Saving the Richness of our Archives for Tomorrow

Baden-Baden (ibu). To a large extent still unnoticed by the TV consumer, at present a technical change is taking place in the entire spectrum of television production. From the studio technology to film editing and video archiving the digital revolution is entering the TV companies.

This digital revolution in Germany is coinciding with the merger of two of the eleven members of the public ARD-network. Since September, former Südwestfunk (SWF) and Süddeutscher Rundfunk (SDR), both FIAT/IFTA-members, together form the new company Südwestrundfunk (SWR). Both partners within SWR also already have a great experience in handling the new techniques. "In the radio production department we have a fully digitised transmitting facility in Mainz, digital news mass storage in Baden-Baden and the multimedia channel "Das Ding" (only to be received via Internet)", explained Helmut Ochs, Director Production and Technology at SWR.

By the end of the year, SWR will also have fully digitised studios at all sites. "Additionally with the beginning of 1999, we are responsible for the head domain of ARD's Internet supplies. Last but not least we are engaged with the development of digital archiving and documentation systems." Since five years now the TV archives of SWF and SDR have been involved together in different national and European research projects. The most successful project so far, Euromedia (with which the automatic generation of key frames for the annotation process was developed as well as an easy possibility for the transfer via Internet) will be concluded this year.

This is reason enough for SWR to try to balance the rapid development on the sector of digital television engineering in the context of an international symposium. Therefore, on invitation of the German Institute for Radio Technology (IRT), the company Compaq (one of FIAT/IFTA's sponsors) and the 140 SWR TV engineers, journalists, documentalists, graphic designers and programme planners came to Baden-Baden in October to discuss the effects of the digitisation on production workflow in a broadcasting corporation. At a technology fair (which took place in parallel) Compaq and its business partners presented concrete solutions for the TV world.
The integration of television and computer engineering, the costs of the digital conversion as well as copyright problems with re-used archive material were the main topics of the symposium.

"Everybody is talking about digitisation", said Dr Peter Dusek, the newly elected President of FIAT/IFTA, who chaired the symposium, as he summarised the enormous expectations with which currently those in charge are currently confronted with many times, even within the TV archive area, "that is at the moment our actual problem. Many believe that it is already possible today to do research via Internet in all TV archives of the world at the same time. But we are evenly not so far yet.". When investigating the integration of television and computer technology, the very different planning periods of both branches of industry play a substantial role. Burkhard Neidecker-Lutz (Technical Director of Digital/Compaq's Applied Research Centre in Karlsruhe): "Many of the questions, which employ us now, are not meant for the next 50 years. They are really short and medium-term accompaniments. Very much is already technically feasible today. But nobody can actually pay for it. One can buy many things within the area of the digitisation today, those systems do also work even well - only - they are not yet economical." His advice to TV archives: "for the number of celluloid films, you fear they will disintegrate, pick yourselves the currently lowest-priced, to your claims of quality sufficient system." He rejected plans for the digitisation of complete archive holdings: "However - really plan only for what gets broken at the moment."

Rainer Kellerhals (Director Digital Media of the Euromedia-partner and FIAT/IFTA-sponsor Tecmath) agreed: "My experience in the field of private TV is: even if one has the financial means and even then, if one really builds up completely new facilities, one falls back within most areas to relatively conventional solutions, because one must have easily the warranty that it works. And one experiments only in quite small areas."

Nobody can really say today when the digitisation of complete archive holdings will be economic, although the cost of storage capacity has fallen in the last 27 years by about, on average, 30 per cent per year. "When we began in 1992", acknowledged Joachim Haitz (responsible for the FMS-project at SWR) this development, "we undertook our first going attempts on an - at that time - technically very high-quality hardware platform. Today those are usual commercial PCs with standard equipment." The first hard disks in the research project had 1 GB capacity, which was considered an astronomical size at that time.

