NDSA:Digital video exploration

Please feel free to list questions for the initial digital video survey below. For example:

Overall challenges

• What are your biggest challenges related to video?
• What is the big roadblock for preserving video? Why is it not part of the usual preservation environment?
• Do copyright issues influence your preservation priorities? If so, how?

High-level Strategy / Resources / Funding

• How are your video preservation activities funded?
• Are you better equipped and resourced for video preservation, for video access, or are they resourced and equipped equally?
• How far back in chain of creation do you go with regular depositors of born digital video?
• Do you contract for consultation services to support your video efforts?
• Are you doing video reformatting in-house, through out-sourcing or a combination? If you are outsourcing some of this how did you decide which to outsource?
• Do you store your preservation master files in institutionally managed storage, through a commercial service, or both?

Specifications / Standards / Modeling

• What are the technical specifications (formats, file characteristics, etc) you use? Especially for born digital video.
• Do you have guidelines for preferred/accepted digital video formats? Would you be able to share them?
• Are you storing any technical metadata for video and if so, in what form/schema?
• What types of auxiliary/associated materials files do you keep along with original files (e.g. production stills)?
• Are you trying to model higher level objects (1 program over 4 tapes, for example)? If so how?
• What about the raw material that comes in on one disc or drive (for example everything that went in to creating a documentary). What do you keep? How do you make the decision? Do you keep only the final version?
• What practices are you using with ingest processing for born digital video - normalize, keep original files, etc.?
• Do you index any technical metadata and if so, which fields?

Tools & Technology

• Are you delivering the video you preserve, and if so using what tools/platforms/services?
• What analog-to-digital interface do you use (i.e., SAMMA, BlackMagic, Kona, AJA)?
• What tools do you use in a preservation workflow?
• What compression engine do you use to create access derivatives (i.e., Front Porch, Nero MPEG-Streamclip, Apple Compressor)? (Duke--this question may cover some of the same ground as the "Are you delivering ..." question, above.)