32 ROUND TABLE Content Management
Managing big content libraries composed of widely diverse materials is becoming a common challenge. This month, our round table experts answer questions about a hypothetical film and video archive that could prove a gold mine – or an endless pain in the neck TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING?
GOODY GROUP: Hi, FEED experts! We are a private equity firm called the Goody Group. We have acquired the rights to the private media library of recently deceased multi-billionaire, Boolie McBoolean. McBoolean hoarded film and video assets of all kinds (he often boasted he had a print of the original cut of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons ). We want to monetise these newly acquired media assets as soon as possible. But there are some complications. One is that there is no systematic cataloguing of the assets that McBoolean acquired over the decades. He would buy a single piece of moving image content or a whole archive, then squirrel it away out of human reach. So, our first question is... The collection includes a huge range of analogue sources, including nitrate and acetate film in varying conditions, multiple gauges of videotape and variously formatted hard drives. What
are the best methods and workflows for digitising the materials we have acquired? IAN MOTTASHED: It would be easy to heroically rush over to the piles of film and save those first – only to find there was nothing worth saving. And while you have spent a year restoring and scanning the film, the video tapes have degraded or the machines required to play them are no longer available. Is there any chance you can work out what is valuable first and prioritise the digitisation that way? KEVIN SAVINA: I have seen various projects like this with source material of multiple types. Each one has its own specific technical way of getting digitised – there is a process for each one. It is going to be your editorial outlook that will dictate how you organise your content and how you choose what to digitise and catalogue first. Your content
sales strategy will be the thing that drives the technical choices you’ll need to make.
GOODY GROUP: Roughly 70% of the collection is completely uncatalogued. Should we try to catalogue and then digitise? Or digitise and then catalogue? Or…? VIVEK KHEMANI: You should first digitise and then catalogue. That way you will be able to use AI technologies to better catalogue the content intelligently. Then later on you can build various applications, such as content performance analytics, viewership analytics, brand visibility measurement and so forth, on top of it. KEVIN SAVINA: The decision of whether to go with a catalogue-first or digitise- first strategy is content specific. I would recommend doing a first skim through
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