The British Board of Film Classification has selected Pebble Beach Systems to provide an automation solution as part of a new facility built to digitize its entire video archive. With a legal obligation to retain copies of all material that has been certified and a library of 200,000 VHS tapes, the race is on to create a permanent digital archive before players are no longer available or the tape stock becomes unplayable.
Neptune automation from Pebble Beach gives the BBFC a flexible, efficient and user-friendly system that allows the simultaneous ingest of material from 12 VTRs distributed across three ingest positions. Using a custom interface to Digital Rapids’ API, Pebble Beach Neptune is able to synchronize the serial control of the VHS machines with the Ethernet control of Digital Rapids encoders to create MPEG and WM9 versions of each videotape in real time. Quality control of both files is carried out using a Pebble Beach application, wherein clip metadata is added and grading is carried out before the media files and the quality data is on passed to BBFC’s internal traffic system.
For more information, visit www.pebble.tv.
