Vectracom

PRESERVING AUDIO-VISUAL ARCHIVES

Vectracom is a service company specialised in preservation and valorisation of audiovisual heritage (films, video and audio).

Every year Vectracom digitises 100,000 to 200,000 hours of content regardless of their physical media type, covering broadcasters, administrations, corporates, museums and associations. Vectracom is the leading mass digitisation company in Europe with proven expertise and references for critical and/or large projects.

Founded in 1991, Vectracom headquarters is located in Paris, France but the company operates worldwide with offices in Europe, North Africa and USA.

On-Site Service Vectracom has long experience and good understanding of content owners’ needs. Therefore, for digitisation, the company suggests on-site service close to the archives vaults to avoid difficulties in shipping archives across. Audio-visual cultural heritage is of great importance and hence it is necessary to limit the risks involved.

When a broadcaster, association or an administration has decided to go for a digitisation campaign, Vectracom comes on site with the required equipment and people. The company takes care of everything. The content owner has only to provide or give access to the legacy audiovisual carriers. At the end of the project, the company takes back all equipment and the content owner has all their assets in a digital repository.

Service Means Saving Money In case of content migration, the big benefit of sub-contracting with Vectracom is the total cost of operation. It is more expensive for a content owner to do the job internally because they face complex tasks and heavy investment. By doing the job in-house, a content owner needs to manage the project in detail, purchase equipment and manage the operations. For the end users, Vectracom makes the project simpler and limits the risk. It also replaces large Capex by smaller Opex.

By doing the job themselves, content owners have to deal with five big issues: • Find (hire) people with old formats expertise for staff management. • Find (buy) the legacy machines to play the original material. • Maintain these players and time to refurbish them. • Take charge of systems design and commissioning. • Finally, hire, train and manage staff.

At the end, it is a lot of things to do and many risks to take and once all the material is digitised, the content owner pays for equipment that has become useless or redundant. As Vectracom is the best specialist that you can find, the risk to content owners is reduced.

System under verification before shipment. SD/HD/2K/4K scanning.

In-house Designed Solution Vectracom also uses several inhouse software designed for archives digitisation. From workflow management, to automation systems and quality control, it is all about specific software allowing the company to provide fast solutions and customised services at the best possible price.

Digitisation - Do It Now! Content owners “should think about digitising their assets if it is not already done,” explains Laurent Gignoux, president of Vectracom. “There are several factors that are making it more and more difficult to digitise or retrieve media from audio and video tapes.” According to Gignoux these are: • Material is ageing and degrading over time. This is true for all media (moisture and fungi) but more specifically for the film (Vinegar syndroma). • Keeping material in optimal storage is expensive – and you have to pay as long as you don’t digitise it. • Legacy machines are now rare, in few years they will be untraceable and in a few decades they will be gone. • Spare parts cost will increase

dramatically. In 2023 beta heads will become unavailable. • People having legacy machine knowledge are getting older. • The sooner you get digitised content, the sooner you can monetise it.

Valorisation: Make Money with Your Historical Content Once content is digitised, it becomes available in many ways and gets a new life. As a file, it can be stored on various containers (hard disk, LTO, DVD, USB keys) and copied, transferred through the internet and broadcast without any limitation. Asset Management System may retrieve any content with just some keywords or indexes. Indexing is of prime importance, an archive has no value if it is not indexed as it is not usable.

Vectracom has developed new services to help content owners to value their assets such as metadata enhancement services. Large projects of these types are currently in progress in Saudi Arabia.

Service Quality With an ISO 9001 Certification Vectracom is among the very few service companies to have made so much investment on quality. Each step of the workflow reflects Vectracom‘s constant concern regarding quality. This means love and care of original material, faithful digitisation and comprehensive file checking, specific proprietary software allowing constant VTR monitoring during transfer. Each snag is recorded in a database. Vectracom is probably one of the very few service providers in the domain to display an ISO 9001 certification.

Quality Control operations.

Large Project Management Vectracom has been in-charge of the largest projects of audio-visual archive digitisation during the last 10 years and has saved more than 800,000 hours of video and 25,000 hours of film. Several countries have trusted Vectracom with preserving their legacy tapes including Arab countries that have entrusted Vectracom with their legacy tapes, such as Saudi Arabia with (60,000 hours spread on 7600 films, 32,000 two-inch reels, 41,000 one-inch B reels and 1,600 one-inch C reels) and Tunisia with (11,000 two-inch reels).

Vectracom is currently managing huge preservation campaigns: • For Saudi Arabia: 110,000 hours of Beta

tapes and metadata enhancement of 250,000 clips. • For Switzerland: More than 45,000 hours of audio tapes. • For France (INA): 350,000 hours of

Beta tapes are currently digitised (50,000 each year). • For French territories: 120,000 hours of DV and Beta located in nine locations around the world (Polynesia,

Carribean, Indian Ocean) are digitised on-site. • For the European Parliament: 120,000 hours of audio cassettes.

Vectracom participates in the activities of various organisations such as FIAT/IFTA, IASA, ICCROM and AMIA.

Mass video digitisation using cart machines.

CONTACT

Vectracom

2 rue de la Justice

93210 La Plaine

St Denis Cedex, France

Jean-Michel Seigneur Email: seigneurjm@vectracom.fr Tel: +33 6 08 75 49 90

Website: www.vectracom.fr

Systems Integrators

Al Futtaim Technologies Aret Video and Audio Engineering BFE Studio und Medien Systeme GmbH Broadcast Solutions GmbH Broadcast Systems Arabia GloCom HEAT for Engineering and Technology INC System Integrations Systems Design Tek Signals/Qatar Signals Systems TSL