QUADRIGA•Video migrates 450,000 hours of Videotapes for the National Library of Norway

Approximately 450,000 hours of program material on video cassettes have been recorded over the years by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation as part of legal deposit recordings. In order to protect these unique broadcasting assets in the long-term, these video cassettes must be transferred into archive files to be preserved in the National Library of Norway's digital long-term archive.

Video Cassette Migration Control Room at the National Library of Norway

Since this high-volume migration requires a specialized quality-controlled video digitization system, a QUADRIGA•Video system from Cube-Tec International was purchased. An additional QC workflow was customized according to the tender specifications. The entire ingest system is using 16 broadcast video tape recorders. The installation is now completely in productive use and can ingest up to 300 video cassettes per day in a fully quality-controlled operation.

For the DVCAM cassette collection the QUADRIGA•Video Direct Readout™ feature is used. This provides users with real-time monitoring and archiving of the compressed digital video streams straight from DVCAM video cassettes. Working directly from the original format not only improves error detection levels, but the company’s implementation of proprietary algorithms also enables users to apply error correction years, or even decades, after the migration has happened.