Sharjah Media Corporation selects NOA for digitising assets

Sharjah Media Corporation (SMC) has selected AV digitising and archiving specialist NOA to  manage its entire legacy video archive. Delivery of NOA’s Archive Asset Management (AAM) system mediARC will be completed by Q2 2017, and will be used to digitise SMC’s 140,000 hours of Betacam, DigiBeta, U-matic, One Inch, and MiniDV tapes to SMC’s enterprise datacentre.

“The move to a dedicated AAM which handles 140,000 hours of digitised legacy content free from any vendor lock and in an OAIS based repository is a clear tendency we can see with broadcasters who take the ‘long-term’ really seriously,” said Jean-Christophe Kummer, Managing Partner of NOA.

“Among other advantages, the mathematically lossless FFV1 codec in use at SMC gives us the possibility to store the source code of the replayer together with the associated essence. Integration in business processes with an existing Production Asset Management (PAM) system can be performantly realised. I am happy that SMC decided to follow our recommendations based on our 18 years of archive management experience.”

At the front end of the operation, sixteen NOA FrameLector channels ingest media directly from tape and simultaneously monitor ISR events and RF levels to reliably detect transfer errors caused by faulty head-tape interaction, enabling a clear differentiation between “error-on-tape” and “error-during-transfer”. This information subsequently allows for pinpoint error correction (e.g. cleaning of tape and/or replaying machine) and is also available for automatisation within the workflow, to trigger or skip individual steps according to predefined error thresholds.

Integration of QC processes and metadata edit validation into production workflows is achieved with NOA’s mediARC built-in workflow engine, which improves SMC’s operation by improving efficiencies and reducing the time taken for digitisation.

Delivering an independent archival format free from any vendor lock has been at the core of NOA’s design philosophy. To ensure SMC is building a future-proof digital archive, NOA’s MediaButler is used to encode the final archival file in an open source FFV1 codec. Since archival storage is only as good as information retrieval, NOA’s mediARC Asset Archive Management system delivers comprehensive media content description with its advanced metadata tools.

NOA will deliver a complete turnkey operation for SMC and provide an entire digitisation and archiving facility. As well as implementing software installation, testing, commissioning and training, NOA will deliver and install all the servers and workstations required to give SMC a highly efficient operation.