Thomson Grass Valley EDIUS HD Software And Spirit 4K Datacine Help Preserve Historic Footage At National Archives
Supporting this massive preservation effort, The National Archives has also purchased a Grass Valley Spirit™4K Datacine and Bones™ data capture and image restoration software, which will be used in tandem to transfer film material to a digital file format for archiving. The Spirit is being provided and installed by Communications Engineering, Inc., a systems integration firm based in Newington, Virginia.
"The National Archives owns an unbelievably broad variety of content and formats and their goal is to digitize it all into a universal standard that can be used to deliver the material in a wide array of formats for people to use," said Terry Cullen, 1 Beyond's founder and CEO, adding that the advanced encoding features of EDIUS was a major purchasing consideration. "The National Archives needed a system that could handle anything they could throw at it and process it as quickly as possible. The combination of our high performance HD OctoFlex workstations with Grass Valley EDIUS HD software with hardware acceleration provided the perfect fit for them."
The bid was won from among a number of competing vendors by 1 Beyond™, Inc., a leading provider of digital video editing and compositing systems based in Somerville, Mass The HD OctoFlex turnkey workstations featuring eight full core processors and internal HD storage running Windows XP — are designed to handle all video formats including the most power hungry 2K and 4K HD film scans and are the most powerful professional video workstations available today.
The monumental preservation project—currently stored on a variety of analog and digital formats—has been under consideration for several years. Thanks to the award-winning 1 Beyond HD OctoFlex combined with the Thomson Grass Valley EDIUS software, this enormous preservation task is now getting started in earnest.
"As the nation's record keeper, The National Archives is entrusted by the American people to safeguard and preserve the records of the United States government, and we are proud to be a small part of that process with our technology and 1 Beyond," said Jeff Rosica, Senior Vice President of Thomson's Broadcast & Professional Solutions business unit. "We at Thomson are honored that EDIUS, the Spirit 4K Datacine and the Bones software platform will have a part in archiving media that will be available for generations to come."
About the Project
The National Archives has been tasked with preserving the images from its vast library of quickly deteriorating video media or risk loosing them forever. The agency often fulfills requests from different sectors of the government and news media to make copies of videos and, in some cases, to edit the images for special purposes. Using the 1 Beyond HD OctoFlex workstations with EDIUS HD, The National Archives will create a digital master file from each piece of footage and store it on a large server system, thereby securing its future longevity. Once this process is completed, pristine digital copies can be made in formats ranging from DV up to full HD resolution.
1 Beyond chose the Thomson Grass Valley EDIUS HD software for its ability to handle any analog or digital format, process it, and output to any digital format from the same GUI and editing timeline. The EDIUS system's real time processing capabilities will also be invaluable in speeding up the process. The staff at 1 Beyond will install the EDIUS HD software and hardware boards in its HD OctoFlex 8 processor systems and deliver them turnkey to Washington D.C.
About EDIUS
Incorporating all of the real-time editing capabilities in a streamlined interface designed to help production professionals get content to air quickly, the Thomson Grass Valley EDIUS Pro real-time video editing software enables real-time, multi-track, mixed format HD/SD editing, compositing, chroma keying, titling, and timeline output. It provides editors with mixed format HD/SD editing of HD, HDV, DV, MPEG-2, lossless, and uncompressed SD video.
About Spirit 4K
The Thomson Grass Valley Spirit Datacine supports Super 35 mm, Academy 35 mm 3-perf, 4-perf, and 8-perf (VistaVision) as well as Standard and Super 16 mm film stocks. It also includes an advanced internal imaging subsystem, designed by engineers at Eastman-Kodak; 4K/2K six-sector color processing; 4K/2K film grain reduction functionality; and full compatibility with all major graphics, compositing, and other post-production systems.
###
About Thomson — World leader in digital video technologies
Media Relations:
|
Denise Williams
Kelly Smith |