFAP).
significance just now, as one of “the steps necessary to ensure … permanent accessibility”.
Our project goal is the following: make access copies into digital format that in some cases are in no way a replacement for the original – but they take pressure off the original, allowing it to be kept untouched in cold, dry conditions with very limited use of masters.
Our archive copies are as close as technically possible to the originals and can be used within this digital production and logging solution for the creation of ‘new masters’.
Also, the digitization scope here is to produce a ‘digital intermediate’ before finally producing a new digital master. This in order to use digital technology for restoration – because there are many defects that can be removed digitally in ways that could not be attempted by analog processing.
DATA SELECTION CONSIDERATION
In large scale projects, like this one, digitization strategy is the key. Selection: which material goes first? There is a lot of information about selection. Most managed collections already have considerable
“Preservation is the totality of the steps necessary to ensure the permanent accessibility – forever – of an audiovisual document with the maximum integrity.” - Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Association (CCAAA)
This document proposes a commercial and technological strategy in digitizing, logging, and archiving videotapes for the purpose of Digital Preservation.
01 | INTRODUCTION
DIGITIZATION OVERVIEW
Many activities contribute to “permanent accessibility – forever.” Just now, in the years of the 21st century, we are at a stage where much audiovisual material from the 20th century is in analog form – and most of the options for trying to obtain “permanent accessibility – forever” are digital options. So digitization is of huge
experience of selection, including:
• Selection of the material coming into the collection• Review of material at regular intervals, to decide about further retention
For a digitization and preservation process, the issue of selection begins with setting priorities. Generally, these are the following major factors to consider:
• Value of the material• Obsolescence of the format• Condition and life expectancy
For this specific project, we do expect that the Customer has already made a map of the collection – so these factors have already been assessed, and the collection has been divided into broad categories. The work that remains is to make another sort of map: a preservation plan covering the entire time necessary to deal with all your preservation needs. This can range from a 6-month plan to transfer a small amount of material from videotape to files, to a 10-year plan for the storage and metadata logging of an entire collection.
A preservation strategy is not a full preservation plan. For the strategy, the issue is sequence and timescale. All the elements in the preservation map that need attention are put in a priority sequence – and time information is added according to how long you want the work to last, or how long the funding lasts, or how long the material itself will last.
02 | USING NEW TECHNOLOGY
OPERATIONAL AREA DIVIDERS (OAD)
The purpose of the following chapter is to categorize the sub-elements (OAD = Operational Area Dividers) of the processing in four areas, as shown below:
• DIGANN: the digitization of analog media or non-native-file media
• CLEAV: clean-up of degraded audio and video signals
• MIRP: metadata ingestion, retrieval, and publication (MediaPower Arkki EVO Digital Asset Manager)
• DISAM: all of the above are sitting on a managed digital storage and asset managent platform. (this is the combination of the following elements: the local storage, the remote hybrid cloud storage, Arkki EVO, and a third archiving solution)
THEORY OF OPERATIONS
As per the design of the solution, there is a single possible scenery of operation, with a single variable, that is the optional use of an automatic video cassette preservation tool that is auspicated will run unsupervised and unattended as much as possible, night and day, so that it can transfer 24h/24 massive amounts of videotapes.
The system will be autonomous. It will transfer programs stored on cassettes without operator intervention, detect when the transfer quality is lower than expected, and take appropriate actions (re-clean, apply specific processes, try another VTR and reject if necessary).
The transferred programs will be stored on data files concurrently in multiple formats (i.e., the high-quality preservation format and browsing quality available via a web interface). They will be copied automatically into one or more (for security reasons) LTO-8 Digital Tapes.
The system will store information (PREPDATA) on the position of dropouts, RF level, and other relevant information, to prepare for possible subsequent
restoration.
System supervisor each work shift can evaluate the PREPDATA analysis and assign resources to proceed with the two following non-recursive path:
• If the digital material is badly, damaged action is taken to move it to the video editing software for the digital restoration process. After that, the “new” asset is re-inventoried into the MAM for proper metadata logging. A prompt is then shown to choose whether to maintain both the new asset as well as the original (uncut, unlogged, and unrestored) or to delete the master in favor of the new digital copy.
• If the digital material appears to be within the previously determined standards on media usability, the asset is processed directly into the Arkki EVO MAM for proper metadata logging. The entire process is applied to the low-quality proxy media, while the high-quality preservation asset is already safely stored into one or multiple LTO-8 tapes, as well as maintained online for a certain time (or indefinitely, mainly depending on the Customer investment into the online storage and Customer policies on media availability).
As mentioned earlier, the single variable in this project is the use (or not) of an automatic migration robotic tool. The following section explains in detail the solution advantages of using it. A subsequent chapter on Arkki EVO digital asset management touches on the non-use of an automatic migration robotic tool.
03 | AUTOMATIC CONTENT MIGRATION
SAVE TIME & MONEY with ROBOTIC AUTOMATIONA Robot can be integrated with Arkki EVO to migrate archival videotapes to digital files efficiently. These Robots are designed to migrate up to seven videotapes simultaneously, to one or several simultaneous digital file formats. The Robot evaluates, monitors, and documents the migration process and acts to identify and correct problems.
The final product is multiple file copies at preservation quality along with metadata that reports the quality of the original master.
Operating environment
The Robot can work on a continuous basis – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Manual labor is reduced to the simple tasks of prepping tapes for migration and loading/unloading the robotic tape handler bins. The Robot runs on standard power and requires no special
cooling.
Migration Workflow
Using the Robot, library staff will access videotapes and import their barcodes and other metadata to the Robot’s database. Metadata about the videotape collection may come from the library’s existing database(s), the Robot accession workflow, or both.
The Robot system can use the library’s existing barcodes or generate new barcodes as required.
Library staff brings groups of videotapes to the Robot and insert them in bins, removing any tapes already migrated. The operator uses the Robot application to initiate a scan of the barcodes on the tapes in the bins. When the barcodes have been read and identified in the database, the operator clicks “Start” and is then free to return to other duties.
When the tapes in the Robot have been migrated, the operator repeats the process. The Robot system can
be programmed to notify the operator by email or cell phone SMS etc. At the end of each tape’s migration, the Robot application performs post-migration commands such as calculating a SHA-1 checksum and moving the migration’s file set to long term archival storage.
We do recommend copying the output XML files and proxies to online storage, where various Arkki EVO can begin viewing them for the proper metadata logging.
Inspection of video cassettes and data entry
A user’s pre-existing data such as tape IDs, titles, barcode numbers, etc., is imported from their database into the Robot. This is useful for keeping pre-existing tape library metadata in context with the metadata created by Robot systems and importing it all back to the user’s database later. It is also useful in checking that the label of the videotape cassette is identical to that found in the imported data for a particular barcode or tape ID. SQL database is used internally, so any standard SQL query can be employed by the user. User data can even be imported to the database from a CSV file.
The first step in the tape preparation process is for the operator to select the tapes to be migrated from the media archive. Next, the operator scans the barcode on the storage media case (if there is one) and ensures that the information contained in the operator’s database matches the information on the storage media case label. An inspection process is then performed in accordance with the training provided and covers typical observable defects that can disqualify a media item from automatic processing. The operator makes a determination as to whether the storage media passes or fails each inspection step. For all storage media, the database generates a unique identifier compliant with SMPTE Unique Material Identifier (UMID) naming convention, optionally used as a barcode number. Or the user can scan any pre-existing barcode. The optional barcode is then automatically printed, and the operator affixes it to the media. The UMID barcode ties that specific videotape to the media database.
Load cassettes and upload related metadata
To begin the migration process, the operator loads prepped tapes into the robotic system. The operator closes the loading door on the Robot and begins the migration. By scanning the UMID barcode on the videotapes inside the Robot, the system verifies the contents of its internal library. This information is retrieved from the central database. Set system parameters for each job. Product ships from the factory with standard settings and templates, customized for the user if necessary. Templates can be changed but once set up, templates probably do not need to be changed by the day-to-day user, and in fact it may be undesirable to change them during the course of migrating a tape collection because the user may prefer to migrate all of the collection’s video with the same settings and workflow policiesSimple digitization process.
If any barcodes are unrecognized, or any VTRs are out of service, they are highlighted in red text with a description of the error. The system can be programmed to automatically initiate a number of functions when the tapes are finished, such as email the operator, begin a batch process to move or backup files, etc.
Monitor the system, processes, and errors
Usually, these Robots provide an Analysis Engine that can automatically monitor repair and log video and audio quality for every video frame. Analysis Engine offers signal processing:
• Full Frame Synchronizer• RF Dropout Compensation• Time Code Reader/Generator• Digital Comb Filter• AGC (Auto Gain Control)• ACC (Auto Chroma Control)• CTI (Chroma Transition Improvement)• NR (Digital Noise Reduction)
Analyze video recording for defects, create and save defect log for each recording
DIGITAL PRESERVATION: A Guide to Videotapes Digitization, Logging, and Archive
The Robot platform features well over 200 metrics about the analog video, analog signal, and the migration. The Robot can read a migration’s XML and graphically show its video and audio levels, dropouts and RF level, input presence, and servo lock, with scrolling and magnification. This can be useful in many ways, including logging, detecting video problems, etc. The XML graphs can be saved as PDF files and viewed later on an external computer.
Digitize the video recording
With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. The Robot can be set to automatically end migration if those levels continue beyond the user-defined duration to avoid wasting time and storage or to detect video segments for logging purposes.
The Robot performs three key functions during a migration:
1. Detect the end of programming and end the migration to save time and storage.
2. Monitor levels and log above-threshold excursions into the XML file.
3. See potential problems in the source video and, if desired, end migration as an Error.- The length of each Threshold’s ‘Duration’ effectively sets
its priority to function as a trigger. Shorter durations will trigger first, longer durations will trigger later, etc.
- ‘Servo Lock Threshold’ might be set to the shortest duration because without servo lock, the other Thresholds trigger anyway.
- ‘Input Loss Threshold’ might be set soon after Servo Lock to detect no video even if the tape is still playing.
- ‘Black Threshold’ and ‘RF Threshold’ might be set soon after Input Loss to detect the end of video recording
- ‘Audio Threshold’ might be set last to detect an audio problem when the video is OK.
- ‘Dropout Threshold’ might be set the shortest of all to detect damaged videotape or a clogged head in the source VTR.
User-selectable error correction for defectsThe Robot offers several automated error correction processes for tape and signal defects.
• ‘Comb Filter’ reduces interference between color and luminance in composite (CVBS) video. Enabling the Comb Filter reduces “hanging dots” (dot crawl) and cross-color artifacts.
• ‘Decoder AGC’ is Automatic Gain Control. The input video’s sync amplitude is measured, and the entire signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until sync levels are corrected.
• ‘Decoder ACC’ is Automatic Chroma Control. The input video’s color-burst is measured, and the chroma signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until chroma is corrected to standard levels. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder CTI’ is Chroma Transition Improvement, and sharpens the edges of colored objects.Setting Decoder CTI to ‘ON’ challenges video compression encoders to spend more bits on tracking those sharper edges so some users reserve it for higher bit rate encodings. This setting does not affect Component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder NR’ is digital noise reduction. Analog tapes, particularly U-matic and VHS, can be very noisy. Removing any portion of the noise can dramatically improve the quality of video compression, so the normal setting is ON. The user may insert external noise reduction equipment in the path between the source VTR and Solo, and in that case, Analysis Engine’s noise reduction should be set to OFF. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘RF Dropout Compensator’ – U-matic tape machines have an “RF out” which is an analog level indicating the amplitude of the RF carrier recovered from the videotape. If the RF level drops below a preset threshold, there will be no visible video, resulting in a dropout. When this occurs, the Analysis engine replaces that segment of missing video with video from the same area of the picture in the preceding frame of video.
Selectable Signal and Image Processing
At the start of a migration working shift or workday, checking that the source VTR is calibrated so a
collection of migrations will remain consistent in its video and audio levels is recommended. Calibration tapes are provided for the videotape format configured in the Robot. If the VTR calibration check returns an error message, the VTR may need service.
‘Proc Amp Controls’ are available for video adjustments. When using these controls, a waveform monitor and vectorscope are recommended to see their effects and avoid ‘illegal’ (outside standard) settings. Settings are saved in templates, which can be helpful when a collection of videotapes will benefit from consistent adjustments.
Each of the correction settings such as AGC, ACC, CTI, etc., can be switched on or off depending on the requirements of the project. These settings are retained in the Robot setup template and are used for each migration until the template is changed by someone with administrator privileges.
Output digital video
Source video and audio is digitized to the CCIR 601 standard (SDI), frame-synchronized and time-base corrected. This SDI signal is internally routed to video encoders along with a stream of the source analog video and analog audio source for monitoring.
Short-term storage of digital files produced during migration of digital video files and data is cached on Robot’s internal E: drive. The user can choose to monitor the migrating video and audio for logging or other reasons, or attend to other duties and return when the migration is complete, letting the Robot determine when the migration should end according to user settings like a long time of black, a time code mark out, a preset duration, a threshold of time with no video or servo lock, etc.
When the user agrees that the migration is complete, the cached files are wrapped and written to a “success folder” on Robot’s internal RAID disk array for retrieval by the Arkki EVO’s deeper storage and asset management system. The Robot can also write finished files to any networked destination. All encoded files can be “pulled” from the “Success directory” or “pushed”
by Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) to any directory of the user’s choosing, local or remote. With the Deep Archiving software (provided), the user can archive files into the tape library and automatically get some of the metadata into a Library.
Track entire process and create/save an audit trail or log file documenting each step and the entire process for each recording
The Robot creates more than 200 metadata fields during a videotape migration, plus 38 metadata fields about every video frame. When saved as an XML file, a typical video migration’s metadata file size can be 30 MB or more.
The robot metadata types include:
• Configurations and template (.sxt) used for this migration
• Analysis Engine and video encoder settings for this migration
• Tape Details about this migration, such as barcode, tape ID, description, user name, sequence (# of #), comments, cleaning and inspection status, migration results (log), etc.
• Settings and information about the output files (video and XML) generated during this migration, including Locations, names, sizes, elapsed time, SHA-1 checksum values, etc.
