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 five weeks after the fire. AM54-S4-: Str P7.1

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. nara205.JPG

C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San Diego 2012 Mike Collier, at the test screening for Celebrating Yaletown Productions Photographer, Jeffery Chong.

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 C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San Diego 2012

Target File Format Container format: Matroska version 2 (.mkv) Specifications: Must produce a “the file appears to be valid” output on assessment with mkvalidator, version or higher. Video 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 TagUsageExample ORIGINAL_MEDIA_TYPEFormat of the source tape. Use the Term Name vocabulary from EBU at ageMediaTypeCode_p.xml.htm ageMediaTypeCode_p.xml.htm Digital Betacam format digital television tape, Small cassette ORIGINAL_MEDIA_TYPE/BARCODEBarcode or other identifier from the tape ORIGINAL_MEDIA_TYPE/COMMENTComments 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. Tape had minor exterior damage. Tape was cleaning with an XYZ machine. DATE_DIGITIZEDDate and time of the file creation process. Enter in ISO 8601 format T19:20:30-05:00 DATE_DIGITIZED/COMMENTSComments about the digitization process including notable time-based events (if relevant). Damage to the source tape prevented digitization of the first ~10 minutes of content. ENCODED_BYName of the technician or organization responsible for the encoding and file creation process Vendor ABC, Inc. ENCODED_BY/URLURL for the technician or organization listed in ENCODED_BY. ENCODED_BY/COMMENTSComments on hardware, software, tools, and settings utilized in digitization process. Sony VO 5800, BlackMagic Design HD DeckLink Pro C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San Diego 2012

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.

Digitization metadata: excerpt C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San Diego 2012

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 Prepare Transfers of Digitized Files

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 – 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 C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San Diego 2012

Works cited "A/V Artifact Atlas." AV Artifact Atlas. AVAA, 13 Nov Web. 27 May 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, Web. 25 May Neidermayer, Michael. "FFV1 Video Codec Specification." FFV1 Video Codec Specification. 12 June Web. 25 May Raymond, Eric Steven. The Art of Unix Programming Web. 22 July Texas Commission on the Arts. Texas Commission on the Arts: Videotape Identification and Assessment Guide.” Web. 23 May 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, Print. Circular 92. C.McLellan, Beyond Borders: San Diego 2012