Wolfgang Dehn (head Documentation and Archives section Baden-Baden of SWR) addressed a further problem of digitisation: "Since we operate the business, we do constantly copy to rotational newly released formats. We have secured the - at that time still visible - archives at very high expenditure, from 2-inch to 1-inch. Then U-matic and the Betacam SP came on the market. What today is the Digital Beta tomorrow Betacam SX and DVCpro." Also the Celluloid film plays still a quite substantial role: "Also the film becomes naturally long-term secured. Only we ask ourselves naturally - for how long can we afford at all still this number of copying processes, copying the available stocks according to always new formats and always new requests. I think, we reached a point, where we must consider exactly, what we actually can still carry out." "If I hear, which new formats are introduced to the market, then I do really feel sick", he added, "also the exchange of programmes between ARD and ZDF and also the requests for a world-wide procurement or delivery of programme material brings us therefore increasing difficulties." His proposal for a solution: "We would really very gladly get an internationally accepted and standardised format, where for the next years up to the digital, tapeless storage a bypass time is ensured, and please - not still 5 or 6 additional formats."

Herbert Hayduck, active member of FIAT/IFTA's documentation commission and responsible for Multimedia projects at Austria's ORF, concluded: "the solutions, which appear on the horizon, for me are still rather far away. A very gradual approximation to potential solutions has to be selected here. And that is the realisation for me as an archivist, because we must be particularly careful as archivists, with what kind of strategy and how we must deal with our materials. We are not only responsible for certain technology thrusts for today and tomorrow, we are responsible for the materials as such. Not in their physical form, how they are present as tapes, but for contents, which are recorded on these tapes; - for the actual treasure, which is present in the archive, and it doesn't matter in which physical form. And therefore what matters most is to be particularly careful, in the selection of the strategy and the technology, with which one wants to secure this treasure."

The fact that such different strategies can also be quite fruitful in the co-operation between computer companies and TV archives, was also clear from the research projects at SWR.

"Our technique partners were at the beginning not quite conscious of the complexity of the operational workflow in a broadcasting corporation. But after initial problems one must say that it became a very profitable co-operation", explained Ulla Kreuder (responsible for Euromedia at SWR). "One can learn very much from each other, the technique partners are also ready to deliver much of their know-how. It is important for them, that the user partners understand the technique, which they apply. A very profitable know-how transfer takes place."
"My most important experience: software and hardware development are always very strongly shaped of the divergence between desire and reality at the beginning of a project", said Joachim Haitz, but" the feedback, the mutual fertilisation of practical work and research is the crucial point."

Also thanks to the FIAT/IFTA-network the SWR is involved in two further European Union projects - apart from Euromedia and the research project FMS (started up by the federal countries Baden-Wuerttemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz). In the Esprit-project VICAR the partners are working on modules to automate annotation in the TV documentation and to develop visual search tools for a more creative search - with applications of automatic pattern recognition. In the project PopEye the researchers are developing multilingual search and retrieval tools with automatic translation, which will help to simplify the international programme exchange. "Regarding a coming marketing of archive material via Internet, a multilingual database will be extremely helpful", explained Istar Buscher (responsible for PopEye at SWR).

"We couldn't have managed all these projects - not least under economic criteria - without the international co-operation with our partners from the FIAT/IFTA. It is very important, that open systems are developed, which can fit for as much as possible TV companies world-wide and be integrated easily in the entire range of specific television workflow and information streams", balanced Karl Maier (head of controlling television at SWR, member of the Programming & Production Commission of the FIAT/IFTA and together with Wolfgang Dehn main organiser of the symposium).

FIAT/IFTA's President Dr Peter Dusek said about the result of the symposium: "The digital world is coming. It is really a revolution of technical innovation and modification. But this world requires more than every other development a standard-giving institution, otherwise we sink into a jungle. Now it is the wild-grown market, which uses the tendency of price reducing and offers more and more systems, thus also gained no large market share and in the long run then the systems will be incompatible - these developments are also not useful for the consumer". FIAT/IFTA's President sees as the only solution an intensified co-operation between TV companies and manufacturers - e.g. in international organisations like FIAT/IFTA. "Perhaps the reason of the market will once triumph - that beside all technical variety certain basic law will be introduced. If in the next years this does not occur, then I see the advantages of the digital revolution connected with perhaps still larger disadvantages."

Many of the subjects of the symposium and already existing results of Euromedia and VICAR are exhibited at the IST98, the fair for Information Society Technology in Vienna, Austria (30th November - 2nd December).
Internet coverage: http://www.cordis.lu/ist98.

Everybody who is interested in the proceedings of the symposium or additional information is welcome to contact Istar Buscher at SWR (Istar.Buscher@swr-online.de or phone +49 7221 929-3840).
Internet: http://www.irt.de/IRT/veranstaltungen/going.htm