• Settings and information about the Source VTR used for this migration
• Settings and information about the Dub VTR and/or external encoder used for this migration (if any)
• Networking information about the Robot current connection and directories
• Information about the Robot’s factory build (software versions etc.)
• Number of video frames sampled in this migration, and frame-by-frame data about each:
- Frame index, frame count- Input presence, color presence- Time code, time code user groups
MEDIA FOUNDATION COMBINED WITH OFF-THE-SHELF TECHNOLOGIES
At the core of our offer is Arkki EVO, a powerful Digital Asset Management designed for large-scale, highly-configurable implementations. It manages assets, tracks metadata across the entire production workflow, and consistently drives both human and media workflows. Arkki EVO can be configured to address the full range of broadcast and content workflows, including archives, news, sports production, programs, new media content distribution, and VOD delivery.
Data-centric Digital Asset Manager
In this digital age, where the sheer amount and demand for content are unprecedented, and content access requires ubiquity, every organization faces the challenge of addressing explosive content growth while effectively managing libraries and adding value to their digital assets by making them available anywhere.
Simply put, the proliferation of content necessitates better ways to store and manage digital content—whether that be media files, branded materials, or documentation. MediaPower takes asset management to new heights with Arkki EVO, a powerful and innovative digital asset manager that enables you to store, catalog, share, edit, retrieve, and distribute digital assets quickly and efficiently.
Arkki EVO is a global content platform that lets you
manage all types of assets and asset correlations effectively.Built on a dynamic and scalable architecture, Arkki EVO lets you take control of your digital content through its data-driven and user-centered features, so that you can focus on your core business and less time on searching and managing the right digital asset.
Arkki EVO provides an online proxy library of digital content with enterprise-level features and powerful tools accessible from any web browser or mobile device. Users can upload, process, edit, download, and share multiple assets and projects, proofed with version history that enables monitoring and analysis of a digital asset’s updates and duplications.
An enterprise platform that meets the requirements of any media needs
At the core of Arkki EVO, is a robust document database server that combines a powerful multimedia Enterprise search, and multiple layers of application servers to handle several back-office processes. This is combined with a wide range of workflow and media management tools, as well as monitoring applications and fully integrated production tools.
Unique and Powerful Features
Arkki EVO incorporates a robust set of features from the types of files it supports, to unique and powerful data structures, built-in video editing capabilities, and OTT streaming capability.
Asset Collections
With Arkki EVO asset collections, you can easily create, edit, and share collections of assets between users. You can create dynamic data connected silos based on search criteria or static catalogs of assets, folders, and collections, and share them with multiple users while ensuring access levels and editing privileges.
File Types Supported
Arkki EVO supports a full range of multimedia files, images, and documents. It also provides an OCR feature for PDFs and Images:
• Video and Audio• JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, and other image file types
(OCR supported)• InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator• PDFs - raster and vector (OCR supported)• Microsoft Office - Word and Excel
Graph Database and Link Object
Arkki EVO uses a NoSQL graph database to manage infinite collections, documents, and custom fields. This provides ultimate flexibility in managing custom
metadata, categories, nested subcategories, and cascading objects. Combined with this, Arkki EVO features an innovative element—the Link Object, a particular type of data used to bond an asset to a network of objects inside the platform, creating dynamic and deep graph networks.
Storage Management
Arkki EVO supports heterogeneous disk spaces. Assets can be stored and managed in different storage and archive tiers for optimal balance of usage and performance requirements.
Standalone or Cloud-based
Arkki EVO orchestrates a number of distributed services following a true Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) that is simple to integrate with external ecosystems via API. Arkki EVO is developed to be hosted onto a single Virtual Machine— giving it the flexibility to be used as a standalone DAM-in-a-box” or forming part of a complex cloud infrastructure that features both horizontal and vertical scalability.
Semantic Search Engine
Arkki EVO incorporates a powerful search engine to
find any asset imported into the system quickly. It features an Elastic Graph engine that uses a semantic algorithm to contextualize data stored into the Arkki EVO platform and find correlations between assets.
Built-in Video Editing and Transcoding
Arkki EVO incorporates various video editing functions that help users handle and process raw video material. These include mark in/out, single frame extraction, sub-clips generation, adding metadata information to clips/sub-clips, uploading sub-clips as main clips, exporting to or downloading low-res or high-res, merging clips to single videos, exporting video frames as images, and even sending video clips to FTP of Public Cloud services.
It also features a built-in transcoding engine that accepts any standard video format (such as MPEG-2, XDCAM, DV, DNxHD, AVC-Intra, IMX, MPEG4, ApplePro Res, WMV wrapped MXF, MOV, and AVI, including MOV or MXF-wrapped 4K files), automatically generates low-resolution proxies in MPEG4, and allows users to create different file formats with optional watermarks.
Digital Asset Management Workflows
Arkki EVO streamlines your digital asset workflows – from importing, organizing, classifying, to delivering your digital assets, and even enabling triggers that automate workflow functions.
Collaboration Tools
Arkki EVO provides a full set of tools that allow different teams and user groups to work collaboratively on asset creation, licensing, marketing, down to distribution. These tools include rating and commenting, email and social media sharing, overlay video commenting, advanced tagging, and much more.
Multi-user and Sharing-friendly
Arkki EVO provides a complete user management system that allows administrators to define users and groups and assign different roles and access rights. Users also get their own user pages for tracking their
activities (such as uploads, edits, creation of groups or projects). Asset and project categories can also be assigned to certain users to control access to specific material.
Arkki EVO can also organize different assets into projects that can be made private, made available to selected users, and be assigned searchable metadata information. It can also generate public links to projects and to individual assets, making them shareable over the Internet. These links allow recipients to view and download low-res copies or for registered users, work directly on the linked project and its contents.
Rights Management Plugin
Ensuring control of copyrighted/licensed material is made easy with Arkki EVO’s Rights Management plugin. It lets you maintain control over assets and their data rights and enforce rules automatically from a single interface. Plugin features include:
• Ownership, permissions, restrictions• Retention and expiration• Licensing• Status and Notification triggers
Multi-tenancy
Sharing your digital assets outside your organization could be a tedious process, but that is made easy with Arkki EVO’s support for multi-tenancy. Arkki EVO lets you selectively share or distribute digital assets (or even collections) to user groups and external organizations (such as teams, subsidiaries, related companies, reseller networks, agency partners) while ensuring security and protecting confidential information.
Resource Optimization
Arkki EVO smartly utilizes the computing resources available to the system. Resource-intensive transcoding and processing tasks generally employ 100% of all CPU cores, rendering other functions virtually unusable. To combat this issue, Arkki EVO ensures that CPU and RAM resources are available for other services, providing a consistently fast response
from the system to users. Moreover, Arkki can also work in virtualized environments, significantly increasing its adaptability.
GDPR compliant
MediaPower fully respects the GDPR directives on privacy by design and by default. Thus, Arkki EVO has been developed to support this. Tokenization, cryptography, and advanced data management are core pillars in the design and development of Arkki EVO.
OTT Delivery
Each video asset imported into and managed by Arkki EVO can be delivered via OTT connector, a middleware that publishes VoD content to an IPTV, WebTV, or over the most important social networks through Mpeg-Dash protocol, HLS, and RTSP.
A.I. Integration
Arkki EVO provides connectors to Google, Amazon
Web Services, Microsoft and IBM Artificial Intelligence infrastructures which include, but not limited to, face recognition, brand presence, advanced OCR, speech-to-text, pedestrian detection, sensitive content detection, sports action classification, setting detection, and content, audio, and video classification.
Flexible and Configurable
Arkki EVO is structured to manage several types of assets and processes pipeline. Arkki EVO’s graph database, Link Object, advanced tagging, and the robust processing engine all work in tandem to let you create complex nested data collections, and customize and control the entire platform as appropriate—from a simple MAM, or large DAM, to archive libraries. For example, a media company can use Arkki EVO as simple Media Asset Manager, a large corporation can use the platform as personal cloud share, or a museum applies Arkki EVO as archive manager following the standard Dublin Core and EAD (Encoded Archival Description) and Berkeley Finding Aids Project (BFAP).
significance just now, as one of “the steps necessary to ensure … permanent accessibility”.
Our project goal is the following: make access copies into digital format that in some cases are in no way a replacement for the original – but they take pressure off the original, allowing it to be kept untouched in cold, dry conditions with very limited use of masters.
Our archive copies are as close as technically possible to the originals and can be used within this digital production and logging solution for the creation of ‘new masters’.
Also, the digitization scope here is to produce a ‘digital intermediate’ before finally producing a new digital master. This in order to use digital technology for restoration – because there are many defects that can be removed digitally in ways that could not be attempted by analog processing.
DATA SELECTION CONSIDERATION
In large scale projects, like this one, digitization strategy is the key. Selection: which material goes first? There is a lot of information about selection. Most managed collections already have considerable
“Preservation is the totality of the steps necessary to ensure the permanent accessibility – forever – of an audiovisual document with the maximum integrity.” - Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Association (CCAAA)
This document proposes a commercial and technological strategy in digitizing, logging, and archiving videotapes for the purpose of Digital Preservation.
01 | INTRODUCTION
DIGITIZATION OVERVIEW
Many activities contribute to “permanent accessibility – forever.” Just now, in the years of the 21st century, we are at a stage where much audiovisual material from the 20th century is in analog form – and most of the options for trying to obtain “permanent accessibility – forever” are digital options. So digitization is of huge
experience of selection, including:
• Selection of the material coming into the collection• Review of material at regular intervals, to decide about further retention
For a digitization and preservation process, the issue of selection begins with setting priorities. Generally, these are the following major factors to consider:
• Value of the material• Obsolescence of the format• Condition and life expectancy
For this specific project, we do expect that the Customer has already made a map of the collection – so these factors have already been assessed, and the collection has been divided into broad categories. The work that remains is to make another sort of map: a preservation plan covering the entire time necessary to deal with all your preservation needs. This can range from a 6-month plan to transfer a small amount of material from videotape to files, to a 10-year plan for the storage and metadata logging of an entire collection.
A preservation strategy is not a full preservation plan. For the strategy, the issue is sequence and timescale. All the elements in the preservation map that need attention are put in a priority sequence – and time information is added according to how long you want the work to last, or how long the funding lasts, or how long the material itself will last.
02 | USING NEW TECHNOLOGY
OPERATIONAL AREA DIVIDERS (OAD)
The purpose of the following chapter is to categorize the sub-elements (OAD = Operational Area Dividers) of the processing in four areas, as shown below:
• DIGANN: the digitization of analog media or non-native-file media
• CLEAV: clean-up of degraded audio and video signals
• MIRP: metadata ingestion, retrieval, and publication (MediaPower Arkki EVO Digital Asset Manager)
• DISAM: all of the above are sitting on a managed digital storage and asset managent platform. (this is the combination of the following elements: the local storage, the remote hybrid cloud storage, Arkki EVO, and a third archiving solution)
THEORY OF OPERATIONS
As per the design of the solution, there is a single possible scenery of operation, with a single variable, that is the optional use of an automatic video cassette preservation tool that is auspicated will run unsupervised and unattended as much as possible, night and day, so that it can transfer 24h/24 massive amounts of videotapes.
The system will be autonomous. It will transfer programs stored on cassettes without operator intervention, detect when the transfer quality is lower than expected, and take appropriate actions (re-clean, apply specific processes, try another VTR and reject if necessary).
The transferred programs will be stored on data files concurrently in multiple formats (i.e., the high-quality preservation format and browsing quality available via a web interface). They will be copied automatically into one or more (for security reasons) LTO-8 Digital Tapes.
The system will store information (PREPDATA) on the position of dropouts, RF level, and other relevant information, to prepare for possible subsequent
restoration.
System supervisor each work shift can evaluate the PREPDATA analysis and assign resources to proceed with the two following non-recursive path:
• If the digital material is badly, damaged action is taken to move it to the video editing software for the digital restoration process. After that, the “new” asset is re-inventoried into the MAM for proper metadata logging. A prompt is then shown to choose whether to maintain both the new asset as well as the original (uncut, unlogged, and unrestored) or to delete the master in favor of the new digital copy.
• If the digital material appears to be within the previously determined standards on media usability, the asset is processed directly into the Arkki EVO MAM for proper metadata logging. The entire process is applied to the low-quality proxy media, while the high-quality preservation asset is already safely stored into one or multiple LTO-8 tapes, as well as maintained online for a certain time (or indefinitely, mainly depending on the Customer investment into the online storage and Customer policies on media availability).
As mentioned earlier, the single variable in this project is the use (or not) of an automatic migration robotic tool. The following section explains in detail the solution advantages of using it. A subsequent chapter on Arkki EVO digital asset management touches on the non-use of an automatic migration robotic tool.
03 | AUTOMATIC CONTENT MIGRATION
SAVE TIME & MONEY with ROBOTIC AUTOMATIONA Robot can be integrated with Arkki EVO to migrate archival videotapes to digital files efficiently. These Robots are designed to migrate up to seven videotapes simultaneously, to one or several simultaneous digital file formats. The Robot evaluates, monitors, and documents the migration process and acts to identify and correct problems.
The final product is multiple file copies at preservation quality along with metadata that reports the quality of the original master.
Operating environment
The Robot can work on a continuous basis – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Manual labor is reduced to the simple tasks of prepping tapes for migration and loading/unloading the robotic tape handler bins. The Robot runs on standard power and requires no special
cooling.
Migration Workflow
Using the Robot, library staff will access videotapes and import their barcodes and other metadata to the Robot’s database. Metadata about the videotape collection may come from the library’s existing database(s), the Robot accession workflow, or both.
The Robot system can use the library’s existing barcodes or generate new barcodes as required.
Library staff brings groups of videotapes to the Robot and insert them in bins, removing any tapes already migrated. The operator uses the Robot application to initiate a scan of the barcodes on the tapes in the bins. When the barcodes have been read and identified in the database, the operator clicks “Start” and is then free to return to other duties.
