FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2024

In January 2024 the Van Rijn report was published by the Dutch government. “Nothing seen, nothing heard, nothing done”, is the title of this investigative report into the Dutch public broadcasters, the culture and social safety within the organisations. In the years leading up to this report there has been a lot of upheaval about the public and commercial broadcasting organizations in the Netherlands.

Powerplay, intimidation, discrimination, sexual harassment, verbal violence and insecurity about employment were and are common in this industry. The setting of producing creative content with strict deadlines in a complex power system enabled and still enables this. Victims have been speaking up for a while and the report has opened this Pandora’s box. And not only in the Netherlands- in many more countries in Europe there has been much ado about #metoo, misuse of power and socially unsafe situations.

After publication of the Van Rijn report, this will presumably go on for a few more years. Directors and managers of public broadcasting organizations have had to leave. So much so that right now, there are a lot of vacancies and questions about who will take the responsibility of changing the system.

Approximately 450,000 hours of broadcast program material on video cassettes have been recorded over the years by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation as part of legal deposit recordings. In order to protect these unique broadcasting assets in the long-term, these video cassettes need to be transferred into archive files to be preserved in the National Library of Norway's digital long-term archive.

For this high-volume migration a specialized quality-controlled QUADRIGA Video digitization system from Cube-Tec International has been installed. An additional QC workflow was customized according to the user’s specifications. The entire ingest system is using 16 broadcast video tape recorders. The installation is now completely in productive use, so that one operator transfers about 128 hours of video in one work shift per day in a fully quality-controlled operation.

For the DVCAM cassette collection a special direct readout feature is used. This provides users with real-time monitoring and archiving of the compressed digital video streams straight from DVCAM video cassettes. Working directly from the original format not only improves error detection levels, but the implementation of proprietary algorithms also enables users to apply error correction years, or even decades, after the migration has happened.

The presentation will be given jointly by Stian Rishaug (National Library Norway) who will explain how the installation was realised and the operation is driven, and Tom Lorenz (Cube-Tec International) who will describe how the technical solution was adapted to special requirements at National Library Norway.

Despite considerable research on explicitly sexualized talk as a form of gender micro-aggression, hostility and harassment, it is still unclear how does talking about less-explicitly sexualizing but no less gendered issue such as beauty, shape the paralinguistics of interaction. Taking the topic of human beauty as our case study and utilizing short moments from TV and film archives, we therefore ask:

1) How does talking about an explicitly gendered issue (beauty) contribute to the overall gendering of audiovisual cultural objects?

2) How do the paralinguistic aspects of audiovisual gendered interactions shift overtime?

This proof of concept (POC) research is testing the usefulness of experimental AI methods to reveal the multilayered effect of gender on interactions. The POC consists of two one-on-one interviews in which beauty is a specifically mentioned topic, with two women beauty queens. The two samples represent two periods of “beauty talk” – one from the 1970ies and one from the 2010s.

Following the design of a set of coding labels, we will index two videos manually and then compare the qualitative process to an automatic indexing of these videos using an AI indexing tool. Among its analytical insights, we will automatically extract multimodal information and insights such as automatic transcription of spoken Hebrew; Speaker identification, vocal effects (such as laughter or long silences), sentiment analysis, and more.

The comparison will help identify specific spoken/visual/vocal profiles of both interviewers and interviewees, as well as of the interactions between them and to set the Beauty features that would be included in the training of a future study, on a large scale database of interviews. Using both human and AI labeling, this POC research hopes to contribute to a more precise hermeneutic interpretations of the human beauty concept and to enable a “distant reading, viewing, and listening” of these multimodal artifacts.

During the footage research for the production of a documentary about sexism in the world of sport, it is highlighted how not only the audiovisual documents themselves but also the metadata that accompany them reflect the model of society and the framework of thought at the moment in which they were created. The challenge of the research was to find fragments that showed attitudes that attract attention today for their sexist tone but that at the time were considered normal and therefore were not described as such in the metadata. The research had to be done blindly, listening to interviews, anticipating the results and thinking about how they would have been described years ago, appealing to the memory of the oldest workers in the medium and navigating the ancient thesaurus, which is in itself a reflection of this thinking 40 years ago when women's sport was not at the same level as men's.  

Once the material has been located and the documentary made, the following question arises: Should we or should we not correct the metadata in our MAM system and update the description according to the current parameters? Our archive has the dual mission of preserving the audiovisual heritage while serving current broadcasting. To fulfill the first mission shouldn't we keep the material with the original metadata? Whereas, to fulfill the second mission, shouldn't we update them to facilitate research for the production of new material?

