Cost Effective Digital Video Asset Management In A Group Station Environment

For decades, newsrooms, broadcast facilities, ad agencies, post production and corporate media centers have accumulated both film and video tape libraries that are staggering in their proportion and expense of acquisition. While these libraries are thought to be of considerable value, in truth their limited accessibility renders them less valuable than their owners believe. Fortunately this situation can be remedied easily and inexpensively with new storage products available today.

Consider a typical video tape archive. Walls of Beta, VHS, reel tape and now DV tapes stored on expensive shelving in a climate controlled room, usually in storage cases with hand written labels on them, or for the more organized systems with barcode labels. Usually there is some basic flat file indexing system down to the tape level, but that is all so that any access to each archived clip requires a lot of human effort and time.

A request for a clip on a specific subject necessitates a search through perhaps a spreadsheet to locate a tape number followed by a trip down the hall to locate it, hoping that it is still on the shelf and not on someone's desk. Getting the tape still isn't the end of the quest as now you have to load the tape into a deck or if it is really old, bake it in an oven, and then search for the clip, mark down the in and outs and transfer the clip you need to a second tape or into your Non Linear Editor. All this takes time and money, and if there are multiple tapes with similar footage on them, reviewing each tape for the best content can take days.