Preserving Visual History

Organizations invest significant resources obtaining and editing visual content only to leave it languishing on shelves or in files, slowly degrading. Government entities, corporations and other organizations have videos and photographic prints documenting significant historical events that should be preserved and available for re-purposing. But the media holding these images begin to deteriorate in just 10–15 years. Once that legacy is lost, it's gone forever.

Video Migration

GTGI protects valuable video assets by migrating clients' footage from any video format or film to a secure digital archive that provides efficient storage and long-term preservation. We take analog videotapes and transform them into useful and accessible assets, that can be searched and previewed using standard software tools.

Uncompressed video is the best way to preserve all the information on the original videotapes. So, GTGI strongly recommends creating uncompressed digital video files from the original videotapes for long-term preservation of valuable legacy material. Because uncompressed video files are very large, this material serves as an "offline archive" for archival purposes. Since uncompressed video is also format-agnostic, new files can be easily created from this material as compression formats evolve. Our digital migration process includes creation of uncompressed video files and a version in the compression format of our clients' choice.

Compressed video files are available in low, medium and high resolution formats. The appropriate format depends on how the video will be stored, accessed and used. MPEG2, DV, and Windows Media files are often stored in digital asset management systems and used for viewing and emailing. Apple ProRes, DV25 and Flash are popular files for editing, web video and presentations. Because there are so many digital video formats, GTGI works closely with you during your digital migration to determine which compression formats meet your needs.

Long-Term Storage and Digital Archiving

GTGI can design and deploy a variety of on-line and tiered storage solutions to preserve your visual assets for the long-term. Many assets are not requested regularly and a properly designed storage and archive work flow can automatically migrate less popular assets to near line or off-line media while retaining the ability to search for the content using metadata.

CONTACT GTGI TODAY AT 703-486-0500 TO SCHEDULE AN INITIAL CONSULTATION