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“Getting to Disk-based Lossless Digital Video Preservation”

National Library of Medicine
Bethesda, Maryland
August 1, 2005

Précis

Many video archivists are looking for a sustainable pathway to transfer their aging film and analog video holdings to a disk-based lossless master digital video format.  This has been impeded by the rapid flux of technology change, driven by broadcasters and by studios where archiving concerns are secondary at best.  Furthermore, the multiplicity of potential standards for file formats and metadata causes fragmentation of an already-small archiving-tool market, leading to solutions that are expensive, maladroit, or slow to arrive.

Video archivists, particularly those with cultural heritage and other non-commercial institutions, can benefit by showing more leadership.   At this meeting, we will strive to set a process in motion – to develop one or more technical standards, profiles within standards, and/or recommendation of best practices, for long-term video archiving serving our needs, and based on standardized mathematically-lossless compression of frame images.  Such recommendations will begin with file formats, codecs, and encoding parameters, but should extend to associated metadata and rights management issues.  The result at the end of the process should provide a target for equipment and software developers to support.

This one-day Washington, D.C. planning meeting will probe these issues, possibly propose a venue for a more formal, follow-on workshop (either standalone or associated with a larger meeting), and establish direction, people, and means to enlarge the effort and carry it to fruition.

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