MUMBAI: The Associated Press (AP) is working with Prime Focus Technologies (PFT) to digitise its video archive, making it available to a new audience across digital platforms.
AP’s film and tape archive contains around 70,000 hours’ worth of footage including more than 1.3 million global news and entertainment stories in 16 mm film and videotape as old as the beginning of the 20th Century.
The project is part of the upgrade project which will see AP switch its entire newsgathering, production and distribution systems to HD to continue to meet the technical, editorial and business needs of its customers in the digital age.
AP director of international archives Alwyn Lindsey said, “Today’s market is driven by giving customers breadth of content, ease of access, and value for money. While we have already digitised around 10 per cent of our archive, it has been a top priority to get all of our most saleable archive footage online and make it available to our customers, wherever in the world they may be. To make this happen, we needed a partner who could handle our global business needs and a project of this scale, and for that reason, we chose Prime Focus Technologies.”
Using the skillsets of its global organisation to digitise AP’s film and tape archives, PFT will then catalogue, manage transcode and deliver AP’s content to a multi-media audience.
PFT has experience in digitising archive content and has partnered with organisations such as the British Movietone Library, British Film Institute, Imperial War Museum, IMG, Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and Eros International.
PFT UK vice president and head Aine Healy said, “PFT is delighted to be working closely with AP to make its valuable archive of footage available to the world, and to preserve it for generations to come.”
The project will be driven by PFT’s content operations platform and supporting services CLEAR.
PFT said that it is delivering this project in an “unprecedented timescale”, creating nearly four million new assets in just 18 months which includes 3,000 hours of film with an average of 60 news stories per hour - creating a total of 900,000 files and 29,000 hours of video with an average of 20 news stories per hour - creating a total of 2.90 million files.
