BC to KY and back again: Crossing
borders to discover new processes
for digital A/V
Cindy McLellan MAS MLIS
Beyond Borders: Annual Meeting of the SAA
August 11, 2012 San Diego CA
Session 607
Outline
• Introduction – the City of Vancouver Archives and the records
of Yaletown Productions Inc.
• Initial appraisal
• Why we chose to preserve video digitally
• FFV1 and choosing a preservation format
• Educate yourself! Your memory institution and the Copyright
Law of the United Sates of America
• Digitization specifications
• Quality checking
• Using Archivematica: digital preservation system
• Final thoughts
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
Diego 2012
Cordova St[reet looking west from Carrall Street] : July 1886 - five weeks after the fire. AM54-S4-: Str P7.1
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
Diego 2012
Some of the formats
we received:
1” Type C
• ¾” U-Matic
• Betacam
• Betacam SP
• VHS
• Hi8 ME
• D1
• D2
• Digital Betacam
• HDCam
•
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
Diego 2012
Preliminary assessment of the
condition of videos
Photograph by Howard Besser.
http://www.nyu.edu/tisch/preservation/media/images/2005_02_dc/0502dcnara205.JPG
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
Diego 2012
Mike Collier, at the test screening for
Celebrating Yaletown Productions
Photographer, Jeffery Chong.
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
Diego 2012
Expansion of U.S. Copyright term
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
Diego 2012
Some factors in video preservation
• Many proprietary formats
• Obsolescence of playback machines
• Proprietary playback machines can often be
expensive or hard to come by depending on the
format
• Inability to fix remaining machines because of
parts or a lack of experts
• Parts inside the videocassettes break down
• Tape itself is fragile
• Damaged by time, heat, water, cold, any extreme
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
Diego 2012
Walk to Coal Harbour
AM336-S3-2-: CVA 677-484
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
Diego 2012
Target File Format
Container format: Matroska version 2 (.mkv)
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Specifications: http://www.matroska.org/
Must produce a “the file appears to be valid” output on assessment with
mkvalidator, version 0.3.4 or higher.
Video
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Codec: ffv1
Chroma subsampling: 4:2:2
Colorspace: YUV
Bit Depth: 8 (yuv422p)
Frame Size: 720x486
Pixel Aspect Ratio: 9/10
Display Aspect Ratio: 4/3
Frame Rate: 30000/1001 (29.97…) frames per second, constant frame rate
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
Diego 2012
Metadata
Metadata Tag
Usage
Example
ORIGINAL_MEDIA_TYPE
Format of the source tape. Use the Term
Name vocabulary from EBU at
Digital Betacam format digital television
tape, Small cassette
http://www.ebu.ch/metadata/cs/web/ebu_Stor
ageMediaTypeCode_p.xml.htm
ORIGINAL_MEDIA_TYPE/BARCODE
Barcode or other identifier from the tape.
2011-99.123
ORIGINAL_MEDIA_TYPE/COMMENT
Comments on the condition of the
source, any preparation for playback of
the source tape (if relevant). For
comments on the digitization event itself
see DATE_DIGITIZED/COMMENT.
Date and time of the file creation process.
Enter in ISO 8601 format.
Comments about the digitization process
including notable time-based events (if
relevant).
Name of the technician or organization
responsible for the encoding and file
creation process
URL for the technician or organization
listed in ENCODED_BY.
Comments on hardware, software, tools,
and settings utilized in digitization
process.
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
Diego 2012
Tape had minor exterior damage. Tape
was cleaning with an XYZ machine.
DATE_DIGITIZED
DATE_DIGITIZED/COMMENTS
ENCODED_BY
ENCODED_BY/URL
ENCODED_BY/COMMENTS
2011-01-13T19:20:30-05:00
Damage to the source tape prevented
digitization of the first ~10 minutes of
content.
Vendor ABC, Inc.
www.example.com
Sony VO 5800, BlackMagic Design HD
DeckLink Pro
George Blood
Standards are like toothbrushes. Everyone agrees that
they are a good idea but no one wants to use the
same one.
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
Diego 2012
Delivery Specifications
Media:
– Filename: Named after an
identifier provided by City of
Vancouver Archives,
appended with the proper file
extension. It is very important
that this format is followed
exactly! Linux is case
sensitive.
– .mkv (digital preservation file)
– .mp4 (access copy)
Checksum: the sidecar
checksum file
– Format: MD5
– Filename: Named
“checksum.md5”, containing
the md5 checksum value and
relative filepath to the
assessed file.
– File attributes: The date
modified attribute of the
checksum file should be the
same as the time when the
checksum was generated.
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
Diego 2012
QC of files
AV Arifact Atlas. Image gallery.
http://preservation.bavc.org/artifactatlas/index.php/Image_Gallery
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
Diego 2012
Digitization metadata: excerpt
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
Diego 2012
Prepare Transfers of Digitized Files
Transfers to Archivematica
• Prepare transfers of
digitized files
• Create transfer
directories
• Put the object files in
the transfer directories
• Create CSV
• Create digitization
metadata spreadsheet
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
Diego 2012
Archivematica
• Ingest transfer of digitized files
– Load properly structured Transfers on to an external device
– Copy the Transfers into standardTransfer.bak, an unwatched directory
outside of the Archivematica
– When ready to process the Transfers, cut and paste as many Transfers
as scalability testing shows will process successfully (currently: 5) into
standardTransfer
• Switch to the Archivematica dashboard
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–
Go to the Transfer tab
Select Transfer Complete from dropdown
Wait (check that the server has not frozen)
Transfer has processed successfully all the way through and created
and AIP and a DIP
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
Diego 2012
Error code
http://xkcd.com/1024/
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
Diego 2012
Works cited
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"A/V Artifact Atlas." AV Artifact Atlas. AVAA, 13 Nov. 2011. Web. 27 May 2012.
<http://preservation.bavc.org/artifactatlas/index.php/A/V_Artifact_Atlas>.
Sue Bigelow. “So you want to make an AIP (from digitization to output.” (2012) City of
Vancouver Archives internal document.
"Matroska Media Container." Matroska Media Container. Matroska, 2011. Web. 25 May
2012. <http://www.matroska.org/index.html>.
Neidermayer, Michael. "FFV1 Video Codec Specification." FFV1 Video Codec Specification. 12
June 2011. Web. 25 May 2012. <http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/~michael/ffv1.html>.
Raymond, Eric Steven. The Art of Unix Programming. 2003. Web. 22 July 2012.
<http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/index.html>.
Texas Commission on the Arts. Texas Commission on the Arts: Videotape Identification and
Assessment Guide.” 2003. Web. 23 May 2012.
<http://www.arts.state.tx.us/video/identify.asp>.
United States. Congress. U.S. Copyright Office. Copyright Law of the United States and
Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code. Washington: U.S. Copyright
Office, 2011. Print. Circular 92.
C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San
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