When the tapes in the Robot have been migrated, the operator repeats the process. The Robot system can
be programmed to notify the operator by email or cell phone SMS etc. At the end of each tape’s migration, the Robot application performs post-migration commands such as calculating a SHA-1 checksum and moving the migration’s file set to long term archival storage.
We do recommend copying the output XML files and proxies to online storage, where various Arkki EVO can begin viewing them for the proper metadata logging.
Inspection of video cassettes and data entry
A user’s pre-existing data such as tape IDs, titles, barcode numbers, etc., is imported from their database into the Robot. This is useful for keeping pre-existing tape library metadata in context with the metadata created by Robot systems and importing it all back to the user’s database later. It is also useful in checking that the label of the videotape cassette is identical to that found in the imported data for a particular barcode or tape ID. SQL database is used internally, so any standard SQL query can be employed by the user. User data can even be imported to the database from a CSV file.
The first step in the tape preparation process is for the operator to select the tapes to be migrated from the media archive. Next, the operator scans the barcode on the storage media case (if there is one) and ensures that the information contained in the operator’s database matches the information on the storage media case label. An inspection process is then performed in accordance with the training provided and covers typical observable defects that can disqualify a media item from automatic processing. The operator makes a determination as to whether the storage media passes or fails each inspection step. For all storage media, the database generates a unique identifier compliant with SMPTE Unique Material Identifier (UMID) naming convention, optionally used as a barcode number. Or the user can scan any pre-existing barcode. The optional barcode is then automatically printed, and the operator affixes it to the media. The UMID barcode ties that specific videotape to the media database.
Load cassettes and upload related metadata
To begin the migration process, the operator loads prepped tapes into the robotic system. The operator closes the loading door on the Robot and begins the migration. By scanning the UMID barcode on the videotapes inside the Robot, the system verifies the contents of its internal library. This information is retrieved from the central database. Set system parameters for each job. Product ships from the factory with standard settings and templates, customized for the user if necessary. Templates can be changed but once set up, templates probably do not need to be changed by the day-to-day user, and in fact it may be undesirable to change them during the course of migrating a tape collection because the user may prefer to migrate all of the collection’s video with the same settings and workflow policiesSimple digitization process.
If any barcodes are unrecognized, or any VTRs are out of service, they are highlighted in red text with a description of the error. The system can be programmed to automatically initiate a number of functions when the tapes are finished, such as email the operator, begin a batch process to move or backup files, etc.
Monitor the system, processes, and errors
Usually, these Robots provide an Analysis Engine that can automatically monitor repair and log video and audio quality for every video frame. Analysis Engine offers signal processing:
• Full Frame Synchronizer• RF Dropout Compensation• Time Code Reader/Generator• Digital Comb Filter• AGC (Auto Gain Control)• ACC (Auto Chroma Control)• CTI (Chroma Transition Improvement)• NR (Digital Noise Reduction)
Analyze video recording for defects, create and save defect log for each recording
The Robot platform features well over 200 metrics about the analog video, analog signal, and the migration. The Robot can read a migration’s XML and graphically show its video and audio levels, dropouts and RF level, input presence, and servo lock, with scrolling and magnification. This can be useful in many ways, including logging, detecting video problems, etc. The XML graphs can be saved as PDF files and viewed later on an external computer.
Digitize the video recording
With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. The Robot can be set to automatically end migration if those levels continue beyond the user-defined duration to avoid wasting time and storage or to detect video segments for logging purposes.
The Robot performs three key functions during a migration:
1. Detect the end of programming and end the migration to save time and storage.
2. Monitor levels and log above-threshold excursions into the XML file.
3. See potential problems in the source video and, if desired, end migration as an Error.- The length of each Threshold’s ‘Duration’ effectively sets
its priority to function as a trigger. Shorter durations will trigger first, longer durations will trigger later, etc.
- ‘Servo Lock Threshold’ might be set to the shortest duration because without servo lock, the other Thresholds trigger anyway.
- ‘Input Loss Threshold’ might be set soon after Servo Lock to detect no video even if the tape is still playing.
- ‘Black Threshold’ and ‘RF Threshold’ might be set soon after Input Loss to detect the end of video recording
- ‘Audio Threshold’ might be set last to detect an audio problem when the video is OK.
- ‘Dropout Threshold’ might be set the shortest of all to detect damaged videotape or a clogged head in the source VTR.
User-selectable error correction for defectsThe Robot offers several automated error correction processes for tape and signal defects.
• ‘Comb Filter’ reduces interference between color and luminance in composite (CVBS) video. Enabling the Comb Filter reduces “hanging dots” (dot crawl) and cross-color artifacts.
• ‘Decoder AGC’ is Automatic Gain Control. The input video’s sync amplitude is measured, and the entire signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until sync levels are corrected.
• ‘Decoder ACC’ is Automatic Chroma Control. The input video’s color-burst is measured, and the chroma signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until chroma is corrected to standard levels. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder CTI’ is Chroma Transition Improvement, and sharpens the edges of colored objects.Setting Decoder CTI to ‘ON’ challenges video compression encoders to spend more bits on tracking those sharper edges so some users reserve it for higher bit rate encodings. This setting does not affect Component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder NR’ is digital noise reduction. Analog tapes, particularly U-matic and VHS, can be very noisy. Removing any portion of the noise can dramatically improve the quality of video compression, so the normal setting is ON. The user may insert external noise reduction equipment in the path between the source VTR and Solo, and in that case, Analysis Engine’s noise reduction should be set to OFF. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘RF Dropout Compensator’ – U-matic tape machines have an “RF out” which is an analog level indicating the amplitude of the RF carrier recovered from the videotape. If the RF level drops below a preset threshold, there will be no visible video, resulting in a dropout. When this occurs, the Analysis engine replaces that segment of missing video with video from the same area of the picture in the preceding frame of video.
Selectable Signal and Image Processing
At the start of a migration working shift or workday, checking that the source VTR is calibrated so a
collection of migrations will remain consistent in its video and audio levels is recommended. Calibration tapes are provided for the videotape format configured in the Robot. If the VTR calibration check returns an error message, the VTR may need service.
‘Proc Amp Controls’ are available for video adjustments. When using these controls, a waveform monitor and vectorscope are recommended to see their effects and avoid ‘illegal’ (outside standard) settings. Settings are saved in templates, which can be helpful when a collection of videotapes will benefit from consistent adjustments.
Each of the correction settings such as AGC, ACC, CTI, etc., can be switched on or off depending on the requirements of the project. These settings are retained in the Robot setup template and are used for each migration until the template is changed by someone with administrator privileges.
Output digital video
Source video and audio is digitized to the CCIR 601 standard (SDI), frame-synchronized and time-base corrected. This SDI signal is internally routed to video encoders along with a stream of the source analog video and analog audio source for monitoring.
Short-term storage of digital files produced during migration of digital video files and data is cached on Robot’s internal E: drive. The user can choose to monitor the migrating video and audio for logging or other reasons, or attend to other duties and return when the migration is complete, letting the Robot determine when the migration should end according to user settings like a long time of black, a time code mark out, a preset duration, a threshold of time with no video or servo lock, etc.
When the user agrees that the migration is complete, the cached files are wrapped and written to a “success folder” on Robot’s internal RAID disk array for retrieval by the Arkki EVO’s deeper storage and asset management system. The Robot can also write finished files to any networked destination. All encoded files can be “pulled” from the “Success directory” or “pushed”
by Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) to any directory of the user’s choosing, local or remote. With the Deep Archiving software (provided), the user can archive files into the tape library and automatically get some of the metadata into a Library.
Track entire process and create/save an audit trail or log file documenting each step and the entire process for each recording
The Robot creates more than 200 metadata fields during a videotape migration, plus 38 metadata fields about every video frame. When saved as an XML file, a typical video migration’s metadata file size can be 30 MB or more.
The robot metadata types include:
• Configurations and template (.sxt) used for this migration
• Analysis Engine and video encoder settings for this migration
• Tape Details about this migration, such as barcode, tape ID, description, user name, sequence (# of #), comments, cleaning and inspection status, migration results (log), etc.
• Settings and information about the output files (video and XML) generated during this migration, including Locations, names, sizes, elapsed time, SHA-1 checksum values, etc.
• Settings and information about the Source VTR used for this migration
• Settings and information about the Dub VTR and/or external encoder used for this migration (if any)
• Networking information about the Robot current connection and directories
• Information about the Robot’s factory build (software versions etc.)
• Number of video frames sampled in this migration, and frame-by-frame data about each:
- Frame index, frame count- Input presence, color presence- Time code, time code user groups
DIGITAL PRESERVATION: A Guide to Videotapes Digitization, Logging, and Archive
MEDIA FOUNDATION COMBINED WITH OFF-THE-SHELF TECHNOLOGIES
At the core of our offer is Arkki EVO, a powerful Digital Asset Management designed for large-scale, highly-configurable implementations. It manages assets, tracks metadata across the entire production workflow, and consistently drives both human and media workflows. Arkki EVO can be configured to address the full range of broadcast and content workflows, including archives, news, sports production, programs, new media content distribution, and VOD delivery.
Data-centric Digital Asset Manager
In this digital age, where the sheer amount and demand for content are unprecedented, and content access requires ubiquity, every organization faces the challenge of addressing explosive content growth while effectively managing libraries and adding value to their digital assets by making them available anywhere.
Simply put, the proliferation of content necessitates better ways to store and manage digital content—whether that be media files, branded materials, or documentation. MediaPower takes asset management to new heights with Arkki EVO, a powerful and innovative digital asset manager that enables you to store, catalog, share, edit, retrieve, and distribute digital assets quickly and efficiently.
Arkki EVO is a global content platform that lets you
manage all types of assets and asset correlations effectively.Built on a dynamic and scalable architecture, Arkki EVO lets you take control of your digital content through its data-driven and user-centered features, so that you can focus on your core business and less time on searching and managing the right digital asset.
Arkki EVO provides an online proxy library of digital content with enterprise-level features and powerful tools accessible from any web browser or mobile device. Users can upload, process, edit, download, and share multiple assets and projects, proofed with version history that enables monitoring and analysis of a digital asset’s updates and duplications.
An enterprise platform that meets the requirements of any media needs
At the core of Arkki EVO, is a robust document database server that combines a powerful multimedia Enterprise search, and multiple layers of application servers to handle several back-office processes. This is combined with a wide range of workflow and media management tools, as well as monitoring applications and fully integrated production tools.
Unique and Powerful Features
Arkki EVO incorporates a robust set of features from the types of files it supports, to unique and powerful data structures, built-in video editing capabilities, and OTT streaming capability.
Asset Collections
With Arkki EVO asset collections, you can easily create, edit, and share collections of assets between users. You can create dynamic data connected silos based on search criteria or static catalogs of assets, folders, and collections, and share them with multiple users while ensuring access levels and editing privileges.
File Types Supported
Arkki EVO supports a full range of multimedia files, images, and documents. It also provides an OCR feature for PDFs and Images:
• Video and Audio• JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, and other image file types
(OCR supported)• InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator• PDFs - raster and vector (OCR supported)• Microsoft Office - Word and Excel
Graph Database and Link Object
Arkki EVO uses a NoSQL graph database to manage infinite collections, documents, and custom fields. This provides ultimate flexibility in managing custom
metadata, categories, nested subcategories, and cascading objects. Combined with this, Arkki EVO features an innovative element—the Link Object, a particular type of data used to bond an asset to a network of objects inside the platform, creating dynamic and deep graph networks.
Storage Management
Arkki EVO supports heterogeneous disk spaces. Assets can be stored and managed in different storage and archive tiers for optimal balance of usage and performance requirements.
Standalone or Cloud-based
Arkki EVO orchestrates a number of distributed services following a true Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) that is simple to integrate with external ecosystems via API. Arkki EVO is developed to be hosted onto a single Virtual Machine— giving it the flexibility to be used as a standalone DAM-in-a-box” or forming part of a complex cloud infrastructure that features both horizontal and vertical scalability.
Semantic Search Engine
Arkki EVO incorporates a powerful search engine to
find any asset imported into the system quickly. It features an Elastic Graph engine that uses a semantic algorithm to contextualize data stored into the Arkki EVO platform and find correlations between assets.
Built-in Video Editing and Transcoding
Arkki EVO incorporates various video editing functions that help users handle and process raw video material. These include mark in/out, single frame extraction, sub-clips generation, adding metadata information to clips/sub-clips, uploading sub-clips as main clips, exporting to or downloading low-res or high-res, merging clips to single videos, exporting video frames as images, and even sending video clips to FTP of Public Cloud services.
It also features a built-in transcoding engine that accepts any standard video format (such as MPEG-2, XDCAM, DV, DNxHD, AVC-Intra, IMX, MPEG4, ApplePro Res, WMV wrapped MXF, MOV, and AVI, including MOV or MXF-wrapped 4K files), automatically generates low-resolution proxies in MPEG4, and allows users to create different file formats with optional watermarks.
Digital Asset Management Workflows
Arkki EVO streamlines your digital asset workflows – from importing, organizing, classifying, to delivering your digital assets, and even enabling triggers that automate workflow functions.
Collaboration Tools
Arkki EVO provides a full set of tools that allow different teams and user groups to work collaboratively on asset creation, licensing, marketing, down to distribution. These tools include rating and commenting, email and social media sharing, overlay video commenting, advanced tagging, and much more.
Multi-user and Sharing-friendly
Arkki EVO provides a complete user management system that allows administrators to define users and groups and assign different roles and access rights. Users also get their own user pages for tracking their
activities (such as uploads, edits, creation of groups or projects). Asset and project categories can also be assigned to certain users to control access to specific material.
Arkki EVO can also organize different assets into projects that can be made private, made available to selected users, and be assigned searchable metadata information. It can also generate public links to projects and to individual assets, making them shareable over the Internet. These links allow recipients to view and download low-res copies or for registered users, work directly on the linked project and its contents.