We will accompany the presentation of a small sample of the material found during the research to exemplify the need to revise the metadata to make these items accessible for future productions.

Since 2022, the FRAME Training programme, organized by INA and supported by EBU Academy and FIAT/IFTA, has a new module for junior audiovisual archive professionals: FRAME Mentoring

Come and meet the two 2024 mentees and discover their projects:

Nevena Popovic, RTS Serbian Broadcasting Corporation - MORE THAN A GAME
Artistic and philosophical approach to the world of archival footage
Working in the archives can become a game and subsequently more than a game and more than a work.
The world of audio-visual archives has endless possibilities.
Possibilities that never cease to inspire and encourage artist to find new ways to express oneself.
Archive, besides being for a long time a means to illustrate past, has over time proven to be a powerful medium in the world of artistic expression.
Different ways of exploring the potential of the footages kept in television vaults, brought them a second life by producing a new and unique piece of art.
Development of an artistic work by adding new music and new voices/narratives to silent videos came out of the idea and desire to break the mold from the current and past offerings in the world of art and archive.
What is the artistic intention?
Breaking away from the constraints of TV formats and social media to bring new experience to "real life" became an imperative, whether in museums, cultural institutions or music clubs.
Creative and experimental approach in the use of archive began as a game to motivate the archivists to be fond of hard and meticulous work.
In time, for all the participants in the process, something inspiring came out of exploration of metatextuality and intertextuality found in the archival videos and metadata.
Working in the imaginative registers led from random words found on old archival description cards to slam poetry and music piece.
Studying hours and hours of silent found footage inspired a variation in the approach and use of old videos: three different narratives are used on a same video which slightly alters with every new narrative. The original video is no longer only an archival video, now it becomes a fiction, a poetry, a drama.
In a word: performance art.
What immerged from the experience?
Previous generations of authors have written for television, new generations use television as a medium to write.

Jakub Hošek, Czech Television - THE REPORTERS PROJECT
The Reporters project, created by the Czech TV Archive in collaboration with the Czech TV cultural website ctart.cz, is being developed with mentorship from the FRAME Mentoring Programme. The series explores the functioning of news services during the communist era in the 1980s. Combining archival footage from TV news with contemporary interviews with former reporters, it aims to provide historical context in an engaging and educational way. Each of the five episodes, lasting around ten minutes, focuses on the story of one reporter, blending archival materials with their narration. The project also examines the specific challenges faced by journalists working under a communist dictatorship. The series will be published online on Czech TV's VOD platform, offering a product that is both informative and entertaining.

The presentation proposes reflection on the choice made by Group Globo of Communications of hiring Google Cloud.

The decision of contracting Cloud companies was taken by Globo in alignment with the world’s tendency in detecting in cloud computing an opportunity to reduce expenses and be more effective. Its audiovisual documents’ back up are now stored in the Cloud. There was a project developed at Globo’s Archives to send to Google Cloud all previous documents up until the contract with Google, whether those were born digital or were digitized.

The numbers of this project are presented and studied and lead to a brief check of pros and cons of the usage of cloud services. This brief talk should contemplate the migration to the Cloud and its process, which includes, for example, the interoperability with systems such as Diva and Vizrt.

Other services provided by the Cloud are taken under consideration, such as usage of artificial intelligence to input basic metadata on documents and face recognition algorithm.

The approach to the matter has its foundation in basically two columns: literary references, and the analysis of interviews conducted with collaborators of Globo, each of them connected to the process of cloudification, but through different perspectives.

The paper titled "Archive Iraq: Films are rising again. How, when and who?" by Wareth Kwaish, a Project Officer of the Iraqi Archive Project, discusses the efforts to preserve Iraq's cinematic heritage. It highlights the historical richness of Iraqi visual memory, emphasizing the importance of films as cultural, historical, and social treasures.

The paper outlines the establishment of the Committee for the Iraqi Visual Memory, supported by the French Embassy and Expertise France, to restore and digitize over 100 Iraqi films. The project involves training Iraqi professionals in film assessment, inventory, restoration, and digitization techniques.

Objectives include creating a digital film library accessible for education and research, raising societal awareness on film preservation, and preserving Iraq's cultural legacy. The methodology encompasses film selection, evaluation, restoration, and digitization, coupled with community engagement. The project aims to ensure the continuity of Iraqi visual memory, contributing to the larger Iraq Archive Project, preserving the nation's heritage for future generations and global appreciation.

