Press release from Well Above
Digital media migration specialists Video-8 Media today gave details of the comprehensive archiving project it has underway digitising the full back catalogue of music videos for music giant EMI.
Video-8 Managing Director Robert Scott explained the background to the project and its process. “We had a meeting with the team at Shooting Star, one of Australia’s leading production companies, and the one tasked with managing and servicing the EMI back catalogue. At the meeting we presented the full Video-8 Media Factory solution to them and discussed their requirements for the EMI music video library.”
Shooting Star’s expertise includes advertising campaigns for TV, cinema and radio, as well as long-form TV shows, multimedia projects, outside broadcasts and corporate productions. With its subsidiary companies Cinema Live, D-Star Digital and Star Media Platinum, Shooting Star is a complete 360-degree entertainment conglomerate providing cross-platform production services for cinema, TV and the web.
Upon assessing the library with Video-8 Shooting Star detailed their need for it to be digitised, preserved and repurposed.
Scott continued, “EMI and Shooting Star were very clear, they wanted a robust and cost effective digitisation process and storage medium. There was another round of demos and tests and the deal was agreed on to use Media Factory for the project.”
Media Factory comprises a Front Porch Digital DIVArchive system, Anystream Agility ingestion and transcoding tools and Magna Systems’ Media Pilot web interface which uniquely allows clients to view material in their archives, trim and bin clips and edit metadata from anywhere in the world.
Scott said, “The project is a comprehensive one that included digitising material, compiling reels and storing the assets. It was tricky as some of the 1” compile reels were compiled on different machines and the tracking would change from clip to clip so we had to get dynamic tracking heads to get around this issue.”
The EMI library consists of over 15,000 individual tapes containing over 50,000 assets of original material, duplicates, dubs, censored media, uncensored media, audio only and video only clips. All of which needed assessing and sorting.
Scott continued, “The entire EMI library was moved physically to Video-8 so that the team could begin the project. Material was bulk ingested first, then broken down into individual clips and finally ingested to Media Factory. Once the individual clips were ingested into Media Factory, MediaPilot was used to add metadata to the database.
Robert Scott concluded, “This is a very important project for one of Australia’s major record companies. The assets we are digitising and preserving are totally unique parts of Australian music history and are now safely stored at Video-8.”
Video-8’s digitisation and preservation of the EMI back catalogue of music videos is ongoing.