Rights Management Plugin
Ensuring control of copyrighted/licensed material is made easy with Arkki EVO’s Rights Management plugin. It lets you maintain control over assets and their data rights and enforce rules automatically from a single interface. Plugin features include:
• Ownership, permissions, restrictions• Retention and expiration• Licensing• Status and Notification triggers
Multi-tenancy
Sharing your digital assets outside your organization could be a tedious process, but that is made easy with Arkki EVO’s support for multi-tenancy. Arkki EVO lets you selectively share or distribute digital assets (or even collections) to user groups and external organizations (such as teams, subsidiaries, related companies, reseller networks, agency partners) while ensuring security and protecting confidential information.
Resource Optimization
Arkki EVO smartly utilizes the computing resources available to the system. Resource-intensive transcoding and processing tasks generally employ 100% of all CPU cores, rendering other functions virtually unusable. To combat this issue, Arkki EVO ensures that CPU and RAM resources are available for other services, providing a consistently fast response
from the system to users. Moreover, Arkki can also work in virtualized environments, significantly increasing its adaptability.
GDPR compliant
MediaPower fully respects the GDPR directives on privacy by design and by default. Thus, Arkki EVO has been developed to support this. Tokenization, cryptography, and advanced data management are core pillars in the design and development of Arkki EVO.
OTT Delivery
Each video asset imported into and managed by Arkki EVO can be delivered via OTT connector, a middleware that publishes VoD content to an IPTV, WebTV, or over the most important social networks through Mpeg-Dash protocol, HLS, and RTSP.
A.I. Integration
Arkki EVO provides connectors to Google, Amazon
Web Services, Microsoft and IBM Artificial Intelligence infrastructures which include, but not limited to, face recognition, brand presence, advanced OCR, speech-to-text, pedestrian detection, sensitive content detection, sports action classification, setting detection, and content, audio, and video classification.
Flexible and Configurable
Arkki EVO is structured to manage several types of assets and processes pipeline. Arkki EVO’s graph database, Link Object, advanced tagging, and the robust processing engine all work in tandem to let you create complex nested data collections, and customize and control the entire platform as appropriate—from a simple MAM, or large DAM, to archive libraries. For example, a media company can use Arkki EVO as simple Media Asset Manager, a large corporation can use the platform as personal cloud share, or a museum applies Arkki EVO as archive manager following the standard Dublin Core and EAD (Encoded Archival Description) and Berkeley Finding Aids Project (BFAP).
significance just now, as one of “the steps necessary to ensure … permanent accessibility”.
Our project goal is the following: make access copies into digital format that in some cases are in no way a replacement for the original – but they take pressure off the original, allowing it to be kept untouched in cold, dry conditions with very limited use of masters.
Our archive copies are as close as technically possible to the originals and can be used within this digital production and logging solution for the creation of ‘new masters’.
Also, the digitization scope here is to produce a ‘digital intermediate’ before finally producing a new digital master. This in order to use digital technology for restoration – because there are many defects that can be removed digitally in ways that could not be attempted by analog processing.
DATA SELECTION CONSIDERATION
In large scale projects, like this one, digitization strategy is the key. Selection: which material goes first? There is a lot of information about selection. Most managed collections already have considerable
“Preservation is the totality of the steps necessary to ensure the permanent accessibility – forever – of an audiovisual document with the maximum integrity.” - Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Association (CCAAA)
This document proposes a commercial and technological strategy in digitizing, logging, and archiving videotapes for the purpose of Digital Preservation.
01 | INTRODUCTION
DIGITIZATION OVERVIEW
Many activities contribute to “permanent accessibility – forever.” Just now, in the years of the 21st century, we are at a stage where much audiovisual material from the 20th century is in analog form – and most of the options for trying to obtain “permanent accessibility – forever” are digital options. So digitization is of huge
experience of selection, including:
• Selection of the material coming into the collection• Review of material at regular intervals, to decide about further retention
For a digitization and preservation process, the issue of selection begins with setting priorities. Generally, these are the following major factors to consider:
• Value of the material• Obsolescence of the format• Condition and life expectancy
For this specific project, we do expect that the Customer has already made a map of the collection – so these factors have already been assessed, and the collection has been divided into broad categories. The work that remains is to make another sort of map: a preservation plan covering the entire time necessary to deal with all your preservation needs. This can range from a 6-month plan to transfer a small amount of material from videotape to files, to a 10-year plan for the storage and metadata logging of an entire collection.
A preservation strategy is not a full preservation plan. For the strategy, the issue is sequence and timescale. All the elements in the preservation map that need attention are put in a priority sequence – and time information is added according to how long you want the work to last, or how long the funding lasts, or how long the material itself will last.
02 | USING NEW TECHNOLOGY
OPERATIONAL AREA DIVIDERS (OAD)
The purpose of the following chapter is to categorize the sub-elements (OAD = Operational Area Dividers) of the processing in four areas, as shown below:
• DIGANN: the digitization of analog media or non-native-file media
• CLEAV: clean-up of degraded audio and video signals
• MIRP: metadata ingestion, retrieval, and publication (MediaPower Arkki EVO Digital Asset Manager)
• DISAM: all of the above are sitting on a managed digital storage and asset managent platform. (this is the combination of the following elements: the local storage, the remote hybrid cloud storage, Arkki EVO, and a third archiving solution)
THEORY OF OPERATIONS
As per the design of the solution, there is a single possible scenery of operation, with a single variable, that is the optional use of an automatic video cassette preservation tool that is auspicated will run unsupervised and unattended as much as possible, night and day, so that it can transfer 24h/24 massive amounts of videotapes.
The system will be autonomous. It will transfer programs stored on cassettes without operator intervention, detect when the transfer quality is lower than expected, and take appropriate actions (re-clean, apply specific processes, try another VTR and reject if necessary).
The transferred programs will be stored on data files concurrently in multiple formats (i.e., the high-quality preservation format and browsing quality available via a web interface). They will be copied automatically into one or more (for security reasons) LTO-8 Digital Tapes.
The system will store information (PREPDATA) on the position of dropouts, RF level, and other relevant information, to prepare for possible subsequent
restoration.
System supervisor each work shift can evaluate the PREPDATA analysis and assign resources to proceed with the two following non-recursive path:
• If the digital material is badly, damaged action is taken to move it to the video editing software for the digital restoration process. After that, the “new” asset is re-inventoried into the MAM for proper metadata logging. A prompt is then shown to choose whether to maintain both the new asset as well as the original (uncut, unlogged, and unrestored) or to delete the master in favor of the new digital copy.
• If the digital material appears to be within the previously determined standards on media usability, the asset is processed directly into the Arkki EVO MAM for proper metadata logging. The entire process is applied to the low-quality proxy media, while the high-quality preservation asset is already safely stored into one or multiple LTO-8 tapes, as well as maintained online for a certain time (or indefinitely, mainly depending on the Customer investment into the online storage and Customer policies on media availability).
As mentioned earlier, the single variable in this project is the use (or not) of an automatic migration robotic tool. The following section explains in detail the solution advantages of using it. A subsequent chapter on Arkki EVO digital asset management touches on the non-use of an automatic migration robotic tool.
03 | AUTOMATIC CONTENT MIGRATION
SAVE TIME & MONEY with ROBOTIC AUTOMATIONA Robot can be integrated with Arkki EVO to migrate archival videotapes to digital files efficiently. These Robots are designed to migrate up to seven videotapes simultaneously, to one or several simultaneous digital file formats. The Robot evaluates, monitors, and documents the migration process and acts to identify and correct problems.
The final product is multiple file copies at preservation quality along with metadata that reports the quality of the original master.
Operating environment
The Robot can work on a continuous basis – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Manual labor is reduced to the simple tasks of prepping tapes for migration and loading/unloading the robotic tape handler bins. The Robot runs on standard power and requires no special
cooling.
Migration Workflow
Using the Robot, library staff will access videotapes and import their barcodes and other metadata to the Robot’s database. Metadata about the videotape collection may come from the library’s existing database(s), the Robot accession workflow, or both.
The Robot system can use the library’s existing barcodes or generate new barcodes as required.
Library staff brings groups of videotapes to the Robot and insert them in bins, removing any tapes already migrated. The operator uses the Robot application to initiate a scan of the barcodes on the tapes in the bins. When the barcodes have been read and identified in the database, the operator clicks “Start” and is then free to return to other duties.
When the tapes in the Robot have been migrated, the operator repeats the process. The Robot system can
be programmed to notify the operator by email or cell phone SMS etc. At the end of each tape’s migration, the Robot application performs post-migration commands such as calculating a SHA-1 checksum and moving the migration’s file set to long term archival storage.
We do recommend copying the output XML files and proxies to online storage, where various Arkki EVO can begin viewing them for the proper metadata logging.
Inspection of video cassettes and data entry
A user’s pre-existing data such as tape IDs, titles, barcode numbers, etc., is imported from their database into the Robot. This is useful for keeping pre-existing tape library metadata in context with the metadata created by Robot systems and importing it all back to the user’s database later. It is also useful in checking that the label of the videotape cassette is identical to that found in the imported data for a particular barcode or tape ID. SQL database is used internally, so any standard SQL query can be employed by the user. User data can even be imported to the database from a CSV file.
The first step in the tape preparation process is for the operator to select the tapes to be migrated from the media archive. Next, the operator scans the barcode on the storage media case (if there is one) and ensures that the information contained in the operator’s database matches the information on the storage media case label. An inspection process is then performed in accordance with the training provided and covers typical observable defects that can disqualify a media item from automatic processing. The operator makes a determination as to whether the storage media passes or fails each inspection step. For all storage media, the database generates a unique identifier compliant with SMPTE Unique Material Identifier (UMID) naming convention, optionally used as a barcode number. Or the user can scan any pre-existing barcode. The optional barcode is then automatically printed, and the operator affixes it to the media. The UMID barcode ties that specific videotape to the media database.
Load cassettes and upload related metadata
To begin the migration process, the operator loads prepped tapes into the robotic system. The operator closes the loading door on the Robot and begins the migration. By scanning the UMID barcode on the videotapes inside the Robot, the system verifies the contents of its internal library. This information is retrieved from the central database. Set system parameters for each job. Product ships from the factory with standard settings and templates, customized for the user if necessary. Templates can be changed but once set up, templates probably do not need to be changed by the day-to-day user, and in fact it may be undesirable to change them during the course of migrating a tape collection because the user may prefer to migrate all of the collection’s video with the same settings and workflow policiesSimple digitization process.
If any barcodes are unrecognized, or any VTRs are out of service, they are highlighted in red text with a description of the error. The system can be programmed to automatically initiate a number of functions when the tapes are finished, such as email the operator, begin a batch process to move or backup files, etc.
Monitor the system, processes, and errors
Usually, these Robots provide an Analysis Engine that can automatically monitor repair and log video and audio quality for every video frame. Analysis Engine offers signal processing:
• Full Frame Synchronizer• RF Dropout Compensation• Time Code Reader/Generator• Digital Comb Filter• AGC (Auto Gain Control)• ACC (Auto Chroma Control)• CTI (Chroma Transition Improvement)• NR (Digital Noise Reduction)
Analyze video recording for defects, create and save defect log for each recording
The Robot platform features well over 200 metrics about the analog video, analog signal, and the migration. The Robot can read a migration’s XML and graphically show its video and audio levels, dropouts and RF level, input presence, and servo lock, with scrolling and magnification. This can be useful in many ways, including logging, detecting video problems, etc. The XML graphs can be saved as PDF files and viewed later on an external computer.
Digitize the video recording
With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. The Robot can be set to automatically end migration if those levels continue beyond the user-defined duration to avoid wasting time and storage or to detect video segments for logging purposes.
The Robot performs three key functions during a migration:
1. Detect the end of programming and end the migration to save time and storage.
2. Monitor levels and log above-threshold excursions into the XML file.
3. See potential problems in the source video and, if desired, end migration as an Error.- The length of each Threshold’s ‘Duration’ effectively sets
its priority to function as a trigger. Shorter durations will trigger first, longer durations will trigger later, etc.
- ‘Servo Lock Threshold’ might be set to the shortest duration because without servo lock, the other Thresholds trigger anyway.
- ‘Input Loss Threshold’ might be set soon after Servo Lock to detect no video even if the tape is still playing.
- ‘Black Threshold’ and ‘RF Threshold’ might be set soon after Input Loss to detect the end of video recording
- ‘Audio Threshold’ might be set last to detect an audio problem when the video is OK.
- ‘Dropout Threshold’ might be set the shortest of all to detect damaged videotape or a clogged head in the source VTR.
User-selectable error correction for defectsThe Robot offers several automated error correction processes for tape and signal defects.
• ‘Comb Filter’ reduces interference between color and luminance in composite (CVBS) video. Enabling the Comb Filter reduces “hanging dots” (dot crawl) and cross-color artifacts.
• ‘Decoder AGC’ is Automatic Gain Control. The input video’s sync amplitude is measured, and the entire signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until sync levels are corrected.
• ‘Decoder ACC’ is Automatic Chroma Control. The input video’s color-burst is measured, and the chroma signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until chroma is corrected to standard levels. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder CTI’ is Chroma Transition Improvement, and sharpens the edges of colored objects.Setting Decoder CTI to ‘ON’ challenges video compression encoders to spend more bits on tracking those sharper edges so some users reserve it for higher bit rate encodings. This setting does not affect Component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder NR’ is digital noise reduction. Analog tapes, particularly U-matic and VHS, can be very noisy. Removing any portion of the noise can dramatically improve the quality of video compression, so the normal setting is ON. The user may insert external noise reduction equipment in the path between the source VTR and Solo, and in that case, Analysis Engine’s noise reduction should be set to OFF. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘RF Dropout Compensator’ – U-matic tape machines have an “RF out” which is an analog level indicating the amplitude of the RF carrier recovered from the videotape. If the RF level drops below a preset threshold, there will be no visible video, resulting in a dropout. When this occurs, the Analysis engine replaces that segment of missing video with video from the same area of the picture in the preceding frame of video.
Selectable Signal and Image Processing
At the start of a migration working shift or workday, checking that the source VTR is calibrated so a
collection of migrations will remain consistent in its video and audio levels is recommended. Calibration tapes are provided for the videotape format configured in the Robot. If the VTR calibration check returns an error message, the VTR may need service.
