Video tape presents well defined but often ignored day-to-day and long term challenges for content owners. Setting aside the issue of constant deterioration and potential loss of valuable content, locating, accessing and handling these assets every day is a real and ever repeating challenge. In addition, simple storage of these massive collections of video tapes occupies valuable real estate and is prone to damage as often only a single copy of this material exists because replication is time consuming and costly.
It is likely that much of this legacy content could be repurposed and possibly monetized if it were easily searchable and accessible, but doing so by conventional methods is enormously expensive in terms of both cost and labor. ROI calculations vary but it is clear that most content owners would not go through the trouble and costs associated with the storage and maintenance of these video tape collections unless they possessed some level of monetary, historic or cultural significance. All of these are clear motivations for addressing the preservation, location and access challenges presented by these pervasive video tape archives.
By effectively migrating these valuable video tape based assets to high quality digital files stored in a central repository, the preservation, access and repurposing challenges become trivial. The key barrier in the past was the human cost and efficiency of these large scale migration operations. Front Porch Digital offers an innovative family of solutions to address these traditional challenges for any size organization.
Our SAMMA family of versatile and cost-effective solutions enable efficient, high volume migration of video tape based assets and the ability to generate a multitude of file based formats in realtime during the migration process.. In addition, they also provide frame by frame content measurement and metadata collection so post migration triage can focus in on problematic items only rather than having to deal with each and every video tape in the library. With systems scaling from stand alone, single stream platforms to robotic systems capable of more than 1,000 hours of migration per week, our solutions are ready to address any scale challenge.
Adding to these migration solutions, our global market share leading DIVArchive Content Storage Management (CSM) system provides the foundation for an end-to-end migration, management and asset access solution serving your entire organization.
SAMMA Solo – A single channel semi-automated multi-standard migration system which makes the ingest process faster and more reliable than ever. Solo is able to support the simultaneous generation of a multitude of high and low resolution video/audio formats ranging from lossless JPEG2000 (J2K) and MXF wrapped MPEG2 though to frame accurate Windows Media low resolution proxies.
SAMMA Clean – An archival quality, precision video tape cleaning device which carefully inspects, cleans, conditions and winds videotape cassettes to achieve optimal playback for migration. With the ability to clean, process and prepare video tapes at approximately 20x faster than realtime, this step does not slow the overall process but guarantees the best possible migration outcome.
SAMMA Robot – An automated video tape based robotic system which can support up to seven simultaneous migration streams allowing the migration of up to 1,000 hours of content each and every week. The system is designed to operate around the clock in an unattended fashion and is also capable of generating a multitude of video/audio formats in realtime as migration progresses. Key metadata collection assists managers in determining the health and quality of migration operations and helps to focus in on damaged source video tapes which may require human intervention.
SAMMA J2K Player – PC based playback of industry standard JPEG2000 content via our own hardware based decoder which offers SDI output or on your monitor leveraging our innovative software based J2K codec.