Fast-Forwarding Tape Conversion
New Crawford Media Services facility designed to speed up process of digitizing old video files
By George Winslow -- Broadcasting & Cable, 2/21/2011 12:01:00 AM
Wrestling With Tapes
Over the years, as WWE grew
into a powerhouse in the wrestling
world, it acquired a number
of regional sports entertainment
companies, accumulating a massive
cache of material from as
early as the 1970s.
To make better use of this library, WWE last year hired Crawford Media Services to digitize some 25,000 tapes holding more than 26,000 hours of material.
Beginning last March, WWE began shipping tapes in a variety of formats from its offices in Stamford, Conn., to Crawford’s facility outside Atlanta. The content was digitized and the standard- definition files were upconverted to HD before being put on LTO4 tapes and shipped back to WWE, where they were fed into WWE’s Grass Valley K2 server system, archived and logged. The massive project will finally be completed by the end of this month.
“The fact that we were able to digitize more than 26,000 hours in the course of a year is quite a huge achievement,” says Tracey Shaw, director of TV operations at WWE.
The newly digitized content is expected to be important for many aspects of the WWE’s business. The digital archived video will be used for new TV programming, video on demand offerings, home video, and an anticipated new WWE cable channel.
“There were a lot of drivers for [the project], but the underlying purpose is to now have searchable, quicker, easier access to a much larger portion of our assets,” Shaw says. —GW
To make better use of this library, WWE last year hired Crawford Media Services to digitize some 25,000 tapes holding more than 26,000 hours of material.
Beginning last March, WWE began shipping tapes in a variety of formats from its offices in Stamford, Conn., to Crawford’s facility outside Atlanta. The content was digitized and the standard- definition files were upconverted to HD before being put on LTO4 tapes and shipped back to WWE, where they were fed into WWE’s Grass Valley K2 server system, archived and logged. The massive project will finally be completed by the end of this month.
“The fact that we were able to digitize more than 26,000 hours in the course of a year is quite a huge achievement,” says Tracey Shaw, director of TV operations at WWE.
The newly digitized content is expected to be important for many aspects of the WWE’s business. The digital archived video will be used for new TV programming, video on demand offerings, home video, and an anticipated new WWE cable channel.
“There were a lot of drivers for [the project], but the underlying purpose is to now have searchable, quicker, easier access to a much larger portion of our assets,” Shaw says. —GW
“You have many companies and stations that have thousands of hours of tapes dating back 20, 30 years that will be lost if they are not migrated to digital, because magnetic tape doesn’t have a long shelf life,” says Steve Davis, Crawford senior VP.
Content providers such as Hollywood studios and sports leagues see a clear business model for converting all this archival content, which can then be used on a variety of digital platforms, Blu-rays, DVDs and on-demand offerings. For example, WWE is completing a massive conversion process of more than 26,000 hours of archival wrestling footage.
Other programmers, including many local TV stations, have struggled to find a cost-effective way to convert their video libraries, a problem Crawford hopes its new facility will help solve.
To handle the process, the facility offers highcapacity fiber connectivity to move content in and out of the building, a high-capacity internal network, massive storage space, a data center and proprietary technology for managing the conversion of old tapes to digital formats.
“We are trying to remove the obstacles to migrating and storing tapes with an asset management system that we offer as a hosted service,” Davis says. That means stations and content companies don’t have to purchase an expensive system or make major capital investments in storage.
Meanwhile, the infrastructure for digital asset management is also playing an increasingly important role in Crawford’s post-production business, which has state-of-the-art editing suites in the company’s new seven-story building.
On its post-production work for the CW’s The Vampire Diaries and AMC’s The Walking Dead, Crawford’s staff works overnight on dailies, correcting for color and converting them to the correct file format. Then the company uses its fiber links to send the files “so people in L.A. and around the country can look at them the next morning,” says Davis. “It provide services that would be hard for a stand-alone post house to offer.”
Crawford’s storage and archiving capability also means “we can offer [programmers] archiving and remote access to their content,” which can be easily lost if simply stored on hard drives, Davis adds.
E-mail comments to gpwin@oregoncoast.com
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