Holocaust Remembrance Authority select Optibase

Optibase have announced that Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, have selected their MPEG MovieMaker encoding platforms to create a digital video content archiving system to store and preserve rare videos of the Holocaust.
For decades, Yad Vashem has been collecting documentation on the Holocaust. This includes over 60 million documents, 263,000 photographs as well as written, audio and video testimonials.
“We value our new state-of-the art archiving system,” said Michael Lieber, chief information officer at Yad Vashem. “Our mission is to perpetuate the legacy of the Holocaust for future generations and video is a key education tool. With our new archiving system, nothing is lost and a vast repository of material is now easily accessible both to scholars and the public.”
Yad Vashem partnered with AVCOM, an Optibase representative in Israel, to develop a digital archiving system that would preserve the video quality of analogue eight millimetre and U-Matics footage, conserve the costly storage space that tape decks were taking up and enable smart cataloguing of film material. With this advanced video archiving system, which will be available through a video on demand (VOD) system, in the new Visual Centre, opened to the public in the fall of 2004, Yad Vashem will be able to provide easy access to Holocaust videos to visitors as well as enable the manageable growth of the institute’s resources.
Tailored for Yad Vashem, the sophisticated video archiving system includes Optibase’s MPEG MovieMaker encoding boards that convert analogue video into digital format. The video is then compressed into MPEG-2 5MB files and uploaded to EMC servers for storage.
Indexing is performed using Sapphire Enterprise software from Idea Information Systems.
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