British Pathe select Optibase for archive management

British Pathe, one of the oldest media companies in the world, is using platforms by Optibase to create its digital history archive.
Up until the 1970s, British Pathe produced cinemagazines and cinema newsreels that have been used extensively around the world in television programs, home videos, advertisements, corporate productions and most recently in web publishing. In order to preserve the quality of the newsreel footage, which contains 3,500 hours from the first 70 years of the 20th century, the content had to be converted into digital format, which would also allow for easy storage and retrieval. British Pathe partnered with Cambridge Imaging System to execute this task.
Cambridge Imaging Systems developed Imagen, an integrated client-server application that captures video and audio images along with metadata. The images are digitised and encoded, a process for which Optibase’s MPEG MovieMaker encoding platforms have been chosen. Two encoding stations are located at British Pathe’s headquarters in Camden. Each system is connected to a DigiBeta player, controlled via RS 422. All clips are encoded to MPEG-2 5Mbits FD1 resolution and are stored on RAID servers on the network. Imagen transcoding modules, transcode this content according to the clients’ player preference: Windows Media 8/9, QuickTime 6/MP4 or MPEG-1. Once these files are created, subscribers consisting of government departments, journalists, academics and businesses with international interests can access them through the British Pathe’s website.
“Since the MPEG-2 files are the basis for the transcoding process we needed superior quality encoding,” said Paul McConkey, Managing Director, Cambridge Imaging. “We found that Optibase’s MPEG MovieMakers met our expectations for high quality. They are also supported by a software development kit.”
Digital archiving is becoming a widespread need for owners of vast video resources,” said Rene Montsma, vice president international sales, Optibase. “Optibase’s encoding, streaming and decoding platforms are positioned to address this need through their excellent performance as well as compatibility with third party video servers, players and set-top boxes. We have numerous archiving deployments and are looking forward to future successes.”
For additional information on Optibase’s MPEG MovieMaker, visit www.optibase.com
(SP)