40 TVBEurope The Workflow The lifecycle of an asset


Kevin Shaw, lead technologist at BBC Studios and Post Production Digital Media Services, explores the most valuable thing the industry possesses — its content


THE WORD‘asset’ — or ‘asset management’ — is now used so often that we could be forgiven for forgetting what it means. The Oxford English Dictionary says that an asset is ‘a thing of use or value’, and for most media businesses their content is their lifeblood. So it makes sense to treat content as a critical asset, and ensure that it’s safeguarded and available as necessary. When discussing asset management, people often talk about monetising content in the future, and this is certainly important. But the value can also be realised in a


different way. At BBC Studios and Post Production Digital Media Services we recently conserved the archive content of renowned dance company Rambert by


digitising it. Their collection — on VHS tapes — is the company’s cultural history. If they wanted to revive one of their ballets, the choreography was only available as a video recording, so they needed continuing access to their archive. With VHS players rapidly dying out,


it was becoming harder for the company to watch the recordings. Rambert’s motivation to digitise its archive was, then, not to monetise it, but to conserve it for future generations of dancers and choreographers. They’ve also made it accessible, free of charge, to the public, so it serves to improve public awareness and extend their marketing reach. The critical point to remember is that, if


an archive is on tape, you have to address this issue now. Every time a tape is played it


www.tvbeurope.com April 2014


Renowned London dance company Rambert restored its deteriorating VHS archive and has now made it available to the public


Kevin Shaw, BBC S&PP


is being worn, reducing its quality the next time it is played: tape has a very finite life. And, of course, it’s increasingly difficult to find players for the many tape formats we’ve seen over the 60-year life of video recording. The solution is digitisation, but on its


own that is not enough. It may seem simple to go to the local computer store, buy a couple of USB disk drives, write the content to them and put them on the shelf. But that’s not a good long-term idea for media. That sort of disk drive is designed to last no more than a few years in reasonably constant use. Leaving them on the shelf means they’ll almost certainly fail the first time you go back to them, so your media assets still have no protection.


Protection


So the first consideration must be to protect the assets into the future. That means making copies and then continually checking the integrity of the data. Whether


the archive is stored on spinning disks or data tape, and whatever form the archive storage takes, you need to be continually aware that the data is securely stored and can be retrieved when required. Because of this need for continual checking, unless your archive is so vast you can sustain your own dedicated team it makes sense to hand the task to an organisation that has the resources to continually monitor the integrity of your data. They’ll operate securely redundant storage, usually in multiple locations, and will have archive management software which is continually running checksum calculations on the data across the sites to spot errors and rewrite files before they become a problem.


Visibility The archive may exist to raise revenues or protect a cultural heritage; it may be open to all or just a small group of researchers. Whatever the requirement, the content will need to be accessed by some people, so it is vital that the archive is visible. First, there must be good metadata to help the researcher find the right content quickly and accurately. A search which brings up hundreds of possibilities is as useless as one which delivers nothing. Each archive will be different and therefore have a different metadata schema.


BBC S&PP won a FOCAL Award for remastering Sir David Attenborough’s Life on Earth andTrials of Life


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