‘Proc Amp Controls’ are available for video adjustments. When using these controls, a waveform monitor and vectorscope are recommended to see their effects and avoid ‘illegal’ (outside standard) settings. Settings are saved in templates, which can be helpful when a collection of videotapes will benefit from consistent adjustments.
Each of the correction settings such as AGC, ACC, CTI, etc., can be switched on or off depending on the requirements of the project. These settings are retained in the Robot setup template and are used for each migration until the template is changed by someone with administrator privileges.
Output digital video
Source video and audio is digitized to the CCIR 601 standard (SDI), frame-synchronized and time-base corrected. This SDI signal is internally routed to video encoders along with a stream of the source analog video and analog audio source for monitoring.
Short-term storage of digital files produced during migration of digital video files and data is cached on Robot’s internal E: drive. The user can choose to monitor the migrating video and audio for logging or other reasons, or attend to other duties and return when the migration is complete, letting the Robot determine when the migration should end according to user settings like a long time of black, a time code mark out, a preset duration, a threshold of time with no video or servo lock, etc.
When the user agrees that the migration is complete, the cached files are wrapped and written to a “success folder” on Robot’s internal RAID disk array for retrieval by the Arkki EVO’s deeper storage and asset management system. The Robot can also write finished files to any networked destination. All encoded files can be “pulled” from the “Success directory” or “pushed”
by Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) to any directory of the user’s choosing, local or remote. With the Deep Archiving software (provided), the user can archive files into the tape library and automatically get some of the metadata into a Library.
Track entire process and create/save an audit trail or log file documenting each step and the entire process for each recording
The Robot creates more than 200 metadata fields during a videotape migration, plus 38 metadata fields about every video frame. When saved as an XML file, a typical video migration’s metadata file size can be 30 MB or more.
The robot metadata types include:
• Configurations and template (.sxt) used for this migration
• Analysis Engine and video encoder settings for this migration
• Tape Details about this migration, such as barcode, tape ID, description, user name, sequence (# of #), comments, cleaning and inspection status, migration results (log), etc.
• Settings and information about the output files (video and XML) generated during this migration, including Locations, names, sizes, elapsed time, SHA-1 checksum values, etc.
• Settings and information about the Source VTR used for this migration
• Settings and information about the Dub VTR and/or external encoder used for this migration (if any)
• Networking information about the Robot current connection and directories
• Information about the Robot’s factory build (software versions etc.)
• Number of video frames sampled in this migration, and frame-by-frame data about each:
- Frame index, frame count- Input presence, color presence- Time code, time code user groups
MEDIA FOUNDATION COMBINED WITH OFF-THE-SHELF TECHNOLOGIES
At the core of our offer is Arkki EVO, a powerful Digital Asset Management designed for large-scale, highly-configurable implementations. It manages assets, tracks metadata across the entire production workflow, and consistently drives both human and media workflows. Arkki EVO can be configured to address the full range of broadcast and content workflows, including archives, news, sports production, programs, new media content distribution, and VOD delivery.
Data-centric Digital Asset Manager
In this digital age, where the sheer amount and demand for content are unprecedented, and content access requires ubiquity, every organization faces the challenge of addressing explosive content growth while effectively managing libraries and adding value to their digital assets by making them available anywhere.
Simply put, the proliferation of content necessitates better ways to store and manage digital content—whether that be media files, branded materials, or documentation. MediaPower takes asset management to new heights with Arkki EVO, a powerful and innovative digital asset manager that enables you to store, catalog, share, edit, retrieve, and distribute digital assets quickly and efficiently.
Arkki EVO is a global content platform that lets you
manage all types of assets and asset correlations effectively.Built on a dynamic and scalable architecture, Arkki EVO lets you take control of your digital content through its data-driven and user-centered features, so that you can focus on your core business and less time on searching and managing the right digital asset.
Arkki EVO provides an online proxy library of digital content with enterprise-level features and powerful tools accessible from any web browser or mobile device. Users can upload, process, edit, download, and share multiple assets and projects, proofed with version history that enables monitoring and analysis of a digital asset’s updates and duplications.
An enterprise platform that meets the requirements of any media needs
At the core of Arkki EVO, is a robust document database server that combines a powerful multimedia Enterprise search, and multiple layers of application servers to handle several back-office processes. This is combined with a wide range of workflow and media management tools, as well as monitoring applications and fully integrated production tools.
Unique and Powerful Features
Arkki EVO incorporates a robust set of features from the types of files it supports, to unique and powerful data structures, built-in video editing capabilities, and OTT streaming capability.
Asset Collections
With Arkki EVO asset collections, you can easily create, edit, and share collections of assets between users. You can create dynamic data connected silos based on search criteria or static catalogs of assets, folders, and collections, and share them with multiple users while ensuring access levels and editing privileges.
File Types Supported
Arkki EVO supports a full range of multimedia files, images, and documents. It also provides an OCR feature for PDFs and Images:
• Video and Audio• JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, and other image file types
(OCR supported)• InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator• PDFs - raster and vector (OCR supported)• Microsoft Office - Word and Excel
Graph Database and Link Object
Arkki EVO uses a NoSQL graph database to manage infinite collections, documents, and custom fields. This provides ultimate flexibility in managing custom
metadata, categories, nested subcategories, and cascading objects. Combined with this, Arkki EVO features an innovative element—the Link Object, a particular type of data used to bond an asset to a network of objects inside the platform, creating dynamic and deep graph networks.
Storage Management
Arkki EVO supports heterogeneous disk spaces. Assets can be stored and managed in different storage and archive tiers for optimal balance of usage and performance requirements.
Standalone or Cloud-based
Arkki EVO orchestrates a number of distributed services following a true Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) that is simple to integrate with external ecosystems via API. Arkki EVO is developed to be hosted onto a single Virtual Machine— giving it the flexibility to be used as a standalone DAM-in-a-box” or forming part of a complex cloud infrastructure that features both horizontal and vertical scalability.
Semantic Search Engine
Arkki EVO incorporates a powerful search engine to
DIGITAL PRESERVATION: A Guide to Videotapes Digitization, Logging, and Archive
08
find any asset imported into the system quickly. It features an Elastic Graph engine that uses a semantic algorithm to contextualize data stored into the Arkki EVO platform and find correlations between assets.
Built-in Video Editing and Transcoding
Arkki EVO incorporates various video editing functions that help users handle and process raw video material. These include mark in/out, single frame extraction, sub-clips generation, adding metadata information to clips/sub-clips, uploading sub-clips as main clips, exporting to or downloading low-res or high-res, merging clips to single videos, exporting video frames as images, and even sending video clips to FTP of Public Cloud services.
It also features a built-in transcoding engine that accepts any standard video format (such as MPEG-2, XDCAM, DV, DNxHD, AVC-Intra, IMX, MPEG4, ApplePro Res, WMV wrapped MXF, MOV, and AVI, including MOV or MXF-wrapped 4K files), automatically generates low-resolution proxies in MPEG4, and allows users to create different file formats with optional watermarks.
Digital Asset Management Workflows
Arkki EVO streamlines your digital asset workflows – from importing, organizing, classifying, to delivering your digital assets, and even enabling triggers that automate workflow functions.
Collaboration Tools
Arkki EVO provides a full set of tools that allow different teams and user groups to work collaboratively on asset creation, licensing, marketing, down to distribution. These tools include rating and commenting, email and social media sharing, overlay video commenting, advanced tagging, and much more.
Multi-user and Sharing-friendly
Arkki EVO provides a complete user management system that allows administrators to define users and groups and assign different roles and access rights. Users also get their own user pages for tracking their
activities (such as uploads, edits, creation of groups or projects). Asset and project categories can also be assigned to certain users to control access to specific material.
Arkki EVO can also organize different assets into projects that can be made private, made available to selected users, and be assigned searchable metadata information. It can also generate public links to projects and to individual assets, making them shareable over the Internet. These links allow recipients to view and download low-res copies or for registered users, work directly on the linked project and its contents.
Rights Management Plugin
Ensuring control of copyrighted/licensed material is made easy with Arkki EVO’s Rights Management plugin. It lets you maintain control over assets and their data rights and enforce rules automatically from a single interface. Plugin features include:
• Ownership, permissions, restrictions• Retention and expiration• Licensing• Status and Notification triggers
Multi-tenancy
Sharing your digital assets outside your organization could be a tedious process, but that is made easy with Arkki EVO’s support for multi-tenancy. Arkki EVO lets you selectively share or distribute digital assets (or even collections) to user groups and external organizations (such as teams, subsidiaries, related companies, reseller networks, agency partners) while ensuring security and protecting confidential information.
Resource Optimization
Arkki EVO smartly utilizes the computing resources available to the system. Resource-intensive transcoding and processing tasks generally employ 100% of all CPU cores, rendering other functions virtually unusable. To combat this issue, Arkki EVO ensures that CPU and RAM resources are available for other services, providing a consistently fast response
from the system to users. Moreover, Arkki can also work in virtualized environments, significantly increasing its adaptability.
GDPR compliant
MediaPower fully respects the GDPR directives on privacy by design and by default. Thus, Arkki EVO has been developed to support this. Tokenization, cryptography, and advanced data management are core pillars in the design and development of Arkki EVO.
OTT Delivery
Each video asset imported into and managed by Arkki EVO can be delivered via OTT connector, a middleware that publishes VoD content to an IPTV, WebTV, or over the most important social networks through Mpeg-Dash protocol, HLS, and RTSP.
A.I. Integration
Arkki EVO provides connectors to Google, Amazon
INGEST SEARCH &DISCOVERY
SHARE &DISTRIBUTEMANAGE
TAGGING
EDITING &COLLABORATION
WORKFLOWMANAGEMENT
A.I. FEATURES
VERSIONING
ARCHIVING
PROCESSING &TRANSCODING
Arkki EVO Workflow Diagram
Web Services, Microsoft and IBM Artificial Intelligence infrastructures which include, but not limited to, face recognition, brand presence, advanced OCR, speech-to-text, pedestrian detection, sensitive content detection, sports action classification, setting detection, and content, audio, and video classification.
Flexible and Configurable
Arkki EVO is structured to manage several types of assets and processes pipeline. Arkki EVO’s graph database, Link Object, advanced tagging, and the robust processing engine all work in tandem to let you create complex nested data collections, and customize and control the entire platform as appropriate—from a simple MAM, or large DAM, to archive libraries. For example, a media company can use Arkki EVO as simple Media Asset Manager, a large corporation can use the platform as personal cloud share, or a museum applies Arkki EVO as archive manager following the standard Dublin Core and EAD (Encoded Archival Description) and Berkeley Finding Aids Project (BFAP).
significance just now, as one of “the steps necessary to ensure … permanent accessibility”.
Our project goal is the following: make access copies into digital format that in some cases are in no way a replacement for the original – but they take pressure off the original, allowing it to be kept untouched in cold, dry conditions with very limited use of masters.
Our archive copies are as close as technically possible to the originals and can be used within this digital production and logging solution for the creation of ‘new masters’.
Also, the digitization scope here is to produce a ‘digital intermediate’ before finally producing a new digital master. This in order to use digital technology for restoration – because there are many defects that can be removed digitally in ways that could not be attempted by analog processing.
DATA SELECTION CONSIDERATION
In large scale projects, like this one, digitization strategy is the key. Selection: which material goes first? There is a lot of information about selection. Most managed collections already have considerable
“Preservation is the totality of the steps necessary to ensure the permanent accessibility – forever – of an audiovisual document with the maximum integrity.” - Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Association (CCAAA)
This document proposes a commercial and technological strategy in digitizing, logging, and archiving videotapes for the purpose of Digital Preservation.
01 | INTRODUCTION
DIGITIZATION OVERVIEW
Many activities contribute to “permanent accessibility – forever.” Just now, in the years of the 21st century, we are at a stage where much audiovisual material from the 20th century is in analog form – and most of the options for trying to obtain “permanent accessibility – forever” are digital options. So digitization is of huge
experience of selection, including:
• Selection of the material coming into the collection• Review of material at regular intervals, to decide about further retention
For a digitization and preservation process, the issue of selection begins with setting priorities. Generally, these are the following major factors to consider:
• Value of the material• Obsolescence of the format• Condition and life expectancy
For this specific project, we do expect that the Customer has already made a map of the collection – so these factors have already been assessed, and the collection has been divided into broad categories. The work that remains is to make another sort of map: a preservation plan covering the entire time necessary to deal with all your preservation needs. This can range from a 6-month plan to transfer a small amount of material from videotape to files, to a 10-year plan for the storage and metadata logging of an entire collection.
A preservation strategy is not a full preservation plan. For the strategy, the issue is sequence and timescale. All the elements in the preservation map that need attention are put in a priority sequence – and time information is added according to how long you want the work to last, or how long the funding lasts, or how long the material itself will last.
02 | USING NEW TECHNOLOGY
OPERATIONAL AREA DIVIDERS (OAD)
The purpose of the following chapter is to categorize the sub-elements (OAD = Operational Area Dividers) of the processing in four areas, as shown below:
• DIGANN: the digitization of analog media or non-native-file media
• CLEAV: clean-up of degraded audio and video signals
• MIRP: metadata ingestion, retrieval, and publication (MediaPower Arkki EVO Digital Asset Manager)
• DISAM: all of the above are sitting on a managed digital storage and asset managent platform. (this is the combination of the following elements: the local storage, the remote hybrid cloud storage, Arkki EVO, and a third archiving solution)
THEORY OF OPERATIONS
As per the design of the solution, there is a single possible scenery of operation, with a single variable, that is the optional use of an automatic video cassette preservation tool that is auspicated will run unsupervised and unattended as much as possible, night and day, so that it can transfer 24h/24 massive amounts of videotapes.
The system will be autonomous. It will transfer programs stored on cassettes without operator intervention, detect when the transfer quality is lower than expected, and take appropriate actions (re-clean, apply specific processes, try another VTR and reject if necessary).
The transferred programs will be stored on data files concurrently in multiple formats (i.e., the high-quality preservation format and browsing quality available via a web interface). They will be copied automatically into one or more (for security reasons) LTO-8 Digital Tapes.
The system will store information (PREPDATA) on the position of dropouts, RF level, and other relevant information, to prepare for possible subsequent
restoration.
