Report from Enhanced Digital Cinema Event, BFI

Posted by Stephen Gray on Friday 29 May 2009 at 9:01am
Tags: digital preservation | video |

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EDCine (Enhanced Digital Cinema) is a European funded project, now approaching its conclusion. The aim has been to address that dull sinking feeling many archivists get when attempting to accession a batch of wonderfully diverse, even disparate, digital video files (as well as the much more acute sinking feeling caused by embarking on film or video digitisation projects).

The EDCine team consists of both academic research partners and those with commercial interests. Their aim has been to create a working model of the film archive of the future. The EDCine system, is now unveiled and (to a greater or lesser degree) works. The system consists of an off-the-shelf PC, running UNIX or Linux operating systems. There is some fairly beefy hard drive storage attached, but essentially the PC is standard system in all ways. It's the software and file handling which has been the focus and it's this that the team is hoping to acquire the funding to develop further. They can see a day when every moving image collection, regardless of size, sector or budget, will be using EDCine tools. So what does the system do? Actually quite a lot, and all based around open source and open standard technologies.

‘Digital cinema' (the team's preferred term but mostly interchangeable with ‘digital video') is ingested into the system via a nice web-style front end. From here it is wrapped up into a Master Archival Package (MAP). If the video is not already in JPEG2000 format (and it probably isn't) it is losslessly transcoded into that non-proprietary format, audio and metadata is separated out and stored alongside.

All these pieces of data are stored in an MXF (Media eXchange Format) wrapper and the digital asset has entered the collection. Metadata is also copied and synched to a central database for quick searching. The system allows for several copies of this MAP to be automatically produced and stored either online (i.e. on hard drive) or offline (e.g. on digital data tape) depending on collection policy and budget. The MAP is used to create an Intermediate Archival Package (IAP) which is lightly compressed at a resolution less than that of its MAP parent. The intention is that this IAP is then used to spawn a whole host of access copies in different formats, while the MAP is locked away, safe and secure. All this happens behind the scenes; all you do is get the video in and chose the secondary formats you need.

The roll call of open standards employed in the system is impressive: the whole system is built around the DSpace digital management system, it's OAI (Open Archives Initiative) compliant, JPEG2000 is an open source ISO standard as is MXF while metadata whizzes around in XML (eXtensible Markup Language). In fact it could be said that (putting aside some sleek interplay between the different parts of the system) that the whole system could be replicated by downloading and configuring a small collection of software already freely available. And it could. But this view loses sight of some of the valuable (if subtle) refinements made by the EDCine team. Firstly they've adapted DSpace to handle huge video files, to stream video and to display low-res previews of anything within the collection. Anyone who has watched DSpace fall over if asked to handle anything over a few hundred megabytes would agree that these are valuable developments.

But the software system isn't the teams' greatest success. The ISO (International Standards Office) is almost certainly going to accept EDcine's flavours of JPEG2000 as official extensions to the JPEG2000 standard aimed squarely at the archival user. With these profiles defined and tagged with words like ‘preservation standards' we could at last be looking at a consensus across film archives, academic collections, libraries, museums and galleries. Fingers crossed there will soon be an agreed upon set of video file formats which have been given the ‘thumbs up' by ISO as best suited to long-term digital video preservation. This would be a great accomplishment and the EDCine team should be suitably proud; the sinking feelings of many an archivist are starting to abate already.

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