English

AV archives preservation concerns :

PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS – PRIVATE COMPANIES – BROADCASTERS – PRODUCERS – MUSEUMS – LIBRARIES…

Who want to :

PRESERVE – RESTORE – DIGITIZE – ACCESS – MANAGE – USE – VALORIZE, THEIR AUDIOVISUAL HERITAGE.

We are committed to servicing our clients with the expertise needed to meet the challenge of the digital era.
Your archives are worth gold… but how long for?
From 2 inches to High Definition, give your AV archives the best chance to resist through time!

[one_half][titled_box title=”The main reasons why you should consider
saving your archives NOW :”]

• Archives are part of an international cultural heritage
• Saving old programmes will become more and more difficult and expensive
• The original equipment is disappearing
• Competent technicians are rare
• More and more content is needed (broadcast, DVD…), making archives valuable
• High quality digital video restoration can give a new commercial life to your archives

[/titled_box][/one_half]
[one_half_last][titled_box title=”The main reasons why you should consider
collaborating with VectraCom :”]

• Our technicians are highly qualified and offer technical expertise
• VectraCom has been dealing with archive preservation for over 12 years
• We take pride in choosing the finest equipment
• We are a human sized company with a real sense of service
• Prestigious institutions have put their trust on our services

[/titled_box][/one_half_last]

At VectraCom, we know that every archive is unique and requires particular care and attention.
Our experience allows us to offer “sur mesure” services associated to industrial processes in order to meet your financial requirements

[one_half]

• AV archives inventory
• Technical advice for preservation plans
• Master tapes storage
• Tape cleaning and preparation before transfer
• Real time digital audio and video restoration
• Digitization of any audio, video and film format
• Multi simultaneous digitizations (high and low compression rate)
• Metadata generation and indexing
• File mass storage
• Media Asset Management solutions

[/one_half]
[one_half_last]
[/one_half_last]

[titled_box title=”VectraCom is a one-stop-shop video solutions provider :”]
[one_half]

[/one_half][one_half_last]

[/one_half_last]
[/titled_box]

• We have over 15 years experience in the preservation of magnetic or film originated material
• We are the only video lab in France able to process all professional and domestic formats.
• We also use all files codec: Mpeg 1, Mpeg 2, WMV, QuickTime and now Mpeg 4 with H264 AVC …

Over 75.000 hours have already been preserved by VectraCom for major archives owners.
Example: to date, 30.000 hours of _” digitized – Mpeg 1 and Mpeg 2 simultaneously, with the same time-code – for INA.

[colored_box][one_half]

Exlusive state-of-the-art playback equipment :

• 7 Quadruplex VTR (Ampex AVR3 and AVR2, RCA TR70 and TR600)
• 9 BCN 51 / 1″B and Sony 1″C
• 30 BVU and U-Matic
• 3 X D1 and 1 D2 VTR
• And many other audio and video formats more or less “exotic” (M2, IVC…)
• Telecine with wet gate (Schmitzer), DaVinci color corrector, Digital Vision grain reducer, Archangel by Snell & Wilcox

List of formats frequently processed at Vectracom :

• 2″ Hi and Low band, normal/half speed, Hi and Low band, normal/haf speed
• 1″B and 1″C
• 1″ IVC
• BVU, U-Matic, U-Matic H, U-Matic SP
• 19mm D1, D2, and D3
• Beta (all), M2, V2000, VHS, EIAJ, VCR…
• Akai
• 35mm, S35mm, 16mm, S16mm, film, negative and positive, Sep mag

[/one_half][one_half_last][/one_half_last]

[/colored_box]

Team of experts
Since the beginning of its activity, VectraCom has recruited experimented engineers for the exploitation and the maintenance of VTRs.
Our in-house IT development team designs computer softwares in order to improve productivity and guaranty efficient quality control. They also developed a comprehensive software suite for various operations such as material tracking, bar code labelling and scanning, default logging, label printing and statistical reporting.

A major actor in Europe for audiovisual restoration, using powerful tools : 

• Archangel (Snell & Wilcox) associated to Brava (INA) is a real time processing machine with unique features as steadiness improvement, flickering elimination and incomparable quality of noise and grain reducing.
• Sratchbox (Edifis) is a Computed Aided restoration device for eliminating large defaults on video pictures rapidly with no equivalent
• Pyramix, from Merging, is an audio tool for eliminating audio noise, hiss, and cracks as well as hum.

VectraCom participates alongside INA, BBC and RAÏ, to Presto Space which objective is to provide technical solutions and integrated systems for a complete digital preservation of all kinds of audio-visual collections. 

« Institutions traditionally responsible for preserving audio-visual collections (…) now face major technical, organisational, resource, and legal challenges in taking on the migration to digital formats and the preservation of already digitised holdings. Technical obsolescence and physical deterioration of their assets imply widely concerted policy and efficient technical services to achieve long-term digital preservation. The principal aim is to build-up preservation factories providing affordable services to all kinds of collection’s custodians in order to manage and distribute their assets.

The 20th Century has provided a new kind of heritage through audiovisual technology. Key events were recorded, and audiovisual media became the new form of cultural expression and an expansion of humankind memory. These historical, cultural and commercial assets are much more fragile that conventional artwork (paintings, paper documents, monuments …), and are now entirely at risk from deterioration. The UNESCO estimate of the world audiovisual holdings is 200 million hours and about 50 million in Europe. All audio, video and film recordings are endangered within the next 20 years. This is a main challenge for local and national archives but also for universities, libraries, museums and enterprise or personal collections.

Audiovisual contents are disseminated and archive owners are heterogeneous in nature and size: institutions, enterprises, regional and local communities… Up to now, the economical cost and the technological complexity prevent these stakeholders from elaborating and managing their own patrimonial policy, and they have to wait for public rules and subventions in a centralised way.

(…) The way to achieve the goal of “preservation for all collections” is with an integrated approach, to produce sustainable assets with easy access for larger exploitation and distribution to specialists and general public. The key idea is: an accessible item is more valuable than an item stuck on a shelf. An integrated process provides this access, generating revenues that will fund the activity and developing resources to finance collection maintenance.

Previous European Projects like PRESTO developed efficient preservation technology for broadcasters, and demonstrated that saving 50% of preservation work can be achieved through a semi-automated assembly-line, with each operator running multiple “preservation chains”.

(…) In order to enable any European archive owner, from small collections to the largest, to manage an autonomous and realistic patrimonial policy, including preservation and exploitation of digital assets, PrestoSpace will push the limits of the current technology beyond the State of the Art, bringing together industry, research institutes and stakeholders at European level to provide products and services for bringing effective automated preservation and access to Europe’s diverse audiovisual collections.

For more information : www.prestospace.org

VectraCom is also partner of :

They trust us :

More information :
+33 (0) 1 55 93 42 42
Bruno Burtre
info@vectracom.fr