Kate: I love that the Project Scope for QCTools quotes both the Library of Congress’s Sustainability of Digital Formats and the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative as influential resources which encourage best practices and standards in audiovisual digitization of analog material for users. When presenting the earliest prototypes of QCTools to users a recurring question was “How can I see the video?” We redesigned the project so that QCTools would present the video alongside the metrics along with various scopes, meters and visual tools so that now it has a visual and an analytic side. Initial work delved deeply into identifying methodology to use to pick out the right metrics to find what could be unnatural to digitized analog video (such as pixels too dissimilar from their temporal neighbors, or the near-exact repetition of pixel rows, or discrepancies in the rate of change over time between the two video fields). Initially the grant application focused on QCTools as a purely analytical tool which would assess and present quantifications of video metrics via graphs and data visualization. The newest release has quite a few optimizations to improve speed and responsiveness, some additional playback & viewing options, better documentation and support for the creation of an xml-format report.ĭave: The most substantial example of going ‘off plan’ was the incorporation of video playback. We’ve also established a GitHub issue tracker to capture user feedback which has been pretty active since the latest release and has been really illuminating in terms of what people are finding useful or problematic, etc. Certain processing filters were added or removed in response to user feedback obviously UI and navigability issues were informed by our testers. We’ve had several user-focused training sessions and workshops which have helped guide and inform our development process. The right window here shows the V plane of the video per field to show what data the deck is providing.ĭevon: The users’ perspective is really important to us and being responsive to their feedback is something we’ve tried to prioritize. Here the left window shows a frame with the two fields presented separately (revealing the lack of chroma data in field 2). Are you pretty much sticking to the plan or have you made adjustments based on user feedback that you didn’t foresee? How has the pilot testing influenced the products? Kate: Tell us what’s new in this release. In 2013, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded BAVC with a Preservation and Access Research and Development grant to develop QCTools. Lastly, the urgency related to the obsolescence issues surrounding analog video and lower costs for digital video management meant that more organizations were starting their own preservation projects for analog video and creating a greater need for an open source response to quality control issues. Additionally, open source technology for archival and preservation applications has been finding more development, application, and funding.
Bay Area Video Coalition had been researching and gathering samples of digitization issues through the A/V Artifact Atlas project and meanwhile FFmpeg had made substantial developments in their audiovisual filtering library. Our aim was twofold: to build a tool that was free/open source, but also one that could be used by specialists and non-specialists alike.ĭave: Over the last few years a lot of building blocks for this project were coming in place. Additionally, quality control work requires a certain skill set and expertise.
While there are tools out there, they tend to be geared toward (and priced for) the broadcast television industry, making them out of reach for most non-profit organizations.
QCTOOLS EXAMPLES MANUAL
As you mention above, manual quality control work is extremely labor and resource intensive but a necessary part of the preservation process. Kate: How did the QCTools project come about?ĭevon: There was a recognized need for accessible & affordable tools out there to help archivists, curators, preservationists, etc.
QCTOOLS EXAMPLES SOFTWARE
In this blog post, I interview archivists and software developers Dave Rice and Devon Landes about the latest release version of the QCTools, an open source software toolset to facilitate accurate and efficient assessment of media integrity throughout the archival digitization process.
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