WASHINGTON—The Packard Campus at the Library of Congress’ National Audio-Visual Conservation Center celebrated its 10th anniversary in July, and Government Video Expo attendees learned more about preserving our audiovisual heritage in Wednesday’s session “Content Preservation and the Library of Congress.”

James Snyder, a senior systems administrator at the facility, is very familiar with the task of preserving the world’s most comprehensive collection of films, television programs, radio broadcasts and sound recordings dating back to the 1800s, and he shared what has been learned in the first decade of operation.

The numbers are staggering. The Packard Center currently holds more than 165 billion items. The collection is 80 percent copyrighted content and 20 percent acquired collections. The Motion Picture, Broadcast and Recording Sound Division, which is the copyright depository division for the non-print media division of the Library, holds more than 7 million audio, video, film and software, electronic gaming and education items. Of those 7 million items there are 1.8 million moving image recordings in almost every format; 3.6 million audio recordings of almost every format, 255 million feet of film; paper records regarding the collected content; and increasingly, digital content.

When the Packard Center opened in July 2007, it was the first time the entire collection was housed in one location. Snyder said that the original needs assessment “was a little off. So our 10-year expansion space was actually filled just three years after we opened. We’ve been taking some of our supplies out of the building and sending them to federal warehouses. ... Part of our challenge going into the future is how to handle the fact that we’ve run out of storage space.” He said the nice thing about being in the facility is that it consolidates content from eight warehouses in four states, and staff can finally inventory and catalog with the goal of eventually migrating and making the collection available to researchers, the public and anyone else who would like to see “what is basically the cultural archive of the United States.”

The digitization process began in 2009 with a goal to preserve the content for at least 150 years, which is the legal period for copyright registration. So the content of a file or a tape that arrives today must be maintained for accessibility, searchability and usability until the year 2167.

Snyder said they have learned a lot of lessons in the last 10 years about what it takes to maintain materials, metadata and QC performance just for 10 years in the digital form and it takes a number of things to enable long-term survivability. First is the need to use well-documented, internationally recognized standard file formats. The facility does not use vendor-specific standards because the standard could be changed at some point down the road. Second is the goal of “preserving the content as close to the original quality as is technically feasible. Luckily, with digital, when you’re talking about analog, that’s actually straight forward to do. The simplest part for us has been the digitization. ... The difficult part for us has been in cataloging the metadata and QC reports and the migration of the data set over periods of time,” he said.

Snyder mentioned some of the near-term challenges for the Packard Campus team are film scanning to larger-scale production status; automating many functions currently done manually; and making color corrections, trims and other functions easier on human processes.

Some challenges he sees ahead are finding enough equipment to keep the migration going; growing the Digital Repository into the exabyte realm ... and beyond; developing the knowledge and training needed to ensure future employees on the project are adequately trained; updating workflows and software for new requirements; dealing with how the physical collection continues to age; studying how the digital collection’s physical storage and equipment ages, as well as to study how automated QC functionality is working or not working and adjusting as necessary.

To learn more about the NAVCC Packard Campus, visit the website.

WASHINGTON—Video is ubiquitous in today’s world, and the range of needs covered by the exhibitors, sessions and demos on day one at the 2017 Government Video Expo and National Drone Show is only increasing.

Jose Alvarez (L) and Marvin Martinez from Ministerio Edificando Las Familias.

One exhibitor that reflects this change is Communications Engineering Inc. (CEI), a Newington, Va.-based systems integrator and dealer with more than 30 years in the broadcast sector. Spike Jones, vice president of sales and marketing said the company has over the last 10-15 years fully expanded its business focus to include high performance audio visual customer requirements. Many new customers from the AV-side of the company’s projects in fact operate in higher resolutions than many broadcast facilities—military command and control operations for example, Jones said. He added that the two broad sectors of the company’s business—broadcast and AV—are in many ways merged, so having experience in both is helpful.

As for trends seen at the show, Jones said that the migration from projection to new, increasingly cost-effective LED direct view displays was gathering pace. Another hot topic across the AV realm was BYOD (bring your own device), and collaboration for distance learning or telecommuting-style applications. In broadcast, getting 1080P HD upconverted to 4K or downconverted to a format for Internet use was topical.

Both sectors benefit from IP transport and production. “The move toward IP from SDI is now becoming cost effective and practical,” said Jones. “It is really helpful in collaboration efforts and in all sorts of field productions.”

AV UPGRADES

Upgrading an existing infrastructure was on the minds of show attendees Jose Alvarez and Marvin Martinez. They are respectively the audio engineer and multi-camera director for Ministerio Edificando Las Familias (MELF), a Spanish language house-of-worship in nearby Hyattsville, Md.

