2020 IASA - FIAT/IFTA Joint Conference

In the English language, the saying 'making lemonade out of lemons' means to take something that is negative or difficult and turn it into something positive. The DV format is a 'lemon' in the video preservation world. Its tape is thin and prone to drop-outs, errors, and data loss. Degraded sections may yield wildly diverging results from deck to deck or even playback to playback. The technical characteristics of the recordings can be heterogeneous, with changes in settings within one collection, within one cassette, and even within one data stream.  But is there a way to make 'lemonade' out of these 'lemons'?"

Within their broader preservation strategies, meemoo (until February 11, 2020: VIAA, Belgium) and Indiana University (USA) started a project for the transfer of the images on thousands of cassettes containing baseline DV, DVCAM, and DVCPRO in 2019. Both institutions consulted extensively with each other when building the workflow with their vendor and determining the output formats for their projects. They kept in mind both the usability of the output files and the principles of audiovisual preservation. As these carrier types are ever higher on the preservation agenda of many audiovisual archives, both institutions want to share their experiences and offer solutions to frequently asked questions, such as: which output wrapper, codec, and file specifications to choose? To normalise audio and video parameters to one configuration or to preserve the heterogeneity of the source signal? And which player output to choose—the audiovisual output (SDI) that may present the most viewable version or the data output (IEEE 1394) that contains metadata not available elsewhere? They will also discuss the use of custom software applications that assist with analyzing the results of transfers.