In the contemporary landscape of news media, we encounter a realm where simulation and stereotypes pervade, shaping our perception of reality. Understanding the visual language of news media is crucial for unraveling how representations are meticulously crafted. It's posited that the visual narrative across various media platforms has become increasingly uniform, a trend significantly influenced by the reliance on stock shots. This practice has seen a noticeable uptick in the last two decades, paralleling the archival turn in media production. Rather than consistently sourcing new material, the efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and digital advancements have led journalists to frequently repurpose stock shots for visual narratives in their reporting.

The ANR CROBORA project, in collaboration with prominent entities like Ina, Rai Radiotelevisione Italiana, and Mediaset, seeks to cast light on the repetitive and emblematic use of stock shots in audiovisual media. By amassing a collection of 35,000 stock footage reflecting European integration from two decades of French and Italian television broadcasts and selected web narratives, the project endeavors to analyze this corpus of mediatized visual memory. A sophisticated visualization platform and analytical tools have been developed to navigate this extensive and diverse dataset, addressing the challenges of collecting, organizing, annotating, and visualizing a large-scale and varied collection of audiovisual content.

This communication aims to delve deeper into the methodologies of data collection, annotation, and explorative analysis, leveraging both metadata and the audiovisual data itself. Through our data-driven approach, our research highlights the construction of collective imagination through the media's repetitive imagery, investigating how audiovisual production reinforces stereotypes, thereby influencing cultural dynamics and visual culture.

In the audiovisual archive of the Bayerischer Rundfunk, speaker diarization systems are used to extract metadata from audio content. These systems can automatically annotate who spoke when in an audio stream, but yet their performance does not match the one of an archivist given the same task. That calls for evaluation. Therefore, as the final project of my traineeship, I have developed an application for testing the speaker diarization systems used in the Bayerischer Rundfunk, introducing scores and error rates.

As of yet, an interactive prototype has been built, showcasing a user interface for the application. Furthermore, it has been laid down how to access the speaker diarization systems via API, and several Python scripts have been written for converting mining results as well as importing metrics from an open-source benchmarking toolkit. This toolkit provides a set of classes to compare the output of speaker diarization systems to perfectly annotated reference data. Finally, a series of tests has been conducted which has proven the concept to be applicable for reproducible testing.

Using the application, single versions of speaker diarization systems as well as different speaker diarization systems can be compared quality-wise. This will make it easier to decide whether to implement said services, and secure the audiovisual archive's data quality.

A Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN) is being introduced to rectify inherent flaws in the SECAM format, a system extensively utilised for archiving and production from 1967 to the 1980s in many countries. Videos, preserved on archived magnetic tapes,  like two-inch tapes that encapsulate the full bandwidth of the composite signal, and U-Matic format tapes that conserve colour using a “colour under” scheme.  

These systematic artefacts, originating from past technological choices rather than ageing, were barely perceptible on 65 cm CRT TVs during their broadcast era. However, they are now deemed unacceptable for display on contemporary technology.

In the PAL format, traditional signal processing techniques enhanced the demodulation and separation of luminance and chrominance. Yet, these methods, such as linear filtering with comb filters or FFT domain filtering, are incompatible with the FM modulation of colour in SECAM. To our knowledge, no technology was previously available to enhance the quality of demodulated composite SECAM video. The proposed RCNN tackles systematic imperfections like blurring (resolution loss), mutual crosstalk between chrominance and luminance, 12.5 Hz colour flicker, and chroma and luma noise. The flicker of horizontal lines is a consequence of the unfiltered vertical sampling of chroma in the SECAM standard.

To train the RCNN, a degraded dataset was generated by processing recent videos through a physical SECAM modulator/demodulator chain. The RCNN also transforms interlaced frames into progressive images, thereby enhancing visual quality and rendering them more suitable for further processing by other super-resolution AI techniques. The processing is executed at a rate of several frames per second on a recent GPU on the already demodulated image YDrDb. This enables the treatment of programmes that have already been digitised and compressed, without requiring access to the original composite video.

Migration is a key preservation action for digital collections. It is unavoidable; challenges like planned hardware obsolescence, format obsolescence, and the staggering storage needs of digital data are some of the issues that pose risks to the long-term accessibility of born-digital materials. It is not a walk in the park. Successful migration requires significant technical expertise, support, and planning. Irrecoverable data loss can easily occur if it is not performed well. For a process that is so unforgiving, it is naturally a daunting task for many, particularly for those embarking on it for the first time. Using several case studies, this presentation seeks to consolidate lessons, identify considerations, and provide guidance to those embarking on the great migration.