System supervisor each work shift can evaluate the PREPDATA analysis and assign resources to proceed with the two following non-recursive path:
• If the digital material is badly, damaged action is taken to move it to the video editing software for the digital restoration process. After that, the “new” asset is re-inventoried into the MAM for proper metadata logging. A prompt is then shown to choose whether to maintain both the new asset as well as the original (uncut, unlogged, and unrestored) or to delete the master in favor of the new digital copy.
• If the digital material appears to be within the previously determined standards on media usability, the asset is processed directly into the Arkki EVO MAM for proper metadata logging. The entire process is applied to the low-quality proxy media, while the high-quality preservation asset is already safely stored into one or multiple LTO-8 tapes, as well as maintained online for a certain time (or indefinitely, mainly depending on the Customer investment into the online storage and Customer policies on media availability).
As mentioned earlier, the single variable in this project is the use (or not) of an automatic migration robotic tool. The following section explains in detail the solution advantages of using it. A subsequent chapter on Arkki EVO digital asset management touches on the non-use of an automatic migration robotic tool.
03 | AUTOMATIC CONTENT MIGRATION
SAVE TIME & MONEY with ROBOTIC AUTOMATIONA Robot can be integrated with Arkki EVO to migrate archival videotapes to digital files efficiently. These Robots are designed to migrate up to seven videotapes simultaneously, to one or several simultaneous digital file formats. The Robot evaluates, monitors, and documents the migration process and acts to identify and correct problems.
The final product is multiple file copies at preservation quality along with metadata that reports the quality of the original master.
Operating environment
The Robot can work on a continuous basis – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Manual labor is reduced to the simple tasks of prepping tapes for migration and loading/unloading the robotic tape handler bins. The Robot runs on standard power and requires no special
cooling.
Migration Workflow
Using the Robot, library staff will access videotapes and import their barcodes and other metadata to the Robot’s database. Metadata about the videotape collection may come from the library’s existing database(s), the Robot accession workflow, or both.
The Robot system can use the library’s existing barcodes or generate new barcodes as required.
Library staff brings groups of videotapes to the Robot and insert them in bins, removing any tapes already migrated. The operator uses the Robot application to initiate a scan of the barcodes on the tapes in the bins. When the barcodes have been read and identified in the database, the operator clicks “Start” and is then free to return to other duties.
When the tapes in the Robot have been migrated, the operator repeats the process. The Robot system can
be programmed to notify the operator by email or cell phone SMS etc. At the end of each tape’s migration, the Robot application performs post-migration commands such as calculating a SHA-1 checksum and moving the migration’s file set to long term archival storage.
We do recommend copying the output XML files and proxies to online storage, where various Arkki EVO can begin viewing them for the proper metadata logging.
Inspection of video cassettes and data entry
A user’s pre-existing data such as tape IDs, titles, barcode numbers, etc., is imported from their database into the Robot. This is useful for keeping pre-existing tape library metadata in context with the metadata created by Robot systems and importing it all back to the user’s database later. It is also useful in checking that the label of the videotape cassette is identical to that found in the imported data for a particular barcode or tape ID. SQL database is used internally, so any standard SQL query can be employed by the user. User data can even be imported to the database from a CSV file.
The first step in the tape preparation process is for the operator to select the tapes to be migrated from the media archive. Next, the operator scans the barcode on the storage media case (if there is one) and ensures that the information contained in the operator’s database matches the information on the storage media case label. An inspection process is then performed in accordance with the training provided and covers typical observable defects that can disqualify a media item from automatic processing. The operator makes a determination as to whether the storage media passes or fails each inspection step. For all storage media, the database generates a unique identifier compliant with SMPTE Unique Material Identifier (UMID) naming convention, optionally used as a barcode number. Or the user can scan any pre-existing barcode. The optional barcode is then automatically printed, and the operator affixes it to the media. The UMID barcode ties that specific videotape to the media database.
Load cassettes and upload related metadata
To begin the migration process, the operator loads prepped tapes into the robotic system. The operator closes the loading door on the Robot and begins the migration. By scanning the UMID barcode on the videotapes inside the Robot, the system verifies the contents of its internal library. This information is retrieved from the central database. Set system parameters for each job. Product ships from the factory with standard settings and templates, customized for the user if necessary. Templates can be changed but once set up, templates probably do not need to be changed by the day-to-day user, and in fact it may be undesirable to change them during the course of migrating a tape collection because the user may prefer to migrate all of the collection’s video with the same settings and workflow policiesSimple digitization process.
If any barcodes are unrecognized, or any VTRs are out of service, they are highlighted in red text with a description of the error. The system can be programmed to automatically initiate a number of functions when the tapes are finished, such as email the operator, begin a batch process to move or backup files, etc.
Monitor the system, processes, and errors
Usually, these Robots provide an Analysis Engine that can automatically monitor repair and log video and audio quality for every video frame. Analysis Engine offers signal processing:
• Full Frame Synchronizer• RF Dropout Compensation• Time Code Reader/Generator• Digital Comb Filter• AGC (Auto Gain Control)• ACC (Auto Chroma Control)• CTI (Chroma Transition Improvement)• NR (Digital Noise Reduction)
Analyze video recording for defects, create and save defect log for each recording
The Robot platform features well over 200 metrics about the analog video, analog signal, and the migration. The Robot can read a migration’s XML and graphically show its video and audio levels, dropouts and RF level, input presence, and servo lock, with scrolling and magnification. This can be useful in many ways, including logging, detecting video problems, etc. The XML graphs can be saved as PDF files and viewed later on an external computer.
Digitize the video recording
With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. The Robot can be set to automatically end migration if those levels continue beyond the user-defined duration to avoid wasting time and storage or to detect video segments for logging purposes.
The Robot performs three key functions during a migration:
1. Detect the end of programming and end the migration to save time and storage.
2. Monitor levels and log above-threshold excursions into the XML file.
3. See potential problems in the source video and, if desired, end migration as an Error.- The length of each Threshold’s ‘Duration’ effectively sets
its priority to function as a trigger. Shorter durations will trigger first, longer durations will trigger later, etc.
- ‘Servo Lock Threshold’ might be set to the shortest duration because without servo lock, the other Thresholds trigger anyway.
- ‘Input Loss Threshold’ might be set soon after Servo Lock to detect no video even if the tape is still playing.
- ‘Black Threshold’ and ‘RF Threshold’ might be set soon after Input Loss to detect the end of video recording
- ‘Audio Threshold’ might be set last to detect an audio problem when the video is OK.
- ‘Dropout Threshold’ might be set the shortest of all to detect damaged videotape or a clogged head in the source VTR.
User-selectable error correction for defectsThe Robot offers several automated error correction processes for tape and signal defects.
• ‘Comb Filter’ reduces interference between color and luminance in composite (CVBS) video. Enabling the Comb Filter reduces “hanging dots” (dot crawl) and cross-color artifacts.
• ‘Decoder AGC’ is Automatic Gain Control. The input video’s sync amplitude is measured, and the entire signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until sync levels are corrected.
• ‘Decoder ACC’ is Automatic Chroma Control. The input video’s color-burst is measured, and the chroma signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until chroma is corrected to standard levels. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder CTI’ is Chroma Transition Improvement, and sharpens the edges of colored objects.Setting Decoder CTI to ‘ON’ challenges video compression encoders to spend more bits on tracking those sharper edges so some users reserve it for higher bit rate encodings. This setting does not affect Component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder NR’ is digital noise reduction. Analog tapes, particularly U-matic and VHS, can be very noisy. Removing any portion of the noise can dramatically improve the quality of video compression, so the normal setting is ON. The user may insert external noise reduction equipment in the path between the source VTR and Solo, and in that case, Analysis Engine’s noise reduction should be set to OFF. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘RF Dropout Compensator’ – U-matic tape machines have an “RF out” which is an analog level indicating the amplitude of the RF carrier recovered from the videotape. If the RF level drops below a preset threshold, there will be no visible video, resulting in a dropout. When this occurs, the Analysis engine replaces that segment of missing video with video from the same area of the picture in the preceding frame of video.
Selectable Signal and Image Processing
At the start of a migration working shift or workday, checking that the source VTR is calibrated so a
collection of migrations will remain consistent in its video and audio levels is recommended. Calibration tapes are provided for the videotape format configured in the Robot. If the VTR calibration check returns an error message, the VTR may need service.
‘Proc Amp Controls’ are available for video adjustments. When using these controls, a waveform monitor and vectorscope are recommended to see their effects and avoid ‘illegal’ (outside standard) settings. Settings are saved in templates, which can be helpful when a collection of videotapes will benefit from consistent adjustments.
Each of the correction settings such as AGC, ACC, CTI, etc., can be switched on or off depending on the requirements of the project. These settings are retained in the Robot setup template and are used for each migration until the template is changed by someone with administrator privileges.
Output digital video
Source video and audio is digitized to the CCIR 601 standard (SDI), frame-synchronized and time-base corrected. This SDI signal is internally routed to video encoders along with a stream of the source analog video and analog audio source for monitoring.
Short-term storage of digital files produced during migration of digital video files and data is cached on Robot’s internal E: drive. The user can choose to monitor the migrating video and audio for logging or other reasons, or attend to other duties and return when the migration is complete, letting the Robot determine when the migration should end according to user settings like a long time of black, a time code mark out, a preset duration, a threshold of time with no video or servo lock, etc.
When the user agrees that the migration is complete, the cached files are wrapped and written to a “success folder” on Robot’s internal RAID disk array for retrieval by the Arkki EVO’s deeper storage and asset management system. The Robot can also write finished files to any networked destination. All encoded files can be “pulled” from the “Success directory” or “pushed”
by Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) to any directory of the user’s choosing, local or remote. With the Deep Archiving software (provided), the user can archive files into the tape library and automatically get some of the metadata into a Library.
Track entire process and create/save an audit trail or log file documenting each step and the entire process for each recording
The Robot creates more than 200 metadata fields during a videotape migration, plus 38 metadata fields about every video frame. When saved as an XML file, a typical video migration’s metadata file size can be 30 MB or more.
The robot metadata types include:
• Configurations and template (.sxt) used for this migration
• Analysis Engine and video encoder settings for this migration
• Tape Details about this migration, such as barcode, tape ID, description, user name, sequence (# of #), comments, cleaning and inspection status, migration results (log), etc.
• Settings and information about the output files (video and XML) generated during this migration, including Locations, names, sizes, elapsed time, SHA-1 checksum values, etc.
• Settings and information about the Source VTR used for this migration
• Settings and information about the Dub VTR and/or external encoder used for this migration (if any)
• Networking information about the Robot current connection and directories
• Information about the Robot’s factory build (software versions etc.)
• Number of video frames sampled in this migration, and frame-by-frame data about each:
- Frame index, frame count- Input presence, color presence- Time code, time code user groups
MEDIA FOUNDATION COMBINED WITH OFF-THE-SHELF TECHNOLOGIES
At the core of our offer is Arkki EVO, a powerful Digital Asset Management designed for large-scale, highly-configurable implementations. It manages assets, tracks metadata across the entire production workflow, and consistently drives both human and media workflows. Arkki EVO can be configured to address the full range of broadcast and content workflows, including archives, news, sports production, programs, new media content distribution, and VOD delivery.
Data-centric Digital Asset Manager
In this digital age, where the sheer amount and demand for content are unprecedented, and content access requires ubiquity, every organization faces the challenge of addressing explosive content growth while effectively managing libraries and adding value to their digital assets by making them available anywhere.
Simply put, the proliferation of content necessitates better ways to store and manage digital content—whether that be media files, branded materials, or documentation. MediaPower takes asset management to new heights with Arkki EVO, a powerful and innovative digital asset manager that enables you to store, catalog, share, edit, retrieve, and distribute digital assets quickly and efficiently.
Arkki EVO is a global content platform that lets you
manage all types of assets and asset correlations effectively.Built on a dynamic and scalable architecture, Arkki EVO lets you take control of your digital content through its data-driven and user-centered features, so that you can focus on your core business and less time on searching and managing the right digital asset.
Arkki EVO provides an online proxy library of digital content with enterprise-level features and powerful tools accessible from any web browser or mobile device. Users can upload, process, edit, download, and share multiple assets and projects, proofed with version history that enables monitoring and analysis of a digital asset’s updates and duplications.
An enterprise platform that meets the requirements of any media needs
At the core of Arkki EVO, is a robust document database server that combines a powerful multimedia Enterprise search, and multiple layers of application servers to handle several back-office processes. This is combined with a wide range of workflow and media management tools, as well as monitoring applications and fully integrated production tools.
Unique and Powerful Features
Arkki EVO incorporates a robust set of features from the types of files it supports, to unique and powerful data structures, built-in video editing capabilities, and OTT streaming capability.
Asset Collections
With Arkki EVO asset collections, you can easily create, edit, and share collections of assets between users. You can create dynamic data connected silos based on search criteria or static catalogs of assets, folders, and collections, and share them with multiple users while ensuring access levels and editing privileges.
File Types Supported
Arkki EVO supports a full range of multimedia files, images, and documents. It also provides an OCR feature for PDFs and Images:
• Video and Audio• JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, and other image file types
(OCR supported)• InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator• PDFs - raster and vector (OCR supported)• Microsoft Office - Word and Excel
Graph Database and Link Object
Arkki EVO uses a NoSQL graph database to manage infinite collections, documents, and custom fields. This provides ultimate flexibility in managing custom
metadata, categories, nested subcategories, and cascading objects. Combined with this, Arkki EVO features an innovative element—the Link Object, a particular type of data used to bond an asset to a network of objects inside the platform, creating dynamic and deep graph networks.
Storage Management
Arkki EVO supports heterogeneous disk spaces. Assets can be stored and managed in different storage and archive tiers for optimal balance of usage and performance requirements.
Standalone or Cloud-based
Arkki EVO orchestrates a number of distributed services following a true Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) that is simple to integrate with external ecosystems via API. Arkki EVO is developed to be hosted onto a single Virtual Machine— giving it the flexibility to be used as a standalone DAM-in-a-box” or forming part of a complex cloud infrastructure that features both horizontal and vertical scalability.
