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?

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? Are you able to influence or define deliverables coming into your repository?
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?
Do you have the expertise you need for video preservation?

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?
Do you index any technical metadata and if so, which fields?

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)?
What practices are you using with ingest processing for born digital video - normalize, keep original files, etc.?

Question to ask the data: