Cube-Tec builds Audio Preservation Factory for Beeld En Geluid

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Beeld en Geluid) in Hilversum preserves 70 percent of the Dutch audio-visual heritage. With around 700.000 hours of television, radio, music and film, Sound and Vision is one of the largest audio-visual archives in Europe.

As part of a public contract, Sound and Vision plans to transfer more than 100.000 hours of the Dutch broadcast audio to mass storage systems before August 2014. In addition to preserving this material, a great part shall be made available for public access by various services.

The largest part of this aural heritage is currently stored on analog quarter-inch tapes and R-DAT cassettes. Cube-Tec has delivered QUADRIGA workstations for the parallel ingest of material from 32 tape machines. 16 Telefunken M15A reel-to-reel machines and 16 Sony DAT-Recorders are used for playback.

All the Telefunken machines were modified by Cube-Tec with the new universal OptoSensor hardware in order to detect and document torn tape, bad splices and separation tape with a timecode stamp.

In addition to the analog material, there is also a backlog of about 30 terabytes of digitized audio files that has to be quality checked. Missing technical metadata have to be inserted.

As DOBBIN will run around the clock, undesignated processing time will be used to inspect the backlog. Processing the backlog has become an automated job. Process rules are individually defined in the DOBBIN Rendering Farm to classify the technical quality of each file.

The critical files will be spot-checked by an operator. Cube-Tec and the audio digitizing team at Sound and Vision have developed a highly optimized workgroup solution based on CubeWorkflow

CubeWorkflow is fully integrated in the existing IT infrastructure, which includes a cataloging system and an external storage provider (Technicolor). CubeWorkflow controls the QUADRIGA and DOBBIN audio and metadata process chain.
CubeWorkflow ensures that each member of the archive group has access to all necessary information available throughout the process which guarantees the best possible work.

CubeWorkflow streamlines the flow of work and detects and prevents operating errors. With the new system, the project leader has a detailed overview of the progress of the work and any occurring exceptions or special cases at any time. The installation at Sound and Vision in Hilversum was completed in May 2010.

We have produced a short documentary film that explains the highlights of this installation. Click on the image below to watch the film

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