Nowadays most of the video we come in contact with, in any area of our lives, is usually digital. And it has been for some years now. But this new media comes with its own set of challenges regarding its storage and long term preservation. Videoma Archive can help you with this.

Video digitization

As we said in the intro, normally the video we come in contact with in our daily lives, is digital. However, for organizations that have been around for a couple of decades this is not so. They usually have video on disc, on tape, or even on film. Hence, the first step for a lasting preservation of this content is digitization.

As this is a lengthy process, because usually it is done in real time, this means that an hour of video takes an hour to digitize. Consequently, it is very important to define the best format for the video, so to avoid repeating the same time-consuming process. This requires two main things:

  • Selecting an appropriate codec
  • Selection an appropriate bitrate

As you are creating a master file, the ideal scenario would be storing the video uncompressed, so to have always the maximum quality. However, this is rarely practical. One second of uncompressed Full HD video requires 148 MB of disk space. For 4K its 622 MB. Therefore, you have to use a compression algorithm (codec) to reduce the amount of space the video requires. And there are two types of those: lossless and lossy. The lossless codecs keep the quality completely intact, but only achieve compression ratios of 10:1 at most.

So, in the end, almost everyone uses lossy codecs, like H264, MJPEG or H265 among others. And for those you have to define a bitrate, which is directly related to the quality the video is stored in. For example, for H264 and a Full HD video about 8-12 Mbps (megabits per second) are needed. This means an hour of Full HD needs a bit over 6 GB of disk space (at 12 Mbps), instead of 532 GB for the uncompressed version, which is much more reasonable for the storage system. However, this has to be sized not just to accommodate the current videos, but be able to grow with time.

The use of proxies

When everything is digitized, you need a way to preserve it correctly. First of all, your video can come from almost any device and in any format, size, codec, bitrate, etc. So your preservation platform needs to unify all of these videos into a single format, that can be visualized with easy from anywhere, with any device. But that does not mean that the original video is lost. Instead, a so called “proxy” is created, usually in the MP4 format, which currently is the most universal one. Our own video archival platform, Videoma Archive, does this automatically with any video. In fact, the system can be programmed so it does different conversion depending on the input file. All of it is automatic and does not require human intervention. Just put all of the files in the Videoma input folder and the system processes them in sequence, following the rules you have specified.

The importance of metadata

Metadata is a type of text data that describes other data. For example, if you have a video clip with a scene at the beach, there is no way of knowing what is in it, unless you watch it. But if the clip has been analyzed and tagged previously, you can just read the metadata textfile which describes the contents of the video. For example, “people on the beach having a party in the afternoon”.

As tagging hundreds or thousands of videos is a lot of work, any help that shortens this process is appreciated. Videoma Archive enriches the ingested videos with its integrated AI analyzers that are able transcribe the spoken content into text, translate it into other languages, add subtitles, identify objects or faces, and the like. This means that all of the videos are tagged automatically when ingested, so you only need to check and perfect the tags as you require. And all of these tags can be searched. So you could, for example, locate all of the videos that contain umbrellas, in just a couple of seconds.

Preservation of digital video

Digital video does not wear out any more like physical media used to, but on the other hand, if you lose your only file of it, you cannot make more copies from the “original”. Hence the preservation of your digital video is very important in several regards:

  1. Unification. We already talked about this when explaining what proxies are. The first step in preservation is making sure that anyone can access the file now and in the future, which means converting it into a universal format.
  2. Quality Control & Backups. Digital video does not wear out like physical media, but needs to be backupped at all times in order to avoid any loss. Once a digital file is gone, either by human or machine error, its gone forever. That is why it is important to always have a redundant backup, in different physical locations, of all the assets. Also, in order to ensure that nothing has happened to any of the existing copies of a file, a periodic quality control or CRC check is necessary, so to detect changes early, and substitute that file with a correct one.
  3. Disaster recovery. In this day and age, where cyber attacks and ransomware are more common than we would like, having your digital video assets correctly preserved is a must, because it enables you to have them accessible, no matter what, even if part of your system fails, has a problem or is attacked. Hence, part of the preservation initiave is having a disaster recovery plan in place, to be able to use and exploit your videos without interruption.

We are a strategic partner with ODILO, which, among other things, is specialised in digital content preservation. Videoma provides the backend and AI analytics for dealing with video files during the preservation process.

Exploiting your content

Preserving your video assets is a good idea per se, but once you have them all organized, tagged and secured, you are able to exploit this content database to convert it into an active for your company or organization, not just a simple storage, where digital data is going to be accumulated and forgotten. And for that, your system has to be able to not only all of the above, but also provide ways of getting information out of the data pool:

Retrieval. In this case we are not talking about just downloading a file once we have found it, but also converting it to the format and size we need, extracting partial clips from it or building a collection of several related videos to then download them or share them with someone else. Videoma can help you in all of these tasks. Its powerful search engine allows retrieving exactly what you need, and its export functions are perfect to get the selected material to the end user.

Sharing. Some video collections may be of interest to the general public, so a very desirable function is one that allows you to publish selected videos in an easy way, for example on the web. Videoma has a special Web Widget that you can program with your own filters, to integrate a subset of your videos in any website, with almost no coding.

Conclusion

Video preservation is an important matter and cannot be treated as regular data backups, due to its special nature. In order to be able to reuse the stored material, you need a solution like Videoma Archive, able not only to store, but to tag, index and archive the video files properly and allow their easy retrieval via a search engine, clip extraction and other sharing functionalities like a web widget which allows easy integration of the contents into any website. Only then your video assets are not only safe, but can be used and monetized.