Harris provides digital asset management to European Parliament

The European Parliament (EP) has completed a large-scale upgrade and redesign of its video, audio and imaging archive using Invenio digital asset management technology from Harris Broadcast Communications. The upgrade was rolled out by the Audiovisual Unit of the EP to allow the archivists in Brussels (Belgium) and Strasbourg (France) to be more responsive when handling increasing demands for information and to remain in full control of the EP’s media assets. The Harris Invenio solution was chosen by the EP after an open call for tender procedure. Belgian Systems integrator VideoPromotion managed the project. The Invenio software forms the backbone of the EP archive, handling the automation, restoration and movement of assets and the copying of files into other systems. The archive includes a 35 GB database containing 15,000 tapes, 65,000 video high-resolution files and 65,000 low-resolution files. This database is growing daily through the addition of up to 20 new files, each containing up to five hours of content and originating from more than 40 different types of events within the EP. “The archive handles requests from journalists at up to 30 external TV stations during the plenary sessions, as well as web requests and requests from researchers and the EP administration,” said Adelino Pires André, project manager at VideoPromotion. “In one week, up to 80% of requests directed at our department will be demands for original archived content. With Invenio, you can search within a large video file and pinpoint the exact clip you’re looking for. It’s magic.” The project first involved the migration of all existing tape content from the legacy system to video files within Invenio, and the deployment of Invenio Motion for workflow and integration with third-party systems and Invenio Insight for frontend users. “The previous vendor’s solution only handled tapes and provided no workflow automation capabilities,” continued Pires André. “This was not just a migration, but a complete change in the way the archive department works. Inside Invenio, we can play, mark in or mark out, enrich the archive with user-directed selections you can listen to video in multiple languages, handle audio or still images, and export metadata to other systems if needed.” The plenary sessions of the EP are recorded in 18 languages, the recordings of which are automatically fed into the Invenio system with EPlogger, a custom application designed by Harris for the EP. Other events such as symposiums and meetings can also be logged manually in EPlogger or updated by the archivists themselves with qualitative data after the event. Invenio is linked to the EP’s in-house semi-automatic eCarton flow system, which, among other things, captures metadata from each microphone used during events. Electronic Video News (EVN) files are also created by post production after many events and need to be archived appropriately. In the archive, the GUI interface allows a search in English or French. The system is highly redundant and can withstand three points of failure. “This project demonstrates the strength of Invenio when it comes to digital asset management in a complex, live multi-cultural environment,” said Mathias Eckert, vice president, sales and services, Europe and Africa at Harris Broadcast Communications. “The European Parliament values the ability of the Invenio solution to handle and automatically capture multi-language metadata, to complete searches within video files and to offer low-resolution previews of any video content in the archive. We believe that the customer will truly benefit from the fact that Invenio is a unique packaged solution that is easy to maintain and evolve.” www.harris.com