- Paris-based VectraCom has instituted NOA technology to provide digital migration services for media enterprises with substantial audio archives. Thanks to the NOA equipment installed in January, VectraCom will now be able to digitize and preserve large amounts of audio and video archives for major archive owners. A compelling reason for VectraCom's selection was that the NOA solution had been precertified as meeting the stringent requirements of its agreement with Institut national de l' audiovisuel (INA).
- VectraCom, founded in 1991, specializes in library and archive work. Besides INA, its prestigious clients include the Cité des Sciences and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
- VectraCom's NOA technology today consists of two NOA Record stations, including analog-to-digital (A/D) converters and re-player communication modules, to enable simultaneous digitization of six parallel stereo ingest streams from analog carriers; NOA WaveButler to provide advanced, near real-time audio transcoding; and the NOA Job Database Workflow System.
- "Previously, VectraCom had relied primarily on the integration of different tools from the market to digitize analog audio recordings," said Bruno Burtre, VectraCom director of sales operations. "This was a limited solution for us, however, because it did not enable easy integration of digital media into a managed digital workflow. Having had only positive experience with NOA in my previous position at Sony, I was confident in our decision to implement the company's technology on behalf of our clients. The NOA Record and Job Database Workflow System are today enabling VectraCom, to do an even better job of supporting our clients' ability to preserve, retrieve, and repurpose their valuable media assets."
- The NOA Record system is a combined hardware and software solution that enables simultaneous migration of multiple parallel ingest streams. Operating in pairs, NOA's N6192 A/D converters rely on internal digital signal processing (DSP) to continuously check the linearity of both outputs, eliminating even tiny distortions and resulting in an unbeatable dynamic range of 125 dB. The converters also enable features relating to analog input gain, sample rate, DSP filter curves, and output channel to be accessed remotely from within the NOA software. The NOA Record system further enables ingest to be monitored at a glance because the user interface affords an overview of multiple simultaneous sources with relevant recording and playback parameters displayed.
- The NOA Job Database Workflow System enables coordinated transcription of ingested data to an existing media asset management (MAM) system. With a design based on best-practice recommendations from the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) and the International Federation of Television Arvhives (IFTA/FIAT), the Job Database Workflow System has been implemented in dozens of institutions worldwide.
- NOA's new MediaButler transcoding performs simultaneous multitrack transcoding in near real-time of eight of the most widely used audio file formats, including WAV, MP3, FLAC, and AC3. MediaButler assures high-quality dubbing because it bases all transcoded duplicates on the first-generation, high-resolution 96kHz 24-bit.wav file.
- "VectraCom is a good example of how NOA is proving itself to be the best solution for efficient, quality-controlled digitization in the professional market," said Jean-Christophe Kummer, NOA managing partner. "VectraCom's digital migration service began small and has now taken significant steps toward becoming a total professional digital storage solution, with built-in quality control and full integration within a production workflow."
