Spanish national broadcaster RTVE has chosen Tedial to provide the technology behind one of the largest projects of video digitisation ever undertaken.
The complete historical archive of RTVE will be converted to a common format and stored, using the complete range of Tedial technology to achieve a seamless solution from ingest and archiving to browsing and delivery.
RTVE is the largest audiovisual group in the Spanish-speaking world and, as well as its radio and television channels in Spain, it broadcasts on five continents. It has set as a strategic objective to bring all its historical archive together, a project planned to take four years. The work will be undertaken in three RTVE centres, linked by the Tedial software into a single system.
More than one million videotapes containing 800,000 hours of content are to be digitised using Tedial TD Capture, crossing a large number of formats including several generations of Betacam and older formats including U-matic and 1″ tape. Some content is only available on film. Content will be ingested at the three RTVE sites and by external service providers.
On ingest into the Tedial system it will be encoded to MXF OP1a at 30Mbps or 50Mbps, or to XDCAM HD as appropriate. During ingest the Tedial Indexer will also analyse the media files, providing quality assurance and extracting existing metadata. It will also storyboard each tape and generate a browse resolution version in H.264.
Archive control uses the Tedial AST module as a hierarchical storage system. In the RTVE system there are 17 AST servers handling both full resolution and browse content, with 900 terabytes on disk and 24 petabytes in tape libraries. The decision to use 17 servers allows the content to be stored by groups, which may be defined by content type, archival format or storage policy. AST co-ordinates the transfer of files between tape and disk.
Standing at the top is the Tedial Ficus business process management system, which coordinates all tasks in the system, including managing the database and supporting users who need to access and re-use the content. Ficus also provides a link to Arca, the document management system at RTVE, which includes the radio archive of more than two million audio clips.
“The archive of RTVE is an important part of Spain’s cultural history, as well as an asset which we can use to make programmes in the future,” said Carlos Hern_ndez, director of the RTVE Documentary Centre. “Digitising and cataloguing more than a million videotapes is a massive undertaking, and we are confident that with the support of Tedial we will accomplish this successfully.”
Jos_ Mesas, managing director of Tedial, added: “The solution we are installing will allow any RTVE user access, from a single application, to millions of pieces of audiovisual content in a professional format. It will then seamlessly handle the recovery of that content to the transmission or production area as required, giving immediate access to the whole of the archive, when and where it is necessary.”