Semantic Search Engine
Arkki EVO incorporates a powerful search engine to
DIGITAL PRESERVATION: A Guide to Videotapes Digitization, Logging, and Archive
09
find any asset imported into the system quickly. It features an Elastic Graph engine that uses a semantic algorithm to contextualize data stored into the Arkki EVO platform and find correlations between assets.
Built-in Video Editing and Transcoding
Arkki EVO incorporates various video editing functions that help users handle and process raw video material. These include mark in/out, single frame extraction, sub-clips generation, adding metadata information to clips/sub-clips, uploading sub-clips as main clips, exporting to or downloading low-res or high-res, merging clips to single videos, exporting video frames as images, and even sending video clips to FTP of Public Cloud services.
It also features a built-in transcoding engine that accepts any standard video format (such as MPEG-2, XDCAM, DV, DNxHD, AVC-Intra, IMX, MPEG4, ApplePro Res, WMV wrapped MXF, MOV, and AVI, including MOV or MXF-wrapped 4K files), automatically generates low-resolution proxies in MPEG4, and allows users to create different file formats with optional watermarks.
Digital Asset Management Workflows
Arkki EVO streamlines your digital asset workflows – from importing, organizing, classifying, to delivering your digital assets, and even enabling triggers that automate workflow functions.
Collaboration Tools
Arkki EVO provides a full set of tools that allow different teams and user groups to work collaboratively on asset creation, licensing, marketing, down to distribution. These tools include rating and commenting, email and social media sharing, overlay video commenting, advanced tagging, and much more.
Multi-user and Sharing-friendly
Arkki EVO provides a complete user management system that allows administrators to define users and groups and assign different roles and access rights. Users also get their own user pages for tracking their
activities (such as uploads, edits, creation of groups or projects). Asset and project categories can also be assigned to certain users to control access to specific material.
Arkki EVO can also organize different assets into projects that can be made private, made available to selected users, and be assigned searchable metadata information. It can also generate public links to projects and to individual assets, making them shareable over the Internet. These links allow recipients to view and download low-res copies or for registered users, work directly on the linked project and its contents.
Rights Management Plugin
Ensuring control of copyrighted/licensed material is made easy with Arkki EVO’s Rights Management plugin. It lets you maintain control over assets and their data rights and enforce rules automatically from a single interface. Plugin features include:
• Ownership, permissions, restrictions• Retention and expiration• Licensing• Status and Notification triggers
Multi-tenancy
Sharing your digital assets outside your organization could be a tedious process, but that is made easy with Arkki EVO’s support for multi-tenancy. Arkki EVO lets you selectively share or distribute digital assets (or even collections) to user groups and external organizations (such as teams, subsidiaries, related companies, reseller networks, agency partners) while ensuring security and protecting confidential information.
Resource Optimization
Arkki EVO smartly utilizes the computing resources available to the system. Resource-intensive transcoding and processing tasks generally employ 100% of all CPU cores, rendering other functions virtually unusable. To combat this issue, Arkki EVO ensures that CPU and RAM resources are available for other services, providing a consistently fast response
from the system to users. Moreover, Arkki can also work in virtualized environments, significantly increasing its adaptability.
GDPR compliant
MediaPower fully respects the GDPR directives on privacy by design and by default. Thus, Arkki EVO has been developed to support this. Tokenization, cryptography, and advanced data management are core pillars in the design and development of Arkki EVO.
OTT Delivery
Each video asset imported into and managed by Arkki EVO can be delivered via OTT connector, a middleware that publishes VoD content to an IPTV, WebTV, or over the most important social networks through Mpeg-Dash protocol, HLS, and RTSP.
A.I. Integration
Arkki EVO provides connectors to Google, Amazon
Web Services, Microsoft and IBM Artificial Intelligence infrastructures which include, but not limited to, face recognition, brand presence, advanced OCR, speech-to-text, pedestrian detection, sensitive content detection, sports action classification, setting detection, and content, audio, and video classification.
Flexible and Configurable
Arkki EVO is structured to manage several types of assets and processes pipeline. Arkki EVO’s graph database, Link Object, advanced tagging, and the robust processing engine all work in tandem to let you create complex nested data collections, and customize and control the entire platform as appropriate—from a simple MAM, or large DAM, to archive libraries. For example, a media company can use Arkki EVO as simple Media Asset Manager, a large corporation can use the platform as personal cloud share, or a museum applies Arkki EVO as archive manager following the standard Dublin Core and EAD (Encoded Archival Description) and Berkeley Finding Aids Project (BFAP).
significance just now, as one of “the steps necessary to ensure … permanent accessibility”.
Our project goal is the following: make access copies into digital format that in some cases are in no way a replacement for the original – but they take pressure off the original, allowing it to be kept untouched in cold, dry conditions with very limited use of masters.
Our archive copies are as close as technically possible to the originals and can be used within this digital production and logging solution for the creation of ‘new masters’.
Also, the digitization scope here is to produce a ‘digital intermediate’ before finally producing a new digital master. This in order to use digital technology for restoration – because there are many defects that can be removed digitally in ways that could not be attempted by analog processing.
DATA SELECTION CONSIDERATION
In large scale projects, like this one, digitization strategy is the key. Selection: which material goes first? There is a lot of information about selection. Most managed collections already have considerable
“Preservation is the totality of the steps necessary to ensure the permanent accessibility – forever – of an audiovisual document with the maximum integrity.” - Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Association (CCAAA)
This document proposes a commercial and technological strategy in digitizing, logging, and archiving videotapes for the purpose of Digital Preservation.
01 | INTRODUCTION
DIGITIZATION OVERVIEW
Many activities contribute to “permanent accessibility – forever.” Just now, in the years of the 21st century, we are at a stage where much audiovisual material from the 20th century is in analog form – and most of the options for trying to obtain “permanent accessibility – forever” are digital options. So digitization is of huge
experience of selection, including:
• Selection of the material coming into the collection• Review of material at regular intervals, to decide about further retention
For a digitization and preservation process, the issue of selection begins with setting priorities. Generally, these are the following major factors to consider:
• Value of the material• Obsolescence of the format• Condition and life expectancy
For this specific project, we do expect that the Customer has already made a map of the collection – so these factors have already been assessed, and the collection has been divided into broad categories. The work that remains is to make another sort of map: a preservation plan covering the entire time necessary to deal with all your preservation needs. This can range from a 6-month plan to transfer a small amount of material from videotape to files, to a 10-year plan for the storage and metadata logging of an entire collection.
A preservation strategy is not a full preservation plan. For the strategy, the issue is sequence and timescale. All the elements in the preservation map that need attention are put in a priority sequence – and time information is added according to how long you want the work to last, or how long the funding lasts, or how long the material itself will last.
02 | USING NEW TECHNOLOGY
OPERATIONAL AREA DIVIDERS (OAD)
The purpose of the following chapter is to categorize the sub-elements (OAD = Operational Area Dividers) of the processing in four areas, as shown below:
• DIGANN: the digitization of analog media or non-native-file media
• CLEAV: clean-up of degraded audio and video signals
• MIRP: metadata ingestion, retrieval, and publication (MediaPower Arkki EVO Digital Asset Manager)
• DISAM: all of the above are sitting on a managed digital storage and asset managent platform. (this is the combination of the following elements: the local storage, the remote hybrid cloud storage, Arkki EVO, and a third archiving solution)
THEORY OF OPERATIONS
As per the design of the solution, there is a single possible scenery of operation, with a single variable, that is the optional use of an automatic video cassette preservation tool that is auspicated will run unsupervised and unattended as much as possible, night and day, so that it can transfer 24h/24 massive amounts of videotapes.
The system will be autonomous. It will transfer programs stored on cassettes without operator intervention, detect when the transfer quality is lower than expected, and take appropriate actions (re-clean, apply specific processes, try another VTR and reject if necessary).
The transferred programs will be stored on data files concurrently in multiple formats (i.e., the high-quality preservation format and browsing quality available via a web interface). They will be copied automatically into one or more (for security reasons) LTO-8 Digital Tapes.
The system will store information (PREPDATA) on the position of dropouts, RF level, and other relevant information, to prepare for possible subsequent
restoration.
System supervisor each work shift can evaluate the PREPDATA analysis and assign resources to proceed with the two following non-recursive path:
• If the digital material is badly, damaged action is taken to move it to the video editing software for the digital restoration process. After that, the “new” asset is re-inventoried into the MAM for proper metadata logging. A prompt is then shown to choose whether to maintain both the new asset as well as the original (uncut, unlogged, and unrestored) or to delete the master in favor of the new digital copy.
• If the digital material appears to be within the previously determined standards on media usability, the asset is processed directly into the Arkki EVO MAM for proper metadata logging. The entire process is applied to the low-quality proxy media, while the high-quality preservation asset is already safely stored into one or multiple LTO-8 tapes, as well as maintained online for a certain time (or indefinitely, mainly depending on the Customer investment into the online storage and Customer policies on media availability).
As mentioned earlier, the single variable in this project is the use (or not) of an automatic migration robotic tool. The following section explains in detail the solution advantages of using it. A subsequent chapter on Arkki EVO digital asset management touches on the non-use of an automatic migration robotic tool.
03 | AUTOMATIC CONTENT MIGRATION
SAVE TIME & MONEY with ROBOTIC AUTOMATIONA Robot can be integrated with Arkki EVO to migrate archival videotapes to digital files efficiently. These Robots are designed to migrate up to seven videotapes simultaneously, to one or several simultaneous digital file formats. The Robot evaluates, monitors, and documents the migration process and acts to identify and correct problems.
The final product is multiple file copies at preservation quality along with metadata that reports the quality of the original master.
Operating environment
The Robot can work on a continuous basis – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Manual labor is reduced to the simple tasks of prepping tapes for migration and loading/unloading the robotic tape handler bins. The Robot runs on standard power and requires no special
cooling.
Migration Workflow
Using the Robot, library staff will access videotapes and import their barcodes and other metadata to the Robot’s database. Metadata about the videotape collection may come from the library’s existing database(s), the Robot accession workflow, or both.
The Robot system can use the library’s existing barcodes or generate new barcodes as required.
Library staff brings groups of videotapes to the Robot and insert them in bins, removing any tapes already migrated. The operator uses the Robot application to initiate a scan of the barcodes on the tapes in the bins. When the barcodes have been read and identified in the database, the operator clicks “Start” and is then free to return to other duties.
When the tapes in the Robot have been migrated, the operator repeats the process. The Robot system can
be programmed to notify the operator by email or cell phone SMS etc. At the end of each tape’s migration, the Robot application performs post-migration commands such as calculating a SHA-1 checksum and moving the migration’s file set to long term archival storage.
We do recommend copying the output XML files and proxies to online storage, where various Arkki EVO can begin viewing them for the proper metadata logging.
Inspection of video cassettes and data entry
A user’s pre-existing data such as tape IDs, titles, barcode numbers, etc., is imported from their database into the Robot. This is useful for keeping pre-existing tape library metadata in context with the metadata created by Robot systems and importing it all back to the user’s database later. It is also useful in checking that the label of the videotape cassette is identical to that found in the imported data for a particular barcode or tape ID. SQL database is used internally, so any standard SQL query can be employed by the user. User data can even be imported to the database from a CSV file.
The first step in the tape preparation process is for the operator to select the tapes to be migrated from the media archive. Next, the operator scans the barcode on the storage media case (if there is one) and ensures that the information contained in the operator’s database matches the information on the storage media case label. An inspection process is then performed in accordance with the training provided and covers typical observable defects that can disqualify a media item from automatic processing. The operator makes a determination as to whether the storage media passes or fails each inspection step. For all storage media, the database generates a unique identifier compliant with SMPTE Unique Material Identifier (UMID) naming convention, optionally used as a barcode number. Or the user can scan any pre-existing barcode. The optional barcode is then automatically printed, and the operator affixes it to the media. The UMID barcode ties that specific videotape to the media database.
Load cassettes and upload related metadata
To begin the migration process, the operator loads prepped tapes into the robotic system. The operator closes the loading door on the Robot and begins the migration. By scanning the UMID barcode on the videotapes inside the Robot, the system verifies the contents of its internal library. This information is retrieved from the central database. Set system parameters for each job. Product ships from the factory with standard settings and templates, customized for the user if necessary. Templates can be changed but once set up, templates probably do not need to be changed by the day-to-day user, and in fact it may be undesirable to change them during the course of migrating a tape collection because the user may prefer to migrate all of the collection’s video with the same settings and workflow policiesSimple digitization process.
If any barcodes are unrecognized, or any VTRs are out of service, they are highlighted in red text with a description of the error. The system can be programmed to automatically initiate a number of functions when the tapes are finished, such as email the operator, begin a batch process to move or backup files, etc.
Monitor the system, processes, and errors
Usually, these Robots provide an Analysis Engine that can automatically monitor repair and log video and audio quality for every video frame. Analysis Engine offers signal processing:
• Full Frame Synchronizer• RF Dropout Compensation• Time Code Reader/Generator• Digital Comb Filter• AGC (Auto Gain Control)• ACC (Auto Chroma Control)• CTI (Chroma Transition Improvement)• NR (Digital Noise Reduction)
Analyze video recording for defects, create and save defect log for each recording
The Robot platform features well over 200 metrics about the analog video, analog signal, and the migration. The Robot can read a migration’s XML and graphically show its video and audio levels, dropouts and RF level, input presence, and servo lock, with scrolling and magnification. This can be useful in many ways, including logging, detecting video problems, etc. The XML graphs can be saved as PDF files and viewed later on an external computer.
Digitize the video recording
With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. With a single Robot, the user can preset up to six sensitivity thresholds. The Robot can be set to automatically end migration if those levels continue beyond the user-defined duration to avoid wasting time and storage or to detect video segments for logging purposes.
The Robot performs three key functions during a migration:
1. Detect the end of programming and end the migration to save time and storage.
2. Monitor levels and log above-threshold excursions into the XML file.
3. See potential problems in the source video and, if desired, end migration as an Error.- The length of each Threshold’s ‘Duration’ effectively sets
its priority to function as a trigger. Shorter durations will trigger first, longer durations will trigger later, etc.
