Overview

Another of the questions that surround the storage and archiving of digital video data involves the way we will manage the data once it has been stored. It's no secret that the video industry continues to store an overwhelming multitude of information. Even though video compression and physical size of the media will make the individual storage footprint smaller, we can expect the pure volume to expand to fill the space available.

As was stated previously, preserving the quality of the image at a reasonable resolution will require careful and thorough planning right now. The discussion should not wait until some months or years after you've started the conversion process to servers and digital. To ignore or postpone addressing the issues could result in a substantial loss of quality and integrity in the original material forever.

Broadcasters have been witnesses to a shift in storage and retrieval for playback that continues to mature as technology provides alternatives and improvements. The concerns for the processes, storage, and retrieval of broadcast inventories began with the first implementations of broadcast video cart machines.

The Ampex ACR-25 and RCA TCR-100 products were introduced over 25 years ago. At the time, few seriously considered the long-term needs for archiving commercial spots, station IDs and promos at the level with which we are investigating the issues today. Commercials and interstitials had relatively short lives and there just wasn't any purpose in keeping them for an extended period of time. The decision to store these today...