1. Vanderbilt Television News Archive
Off-air archiving of news broadcasts from national television networks
NDIIPP Partners Meeting
July 2008
Breakout session:
Broadcast and Satellite Television
Marshall Breeding Director for Innovative Technologies and Research
Vanderbilt University

2. Talking points
10:40 Marshall Breeding, Vanderbilt, the classic example. Where does the incoming signal come from? About the digital capture setup, i.e., the workstation. What sort of worker does the capture work. About the archiving format: what were the considerations, what was the decision? About the quantity or rate of capture. About metadata (just a little!). About producing "access" copies. About the Web site. Who are users?

3. The Vanderbilt Television News Archive
Off-air capture and archiving of US National News broadcasts
Established August 5, 1968
ABC, CBS, NBC
CNN added in 1995 (One hour / day)
Fox News added in 2004 (One hour / day)
Specials – selected news content beyond regular news broadcasts

4. Signal sources Standard cable service Roof-top antennas
Comcast
Roof-top antennas
Satellite service
Not reliable enough to justify
Unable to get agreements to tap non-local feeds
May add to gain access to additional news networks

5. Digital Capture hardware and software

6. Digital Recording system
Manual digital system
Dell OptiPlex towers
Automatic 24/7 recording system
Dell PowerEdge rack-mount servers
Need a highly reliable redundant environment
We only get one chance to record each program

7. Digital Video Workstation
Dual purpose
Off-air recording of newscasts
Conversion of videotapes

8. Digital Recording Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350 tuner card
Video composite output to OSD overlay
OSD output to Optibase Moviemaker video input

9. Digitizing Workstation

10. Digital Studio 2

11. Digital Studio 3

12. Staffing issues
Work with staff members of the Archive that have evolved through many generations of equipment and technology
Strong dedication to the mission
Able to adopt each new generation of technology to the Archive’s work

13. About the quantity or rate of capture
Quality considerations included
File size vs video quality
Dealing with off-air capture, not studio quality
Aggressive data rate and resolution would not lead to perceptible improvements in quality

14. MPEG-2 Options NTSC Signal Format Main Profile @ Main Level
Program Stream (video/audio multiplexed)
29.97 frames per second
6mb/sec video bit rate
D2 Resolution: 720 x 480
Audio Sampling: 44 kHz
Audio bit rate 192 kb/sec

15. Metadata Qualified Dublin core Abstract + structured fields
Headline
Date / Begin-end times
Reporters
One record / story (25+stories / broadcast)
Web-based process for submitting metadata

16. Metadata

17. Access
TV news Web site
On-campus: Ex Libris Primo interface

18. Access copies Streaming currently offered in Realmedia format
Automatically transcoded from MPEG-2 to RM upon initial ingestion
Realmedia was best choice in Today most users prefer Flash or other formats

19. TV News web site Locally developed content management environment
Windows 2003 Server / Dell PowerEdge server hardware
MySQL database
Perl-based interface layer
E-commerce for loan requests
IP-authentication for subscriber access

20. Users
Academic
Individual researchers
Journalists
Legal

21. Registered Users

22. Questions?
Marshall Breeding