- ‘Servo Lock Threshold’ might be set to the shortest duration because without servo lock, the other Thresholds trigger anyway.
- ‘Input Loss Threshold’ might be set soon after Servo Lock to detect no video even if the tape is still playing.
- ‘Black Threshold’ and ‘RF Threshold’ might be set soon after Input Loss to detect the end of video recording
- ‘Audio Threshold’ might be set last to detect an audio problem when the video is OK.
- ‘Dropout Threshold’ might be set the shortest of all to detect damaged videotape or a clogged head in the source VTR.
User-selectable error correction for defectsThe Robot offers several automated error correction processes for tape and signal defects.
• ‘Comb Filter’ reduces interference between color and luminance in composite (CVBS) video. Enabling the Comb Filter reduces “hanging dots” (dot crawl) and cross-color artifacts.
• ‘Decoder AGC’ is Automatic Gain Control. The input video’s sync amplitude is measured, and the entire signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until sync levels are corrected.
• ‘Decoder ACC’ is Automatic Chroma Control. The input video’s color-burst is measured, and the chroma signal, including active video, is increased or decreased until chroma is corrected to standard levels. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder CTI’ is Chroma Transition Improvement, and sharpens the edges of colored objects.Setting Decoder CTI to ‘ON’ challenges video compression encoders to spend more bits on tracking those sharper edges so some users reserve it for higher bit rate encodings. This setting does not affect Component video inputs.
• ‘Decoder NR’ is digital noise reduction. Analog tapes, particularly U-matic and VHS, can be very noisy. Removing any portion of the noise can dramatically improve the quality of video compression, so the normal setting is ON. The user may insert external noise reduction equipment in the path between the source VTR and Solo, and in that case, Analysis Engine’s noise reduction should be set to OFF. This setting does not affect component video inputs.
• ‘RF Dropout Compensator’ – U-matic tape machines have an “RF out” which is an analog level indicating the amplitude of the RF carrier recovered from the videotape. If the RF level drops below a preset threshold, there will be no visible video, resulting in a dropout. When this occurs, the Analysis engine replaces that segment of missing video with video from the same area of the picture in the preceding frame of video.
Selectable Signal and Image Processing
At the start of a migration working shift or workday, checking that the source VTR is calibrated so a
collection of migrations will remain consistent in its video and audio levels is recommended. Calibration tapes are provided for the videotape format configured in the Robot. If the VTR calibration check returns an error message, the VTR may need service.
‘Proc Amp Controls’ are available for video adjustments. When using these controls, a waveform monitor and vectorscope are recommended to see their effects and avoid ‘illegal’ (outside standard) settings. Settings are saved in templates, which can be helpful when a collection of videotapes will benefit from consistent adjustments.
Each of the correction settings such as AGC, ACC, CTI, etc., can be switched on or off depending on the requirements of the project. These settings are retained in the Robot setup template and are used for each migration until the template is changed by someone with administrator privileges.
Output digital video
Source video and audio is digitized to the CCIR 601 standard (SDI), frame-synchronized and time-base corrected. This SDI signal is internally routed to video encoders along with a stream of the source analog video and analog audio source for monitoring.
Short-term storage of digital files produced during migration of digital video files and data is cached on Robot’s internal E: drive. The user can choose to monitor the migrating video and audio for logging or other reasons, or attend to other duties and return when the migration is complete, letting the Robot determine when the migration should end according to user settings like a long time of black, a time code mark out, a preset duration, a threshold of time with no video or servo lock, etc.
When the user agrees that the migration is complete, the cached files are wrapped and written to a “success folder” on Robot’s internal RAID disk array for retrieval by the Arkki EVO’s deeper storage and asset management system. The Robot can also write finished files to any networked destination. All encoded files can be “pulled” from the “Success directory” or “pushed”
by Uniform Naming Convention (UNC) to any directory of the user’s choosing, local or remote. With the Deep Archiving software (provided), the user can archive files into the tape library and automatically get some of the metadata into a Library.
Track entire process and create/save an audit trail or log file documenting each step and the entire process for each recording
The Robot creates more than 200 metadata fields during a videotape migration, plus 38 metadata fields about every video frame. When saved as an XML file, a typical video migration’s metadata file size can be 30 MB or more.
The robot metadata types include:
• Configurations and template (.sxt) used for this migration
• Analysis Engine and video encoder settings for this migration
• Tape Details about this migration, such as barcode, tape ID, description, user name, sequence (# of #), comments, cleaning and inspection status, migration results (log), etc.
• Settings and information about the output files (video and XML) generated during this migration, including Locations, names, sizes, elapsed time, SHA-1 checksum values, etc.
• Settings and information about the Source VTR used for this migration
• Settings and information about the Dub VTR and/or external encoder used for this migration (if any)
• Networking information about the Robot current connection and directories
• Information about the Robot’s factory build (software versions etc.)
• Number of video frames sampled in this migration, and frame-by-frame data about each:
- Frame index, frame count- Input presence, color presence- Time code, time code user groups
MEDIA FOUNDATION COMBINED WITH OFF-THE-SHELF TECHNOLOGIES
At the core of our offer is Arkki EVO, a powerful Digital Asset Management designed for large-scale, highly-configurable implementations. It manages assets, tracks metadata across the entire production workflow, and consistently drives both human and media workflows. Arkki EVO can be configured to address the full range of broadcast and content workflows, including archives, news, sports production, programs, new media content distribution, and VOD delivery.
Data-centric Digital Asset Manager
In this digital age, where the sheer amount and demand for content are unprecedented, and content access requires ubiquity, every organization faces the challenge of addressing explosive content growth while effectively managing libraries and adding value to their digital assets by making them available anywhere.
Simply put, the proliferation of content necessitates better ways to store and manage digital content—whether that be media files, branded materials, or documentation. MediaPower takes asset management to new heights with Arkki EVO, a powerful and innovative digital asset manager that enables you to store, catalog, share, edit, retrieve, and distribute digital assets quickly and efficiently.
Arkki EVO is a global content platform that lets you
manage all types of assets and asset correlations effectively.Built on a dynamic and scalable architecture, Arkki EVO lets you take control of your digital content through its data-driven and user-centered features, so that you can focus on your core business and less time on searching and managing the right digital asset.
Arkki EVO provides an online proxy library of digital content with enterprise-level features and powerful tools accessible from any web browser or mobile device. Users can upload, process, edit, download, and share multiple assets and projects, proofed with version history that enables monitoring and analysis of a digital asset’s updates and duplications.
An enterprise platform that meets the requirements of any media needs
At the core of Arkki EVO, is a robust document database server that combines a powerful multimedia Enterprise search, and multiple layers of application servers to handle several back-office processes. This is combined with a wide range of workflow and media management tools, as well as monitoring applications and fully integrated production tools.
Unique and Powerful Features
Arkki EVO incorporates a robust set of features from the types of files it supports, to unique and powerful data structures, built-in video editing capabilities, and OTT streaming capability.
Asset Collections
With Arkki EVO asset collections, you can easily create, edit, and share collections of assets between users. You can create dynamic data connected silos based on search criteria or static catalogs of assets, folders, and collections, and share them with multiple users while ensuring access levels and editing privileges.
File Types Supported
Arkki EVO supports a full range of multimedia files, images, and documents. It also provides an OCR feature for PDFs and Images:
• Video and Audio• JPG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, and other image file types
(OCR supported)• InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator• PDFs - raster and vector (OCR supported)• Microsoft Office - Word and Excel
Graph Database and Link Object
Arkki EVO uses a NoSQL graph database to manage infinite collections, documents, and custom fields. This provides ultimate flexibility in managing custom
metadata, categories, nested subcategories, and cascading objects. Combined with this, Arkki EVO features an innovative element—the Link Object, a particular type of data used to bond an asset to a network of objects inside the platform, creating dynamic and deep graph networks.
Storage Management
Arkki EVO supports heterogeneous disk spaces. Assets can be stored and managed in different storage and archive tiers for optimal balance of usage and performance requirements.
Standalone or Cloud-based
Arkki EVO orchestrates a number of distributed services following a true Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) that is simple to integrate with external ecosystems via API. Arkki EVO is developed to be hosted onto a single Virtual Machine— giving it the flexibility to be used as a standalone DAM-in-a-box” or forming part of a complex cloud infrastructure that features both horizontal and vertical scalability.
Semantic Search Engine
Arkki EVO incorporates a powerful search engine to
DIGITAL PRESERVATION: A Guide to Videotapes Digitization, Logging, and Archive
find any asset imported into the system quickly. It features an Elastic Graph engine that uses a semantic algorithm to contextualize data stored into the Arkki EVO platform and find correlations between assets.
Built-in Video Editing and Transcoding
Arkki EVO incorporates various video editing functions that help users handle and process raw video material. These include mark in/out, single frame extraction, sub-clips generation, adding metadata information to clips/sub-clips, uploading sub-clips as main clips, exporting to or downloading low-res or high-res, merging clips to single videos, exporting video frames as images, and even sending video clips to FTP of Public Cloud services.
It also features a built-in transcoding engine that accepts any standard video format (such as MPEG-2, XDCAM, DV, DNxHD, AVC-Intra, IMX, MPEG4, ApplePro Res, WMV wrapped MXF, MOV, and AVI, including MOV or MXF-wrapped 4K files), automatically generates low-resolution proxies in MPEG4, and allows users to create different file formats with optional watermarks.
Digital Asset Management Workflows
Arkki EVO streamlines your digital asset workflows – from importing, organizing, classifying, to delivering your digital assets, and even enabling triggers that automate workflow functions.
Collaboration Tools
Arkki EVO provides a full set of tools that allow different teams and user groups to work collaboratively on asset creation, licensing, marketing, down to distribution. These tools include rating and commenting, email and social media sharing, overlay video commenting, advanced tagging, and much more.
Multi-user and Sharing-friendly
Arkki EVO provides a complete user management system that allows administrators to define users and groups and assign different roles and access rights. Users also get their own user pages for tracking their
activities (such as uploads, edits, creation of groups or projects). Asset and project categories can also be assigned to certain users to control access to specific material.
Arkki EVO can also organize different assets into projects that can be made private, made available to selected users, and be assigned searchable metadata information. It can also generate public links to projects and to individual assets, making them shareable over the Internet. These links allow recipients to view and download low-res copies or for registered users, work directly on the linked project and its contents.
Rights Management Plugin
Ensuring control of copyrighted/licensed material is made easy with Arkki EVO’s Rights Management plugin. It lets you maintain control over assets and their data rights and enforce rules automatically from a single interface. Plugin features include:
• Ownership, permissions, restrictions• Retention and expiration• Licensing• Status and Notification triggers
Multi-tenancy
Sharing your digital assets outside your organization could be a tedious process, but that is made easy with Arkki EVO’s support for multi-tenancy. Arkki EVO lets you selectively share or distribute digital assets (or even collections) to user groups and external organizations (such as teams, subsidiaries, related companies, reseller networks, agency partners) while ensuring security and protecting confidential information.
Resource Optimization
Arkki EVO smartly utilizes the computing resources available to the system. Resource-intensive transcoding and processing tasks generally employ 100% of all CPU cores, rendering other functions virtually unusable. To combat this issue, Arkki EVO ensures that CPU and RAM resources are available for other services, providing a consistently fast response
from the system to users. Moreover, Arkki can also work in virtualized environments, significantly increasing its adaptability.
GDPR compliant
MediaPower fully respects the GDPR directives on privacy by design and by default. Thus, Arkki EVO has been developed to support this. Tokenization, cryptography, and advanced data management are core pillars in the design and development of Arkki EVO.
OTT Delivery
Each video asset imported into and managed by Arkki EVO can be delivered via OTT connector, a middleware that publishes VoD content to an IPTV, WebTV, or over the most important social networks through Mpeg-Dash protocol, HLS, and RTSP.
A.I. Integration
Arkki EVO provides connectors to Google, Amazon
Web Services, Microsoft and IBM Artificial Intelligence infrastructures which include, but not limited to, face recognition, brand presence, advanced OCR, speech-to-text, pedestrian detection, sensitive content detection, sports action classification, setting detection, and content, audio, and video classification.
Flexible and Configurable
Arkki EVO is structured to manage several types of assets and processes pipeline. Arkki EVO’s graph database, Link Object, advanced tagging, and the robust processing engine all work in tandem to let you create complex nested data collections, and customize and control the entire platform as appropriate—from a simple MAM, or large DAM, to archive libraries. For example, a media company can use Arkki EVO as simple Media Asset Manager, a large corporation can use the platform as personal cloud share, or a museum applies Arkki EVO as archive manager following the standard Dublin Core and EAD (Encoded Archival Description) and Berkeley Finding Aids Project (BFAP).
About MediaPower
MediaPower enables media workflows through products and services that empower organizations to create, manage, deliver, and monetize digital content. Founded in 1993, MediaPower started as an integrator of networking and storage solutions for the broadcast industry, with products from top brands like SeaChange, DDN, NetApp, and Dalet. MediaPower has since developed multidisciplinary expertise in IT-based workflows, media management, content acquisition & distribution, and digital transformation.
Having started in Italy & France, MediaPower now has established offices in Europe, Asia, and the United States, with a global presence in over 30 countries through its expansive and continually growing channels network.
While MediaPower continues to bring best-of-breed technologies from different content creation, management, and distribution brands into its offerings, it now also develops its suite of services and applications that enable the use of video throughout an organization’s internal and external communications. These include NewsTouch touch-based live presentation appliance, Arkki EVO Digital Asset Manager, AirGo integrated video server, NewsApp UGC (user-generated content) sharing platform, and its own OTT delivery platform.
With the widespread use of video and digital media in many different aspects of any business or vertical industry, MediaPower aims to serve not just the traditional broadcast and media space, but also content publishers, institutions, and corporate organizations to help them shift to technology and data-driven operations that deliver value to their customers.
Via XII ottobre 2/181 16121 GenoaITALYT +39 010 553-0177 F +39 010 570-9961
Via Giulio Pasquati, 7 (D/2)00139 RomeITALYT +39 06 87148746 W www.media-power.it
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