AP Selects Prime Focus to Digitize Archive

Will digitize 70,000 hours of archival footage in the next 18 months

By George Winslow -- Broadcasting & Cable, 2/22/2012 6:57:03 PM

Prime Focus Technologies (PFT) has announced that it is working with The Associated Press (AP) to digitize AP's film and tape archive library that dates back to the beginning of the 20^th century.

The effort to digitize AP's archive is part of a larger multimillion dollar upgrade to AP's video business. The AP archive includes some 70,000 hours' worth of footage on film and video tape, including more than 1.3 million global news and entertainment stories.

"While we have already digitized around 10% of our archive, it has been a top priority to get all of our most saleable archive footage online and make it available to our customers, wherever in the world they may be," explained AP Director of International Archives Alwyn Lindsey, in a statement. "To make this happen, we needed a partner who could handle our global business needs and a project of this scale, and for that reason, we chose Prime Focus Technologies."

Over the years, PFT has worked on digitizing archive content from such organizations as the British Movietone Library, British Film Institute, Imperial War Museum, IMG, Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and Eros International.

PFT will use its Clear content operations platform and services to digitize around the footage.

Over the next 18 months PFT is planning to create nearly 4 million new digital assets.

As part of that effort, it will be processing some 3,000 hours of film and creating a total of around 900,000 files.

It will also be processing some 29,000 hours of video with an average of 20 news stories per hour for a total of 2.9 million files. 

As a result of the effort, newly digitized content will appear every day on AP Archive's website.