One of the MELF cameras went down for good recently, and when the pair saw that SI and supplier Digital Video Group and Blackmagic Design would have cameras on demo, they made the short trek in to the city to get some hands-on time with the cameras. “We’re considering a 4K camera,” said Martinez. “In the long run it makes sense to upgrade now.”

MELF’s short term plans also include moving to a new facility, making it a good time to upgrade the audio infrastructure. Having recently added a digital mixer, Alvarez said the organization was considering and researching AoIP options. “We’re also looking for ways to make remote productions easier,” said Alvarez, who noted that the church’s band frequently requires live sound capture away from the facility.

IN THE SKY

The National Drone Show component of the day saw a steady stream of demos taking place in the Drone Cage, and a Q&A session with winners of the D.C. Drone Film Festival. Dominating the left side of the exhibition hall was Stampede Global, an Amherst, N.Y.-based AV distributor. While Stampede does a lot more than just UAV/drones, its GV Expo presence reflected the growing importance of the technology across all sorts of applications from industrial to security and surveillance to ENG/EFP and more. The company offers drone training and certification along with all of the hardware from UAV to the NOC.

Peter Hunley, vice president of sales at Stampede said two trends in the UAV sector evident today were resellers including a drone option in their product offerings, and increased outsourcing of the drone enterprise for customers who might not want to make a larger upfront investment. 

The Government Video Expo continues Thursday, Nov.30 at the Walter Washington Convention Center.

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GV Expo: DMA Soldiers Toward Media’s Future

WASHINGTON—If you can remember seeing a commercial promoting the Marines, National Guard, Army or other military service branches, visited a military website; or checked out the Armed Forces Network, then you’re already familiar with some of the work of the Defense Media Activity.

The DMA is a Department of Defense Field Activity reporting to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. Led by Director Ray B. Shepherd, the worldwide media organization is a consolidation of five media organizations, located in Ft. Meade, Md.

As the direct line of communication to U.S. forces, civilians, contractors and families, the DMA provides news, information and entertainment on a variety of platforms, including television, internet, social and emerging technologies.

And doing that requires innovation through education, collaboration and trust, according to Director Shepherd, who shared insights into the DMA’s strategies and workflows in an address entitled “From Combat Cameras to Emerging Internet: Innovation at DMA.”

Created in 2005 as part of a Defense Base Realignment and Closure Act, the DMA not only needed to co-locate—they moved into their current building at Ft. Meade in 2008—each military branch has its own production house as part of DMA, and they also merged “ideas, technology and methodology” in order to be most effective and foster innovation.

There is one studio for everyone at DMA, and it features worldwide connectivity. The connectivity enables DMA to effectively get messages out in real-time.

According to Director Shepherd, education is key and he is proud of the types of training they provide. The DMA offers general training through DoD Visual Storytelling Workshop, Syracuse University’s Newhouse, SMG, Disney, Maine Media Workshops & College, among others.

More specifically, they also have been early adopters of using drones as video production tools. They take education seriously, and require that operators become FAA- and DoD-certified drone pilots. In addition to flying skills, production is also taught to operators. Director Shepherd says they aim to teach “correctly and sustainably,” which means they have strict rules, including requiring pilots to log at least 30 hours/month to maintain proficiency and sending operators out in pairs to ensure safety protocols are followed.

The Army acquired Defense Video & Imagery Distribution System, and today DVIDS is one of the best sources of public domain content related to the armed forces. The system facilitates communication between the military and the media in a variety of ways. “Nine out of ten times, if it’s military video on a network, it probably came out of DVIDS,” Director Shepherd explained.

DVIDS also feeds DefenseTV (a free mobile app), which features the “best of the best” from military and partners. Its channel lineup features content from service branches, war commemoration committees, NATO TV, Army medical and more.

Collaboration is crucial to DMA’s success, and Director Shepherd and his team do their best to foster cooperation and innovation. For example, they’ve set up a Facebook group for DMA employees to discuss issues and ideas. “All the geeks together, no matter what discipline you’re in,” Shepherd joked.

A good, practical example of this working is a 360-degree interactive display used by the Navy to demonstrate a haircut that meets its standards. The videographer didn’t originally have the skills to do this as envisioned, so they learned the coding from a coworker who did.

Trust is also a key element for the organization to flourish. Director Shepherd noted that “Failure is an option because we don’t learn otherwise.” However, this means that trust is required—between employees and supervisors, between the DMA and the individual branches of the military with which they work to craft messages. They’ve even “lost” a few drones over the years, but it’s part of the process.

In the past decade, the Defense Media Activity has experienced and embraced numerous technological shifts through education, collaboration and trust.