Digital preservation has become the important field to make sure the valuable digital objects are sustained for a long time. Every student has to be done their projects and some academic jobs are valuable to maintain for future reference or further study or other causes. In this paper, we chose the film 88 which is the Final Year Project (FYP) of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information according to Dr. Paul Wu's suggestion. Our scope of research is based on the ACRC, Mr. Vincent who is the senior manager of the WKW's AV material department, Ms. Tee Yock Sian who is one of the group members of the film 88 project, and Asian Film Archive. We also try to describe what preservation is and why we need to preserve. Our observation and analysis include the current condition, format, and version of 88 video, and how to migrate from the current medium to others. After that, we mention about DSpace which is the digital repository that we need to submit our archived video. Finally, we discuss the issues while we convert from current format to appropriate archiving format.
INTRODUCTION
Videos and films have come a long way, from VHS to DVD and anything in between; a lot of memories have been captured and watched over and over again. It is important to take care of these videos and films so that they can be enjoyed in the years to come. The maintenance and care for curation of digital or electronic objects are relation to both storage and access. Our project will focus on the video drama, 88. This drama is 24 minutes short video produced by a student group as their final-year project.
BACKGROUND
Certain amount of short films were produced each year WKW SCI final year students as part of their final year project. Some of these films are of value to the greater community of film producer, collector and artists themselves. Among these films, we select the film name 88 to do our Video Preservation project. We incorporate the use of DSpace as the final depository of this film.
SCOPE OF RESEARCH
Firstly, we went to the ACRC to get the information and the physical object of 88 video. Unfortunately, ACRC is now digitizing this video and cannot support to us. However, as it is a FYP (Final Year Project), we got the report of this project from ACRC. So we have to get the copy or original of 88 film to preserve it. According to Dr. Paul Wu suggestion, we finally got this video in DVD format from Ms Nikki Draper who is the supervisor of this FYP.
The second step of our research is that we went to the A/V material department to get any other format of this video or any other information. We sent e-mail to Mr. Vincent Teo who is the senior manager of A/V material department to get appointment to meet with him. Mr. Vincent gave us many guidelines to preserve this video. He also provides us video 88 with the mini DV which is also the original format of this video.
At last, we interviewed with Ms Tee Yock Sian who is a group member of this FYP. We got information like which equipment they used during their shooting, with which format they published their video, and how many formats they submitted to ACRC and DR-NTU. We also referenced to the presentation slide of the Asian Film Archive which distributed and presented to us during our class.
SIGNIFICANT PROPERTIES
4.1. Content
Digital video contains channels such as image streams and audio streams, and length. The length of the video can be measured as the number of frames and the duration in seconds. These duration or number of frames and channels are significant properties of the digital video.
4.2. Context
The file format stores the digital video may contain metadata such as Creator, Creation date, Reference No, Description, etc. However, our final repository, DSpace does not provide such kind of metadata type like Dublin core. So the context of the 88 video may not be cleared. It does not mean that there is no significant property in digital video. Nonetheless, we can use MPEG-7 standard which describe multimedia content multiplexed with the content itself so that it provides huge contextual information. This standard will be conducted as a future work of this video preservation.
4.3. Rendering
The rendering category consists of resolution, gamut, pixel aspect ratio, frame rate, and audio aspects. The resolution includes width, height, and bit-depth. The width and height is measured by the number of pixels, and the bit-depth is measured by the number of bit. Gamut means appearance which is colour and brightness is measured by the colour model and colour space. The pixel aspect ratio is measured by the ratio. The frame rate and audio aspects are similar to the content category.
4.4. Structure
The structural relationship between digital video is implicit in the content. The relationship between the audio and video streams and its metadata must be maintained to ensure the correct contextual information. The relationship between the audio and video channels must be maintained to allow the correct render.
4.5. Behaviour
There is no behavioural aspect in digital video. However, some digital videos like DVDs have interactive features that can take into account as a behavioural aspect.
METHODOLOGY
5.1. Types of Video Formats and Standards
There are many types of video formats and standards. They are: digital 8, digital beta, DV, miniDV, HDV, DVD, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, HDTV, LaserDisc, Flash, MXF, MPEG and MPEG-4. Between 1990 and 2008, the formats of VHS, VHS-C, 8mm, Hi-8, and MiniDV all enjoyed popularity as recording formats for scholars. Today, MiniDV is the only one not considered an obsolete recording format, but it soon will be obsolete as the industry moves toward non-tape solutions.
According to Mr. Vincent suggestion, the most appropriate formats and medium for video preservation are MXF format, blu-ray, mpeg, and mpeg-4. Among them, we chose mpeg-4 format to archive this video.
5.2. Archiving Technology (DSpace)
For our project, we use DSPACE as the final depository of the film we preserve. Dspace is a digital repository system that captures, stores, indexes, preserves, and redistributes an organization's research data. It is jointly developed by MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Labs. It serves a variety of digital archiving needs.
