Digitisation project 7: Digital Video formats
With Digital Video we once again welcome a carrier with a digital signal to our digitisation projects. DV, DVCAM and DVCPro emerged during the early 1990s, but they will need to be digitised in the near future.
DV, DVCAM and DVCPro were launched in the 1990s by a consortium with Sony and Panasonic among others. Several carriers are out of production, which caused the formats to appear on our radar.The approximately 60 content partners who answered our first call, were joined by 10 extra partners, together possessing nearly 22,000 carriers all together. Meemoo wants to ‘digitise’ these from 2019 on.
We call it ‘digitising’, but we actually transfer or migrate the content of these Digital Video-carriers to a more sustainable digital file format. That’s why our intern, Gaël, started with a very specific preparation in March 2018. In the context of his Master’s course Audiovisual Management at the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) in France, Gaël will investigate the quantity and condition of the carriers until August. He’ll also help, among other things, to determine the technical specifications for the tender document of the migration. The result of his research appeared in an intermediate report. The research into different file formats in which we will preserve the digital signal, has been continued after Gaël left, together with several experts.
We began writing the tender at the start of 2019, and the tender procedure was started in June. After considering price and quality, Memnon emerged as the best candidate. We started testing with Memnon at the end of October before performing the digital transfer. This project should be completed by the end of 2020.