The mass-scale digitisation project Images for the Future project, concluded in 2014, allowed an important part of Dutch audiovisual heritage to be digitised and preserved. The promised land of wide accessibility for the public however could not be reached at that time due to copyright restrictions limiting the re-exposure of our archival treasures.  

Since the EU Copyright Directive introduced mechanisms that allow for out-of-commerce works to be published on cultural heritage portals, unless rights holders opt-out, Sound & Vision started to prepare the potential mass-scale publication of content. However, incomplete, erroneous, or conflicting information complicates the selection of material suitable for public release. Additionally, inconsistent metadata quality and lack of standardization for diverse audiences obstruct efficient and appropriate online publication. In this presentation the audience is invited at Sound & Visions kitchen table to take a closer look at how we analyse collection-assets’ data to establish (i) if they can be labled as an Out of Commerce work, (ii) if they are technically ready for publication and (iii) what metadata changes are potentially needed in order to present them in an understandable way to a wider audience.

In addition to being a tool, technology has a transformative power. And in the field of audiovisual information management, traditionally based on a high investment in human resources, the use of algorithms has a substantial impact. After a first phase mainly focused on the use of automatic transcription and facial recognition tools, the ATRESMEDIA Archive is now evolving into the use of new generative AI. A technological project framed in a broader objective such as the transformation of the profile of the professionals who work in the Archive. What will be the identity of this new profile, its survival and its place in the ecosystem of television production, are the main incentive to actively promote and monitor from the Archive itself a technological change that sooner or later will in any case be unstoppable

It is by now widely acknowledged among scholars that television as a medium played a pivotal role in the unfolding of the Romanian Revolution of 1989. This assertion is commonly understood to highlight the significance of the Romanian Revolution as a historical event that was broadcast in real-time, thus marking the inauguration of a new era in the history of media. It also implies the gradual change of status of the Romanian Television as an institution during those days, from catalyst of popular discontent to agent of large-scale manipulation.

This paper will thus be developed around two axis. The first one will posit that the symbolic supremacy of the Revolution among neighbouring countries and its endurance over time predominantly rely on the creation of the creation of what Cahiers du cinéma film critics Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana referred to as “trademark images” – convenient clichés which “prevent any other image from being seen” (no. 268-269), while helping to create an easily recognisable, sellable image of the event. By examining theoretical frameworks proposed by Traverso or Siani-Davies, this first axis will uncover those sequences that conform to a sensationalist revolutionary imagery.

The second axis will provide a corrective to this reading. It will highlight precisely those images which do not conform to preconceived schemes. It will aim to show both the occurrences in which the newly liberated television attempted to incorporate the democratic regime into its audiovisual treatment (a more egalitarian distribution of speeches, panoramic movements showing the personnel behind cameras, etc.) and those that depict the revolution as a site of hesitancy, confusion, and mistakes – in short, as an authentic bearer of contradictory possibilities for the future. The complexity of the event will emerge according to the capabilities of live broadcasting within a nascent free television, providing a valuable lesson of reportage for generations to come.

We propose a brief presentation of four conceptual elements that may underpin an automated cataloging process of archival materials, summarizing them through a free adaptation of the biblical Commandments. The chosen ones are:
 
• Thou shalt describe events about all things.
• Thou shalt univocal identify the event in linked properties and relationships.
• Thou shalt use equivalences to transform the captured external data into your metadata  standards.
• Thou shalt describe the documents in cascade.
 
These four theoretical pillars arise from an idea that challenges the traditional approach to the documentary process by reversing the object of analysis, which almost always has focused on the document. Therefore, the first and main commandment relies on this thought, and encourages us  to do it the other way around,  going from the analysis of the documents that report events to analyse events captured in documents... And let's see what happens.
 
The second commandment, and based on the experience of the semantic web, indicates that events must be defined as unique concepts described in properties and relationships, which are linked to other concepts contained in controlled vocabularies.
 
The third statement focuses on the capture of external data applying the principle of equivalence based on the transformation of these data into metadata with the desired standardized form in order to assign each concept its equivalent in the field where it is represented.
 
And finally, the fourth commandment suggests the process of describing documents in cascade mode. That is, to use the common metadata of an event and replicate them in all the documents that refer to it.

RAI Film Digitisation Project ? Neck-deep in the digital oil?