LONDON: The Associated Press is working with Prime Focus Technologies to digitize its video archive. AP’s film and tape archive contains around 70,000 hours worth of footage, including more than 1.3 million global news and entertainment stories, in 16mm film and videotape, dating back to the beginning of the 20th Century.The project is part of AP’s multimillion-dollar HD video upgrade.
PFT will use the skillsets of its global organization to digitize AP’s film and tape archive, then catalog, manage, transcode and deliver AP’s content to a multi-media audience. PFT has digitized archived content for the British Movietone Library, British Film Institute, Imperial War Museum, IMG, Board of Control for Cricket in India and Eros International.
The project will be driven by CLEAR, PFT’s content operations platform and supporting services. PFT has a large team of developers writing bespoke scripts to support the workflows required by this project, and utilizes its own cloud technology for supporting services.PFT is creating nearly 4 million new assets in just 18 months, including 3,000 hours of film with an average of 60 news stories per hour that will comprise 900,000 files; and 29,000 hours of video with an average of 20 news stories per hour that will comprise of 2.9 million files.Newly digitized content will appear every day on AP Archive’s website.
