ITN Source is a major provider of archive clips for the
television broadcast industry.
We have over 1m hours of footage spanning 3 centuries from the
19th to the 21st century. I'm the technical
supervisor of the multi-format transfer (MFT) department. That's
the content-aggregator for ITN Source where materials come in from
lots of different sources like ITV, Reuters and our own archive, in
lots of different formats like Beta SP, Digibeta, DVC-Pro, film and
files like MPEG-4s.
All of this content gets converted into a format that the client
requests. For example, a client might want everything in WMV files
but the source formats may not match so we ingest and transcode the
content to provide the right output. So the process is as follows:
the client order will pass from the sales team to customer
services. If the content isn't digitised, the Vaults staff will
find the clip from the extensive ITN vault in our basement. The
content might be on a tape or another old format so Vaults will
correct any issues there are like poor sound, brightness, lighting
etc. and they'll then ingest that content using an analogue digital
converter and high-end "legalizers" into our digital asset
management server. Once it's on the server, our "shotlisters" will
add and update metadata to the item which is recorded in our
content management system. That means it's then searchable by
internal staff and customers alike. The footage itself can then be
encoded into the end-output format and delivered to the
client.
I look after a team of brilliant MFT media technicians who all
have specialist areas of knowledge but also core skills like tape
dubbing, time dubbing, tape-code matching, sprint-control, Content
Agent use and basic telecine. One of my other primary functions is
equipment maintenance. It doesn't matter how great a piece of
content is; if the kit isn't working we can't get the customer what
they want. If we can identify problems before they happen we can
escalate them appropriately and head them off at the pass.
Recently, we've upgraded many of our systems and infrastructure
to high-definition cabling, routers, circuits, monitoring, trunking
and audio. We can now do HD, SD, up-convert, down-convert: whatever
the customer needs!
<Back to Antony
Gostyn
> Forward to Next
Interview