Front Porch Digital and Technicolor Media Services have formed a joint operation to provide mass tape to file migration. The new service, supported by Front Porch Digital technical staff, is hosted at Technicolor’s site at Perivale, west London.
The service is based on Front Porch’s Samma technology, including a three stream Samma Robot for automatically loading and transferring video tape. The process performs quality control tests while transferring the content to the archive. Technical metadata as well as indexing information is added at this stage.
The archive content is written to a large, nearline disk system from where it can be transferred to external data tape storage. With a capability of transferring as many as seven tapes simultaneously, each with error detection and multiple output formats, the system has a capacity of around 1000 hours of content a week.
This sort of service centre has already been implemented, using Samma technology, in the US, Australia, mainland Europe and the Middle East. “It is very pleasing to be the first to bring this state of the art migration facility to the UK industry, and to the US studios we work with,” said George Kilpatrick, managing director of Technicolor Media Services.
