VideoScanner seals long-term archive access

NOA has announced VideoScanner, an ingest and normalisation solution that creates lossless video archives in a format to suit long-term access and preservation strategies. To overcome the lack of a lossless archive format with wide vendor support, NOA’s VideoScanner uses a combination of mathematically lossless formats based on royalty-free open source technology to create lossless encoded files in the native source pixel formats (8bit 4:2:0 – 10bit 4:4:4). Future access to these formats is assured indefinitely, and decoders are available today for every computer operating system.

VideoScanner imports most MXF OP1a and AVI files in a wide range of codecs (AVC Intra50/100, VC-3 [DNxHD], XDCAM HD 422, IMX D-10, FFv1, FFvHuff) together with up to 32 audio channels to produce the normalised archive. The lossless base format guarantees that copies subsequently created in production formats will always be supplied at the highest quality, and never suffer from lossy-to-lossy transcodings.

To streamline the ingest process and further future-proof the archives created, VideoScanner creates a shot-detected index of the content and extracts all relevant technical metadata including timecode and source format properties. When users need to store additional technical metadata information which is not supported by the AVI container format, the data is stored in an openly-accessible standard IT database.

“For a long time, archive owners have been dealing with lossy codecs to archive their material, and there has also been the problem of how to keep video files in a way that guarantees they will be readable for more than just a decade or so,”said Christophe Kummer, CEO of NOA Audio Solutions. “VideoScanner finally solves the conundrum: now it’s possible to create TV archives in a future-proof open archive format with no compromise on video quality.”

Designed to run in conjunction with NOA’s MediARC systems, VideoScanner is available immediately as a software licence for installation on standard IT hardware, and integrates fully with NOA workflows.