Institutional Repositories
Learning Object Repositories
eTheses
Digital Preservation
Publishing, and more
5.3. What is a Digital Institutional Repository?
"A university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution."By Clifford A. Lynch.
5.3.1. How does DSpace work?
DSpace work in 4 areas: Captures, Describes, Distributes and Preserves. The following points are briefly described how DSpace work.
Captures
Digital research material in any formats
Directly from creators (e.g., faculty)
Large-scale, stable, managed long-term storage
Describes
Descriptive, technical, rights metadata by using a qualified Dublin Core metadata. E.g. date.issued, date.created, date.available, etc.
Persistent identifiers
Distributes
Via WWW, with necessary access control and use several interfaces for submitters, end-users, and system administrators
Preserves
Bitstream (file) guaranteed and integrity checking through MD5 checksum reporting
DIGITAL PRESERVATION
6.1 What do we need to preserve?
"Various aspects of the digital objects may be needed to be preserved. The lowest level of preservation requirements includes preservation of the bit stream; this does not however ensure understandability, readability or usefulness of the digital object. The biggest risk in terms of understandability is that the meaning (and even the names) associated with values in a dataset, although known to the data producers, is not available to the users; without this the data is essentially useless. Another aspect is that, even for users within the same sub-discipline, terminology drifts and meaning is lost; users in different (sub) disciplines will require even more help with the semantics of the data." [8]
6.2 Why should we care about Digital Preservation?
Storage media/data carrier problem
"Digital objects are much more 'fragile' than traditional analogue documents such as books or other hard copy mediums. Digital objects are fragile because they require various layers of technological mediation before they can be heard, seen or understood by people. Digital objects are also much more venerable to physical damage. One scratch on CD-ROM containing 100 e-books can make the content inaccessible, whereas to damage 100 hard copy books by one scratching move is - fortunately - impossible. A flash memory stick can drop into glass of water or get magnetized, portable hard drive or laptop can slip from your hands and get irreparably damaged in a second." [8]
Hardware obsolescence
Even if we returned to the digital object in five years to find the disk is in perfect condition and we have software that can open the file, but if that file is on a disc our computer doesn't have a drive for we will not be able to access it.
Software and format obsolescence problem
Alternatively the software or file format can become obsolete for a number of reasons. For example software upgrades may not support legacy files; the format take up is low and the industry does not produce compatible software; software which supports the format may be bought by a competitor and withdrawn from the market place. Without the intervention of digital preservation techniques the information contained will no longer be accessible.
OBSERVATION
7.1. Current Condition of 88 Video
We can collect two types of formats of this video (MiniDV and DVD), both are in well condition. However, both formats need to be preserve. And also, we cannot find the original video means that the version before editing. We do not know whether is it still has or not and whether is it in good condition or not.
7.2. Version and Format of 88 Video
According to Ms Tee speech, the shooting format is already digitized and the format they took was miniDV. After that, they converted to DVD and submitted both miniDV and DVD to ACRC. Now we got both of these two formats, one from Ms Nikki Draper and the other from Mr. Vincent. But it is still in SD (Standard Definition) format and not in HD (High Definition).
7.3. How to Migrate Current Medium to Others?
We tried several ways to migrate current medium to other appropriate formats to archive, and there are also many good ways to archive this video. As our target is to archive on the server which is DSpace, so we chose MXF format to preserve this video; unfortunately, this format is not provided by DSpace and other limitations, we changed to mpeg-4 format.
ISSUES
8.1. Conversion Issue
When we convert from one format to others, we need to use software to rip the video. But there is no software to rip DVD with .vob format to MXF. So Mr. Vincent recommended us to use multimedia lab at third floor of WKW school in which there are equipments and software to convert from miniDV to MXF file.
8.2. Format Issue
First, we chose MXF format which is the best for preserve by suggestion of Mr. Vincent. But, while we convert the video from miniDV to MXF, it cannot directly be converted and also we need a player to play this MXF format. So we finally chose mpeg-4 format which is more flexible format.
8.3. Medium Issue
Another issue we encountered is that medium issue. Although the blu-ray is good to preserve, we do not have blu-ray disk. And also we need to upload on to the DSpace. So we have to choose the format supported by the DSpace.
CONCLUSION
In this paper we have presented types of video formats and standards, why we need to preserve, and why should we care about digital preservation. We also mentioned how we collect the film 88 and analyse how to migrate it. We have presented an approach for making video preservation and issues and challenges of making video preservation. By using DSpace for our final repository, we have to decide which format and standard fits best for DSpace. Finally, we have been found the most appropriate format that should be hoped the best for video preservation and can last for a long time. We also hope that our effort can also be applied to other WKW SCI students' projects.
