Basque Film Archive
The Basque Film Archive was founded in 1978 to investigate, recover, conserve and show audiovisual clips that are of interest for film studies in general as well as for Basque cinema in particular. Another of its aims was to collect and take care of documentation and technical material whose conservation was a cultural and historical imperative.
For years, the Basque Film Archive has been weighing the need to digitalize its collection to preserve its materials. In the words of Peio Aldazabal, General Director of the Archive: “Whenever something would come into the Archive, we converted it to video. For professional material, it was encoded to a C inch format, a simultaneous Matrix and a Betamax for viewing. Later, what we used to transfer to one inch went to betacam SD and then to Betacam Digital, so we realized we needed to save the materials in the same quality that they had in each of the formats.”
The Archive needed a film ingesting and archiving solution to give access to the material. The solution needed to improve the service at every step, that the Basque Film Archive was offering to the numerous requests, coming in for copies from production companies, researchers, etc.
Debolex Films, after having won the tender, undertook to analyze the situation, looking for a multimedia file indexing solution that adapted to the Archive’s specific needs.
Natxo Escobar, director of Debolex Films, states that, “when we assessed the material we were going to digitalize, we found ourselves with 5 million meters of celluloid and 17 million meters of videographic materials. In addition to that, we had other types of material related to film images like press books or posters, that we had to gather into an item, before we could digitalize them. We were looking for a digitalization system that from the very first convinced us and was convenient to work with” . Videoma was that solution: a modular, scalable and flexible multimedia archiving system.
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