Front Porch Digital has donated a SAMMAsolo single-stream multiformat tape migration system to Association FL@H, the association in charge of preserving Madagascar's audiovisual archives, to drive its preservation effort.
Association FL@H, also known as Fanajariana Lova association Haino Aman-Jery, relies mostly on donations to sustain its activities. SAMMAsolo will integrate into the association's digitization workflow to ingest audio and video tape assets and encode them to multiple formats simultaneously, while also analyzing content to ensure the quality of the migration.
"Preserving Madagascar's cultural heritage is something that's near and dear to us because it is so closely tied with the cultural history of France, the home of our international headquarters," said Rino Petricola, senior vice prsident and managing director of Front Porch Digital International. "We are pleased to contribute to this effort with best-of-breed products that the association could not otherwise afford."
Since 2007, FL@H has been working to digitize Madagascar's cinema, television, and radio recordings before they deteriorate to a point where they cannot be preserved. FL@H's founder, Monique Razafy Rahajarizafy, won the Best Archive @ Risk award at the 2010 FIAT/IFTA Archive Achievement Awards for her preservation work.
"Saving the heritage is a very complex process that demands a whole range of technical, political, human, and financial resolutions," Rahajarizafy said. "If we don't do it, then whole chapters of this heritage will disappear in less than 10 years, leaving an irreparable void in our cultural identity. Front Porch Digital's SAMMAsolo system adds efficiencies that will allow us to make a significant stride forward in our effort."
SAMMAsolo is a single-stream migration solution that supports a wide variety of video tape formats on input, and then simultaneously delivers multiple digital files in flight, with frame- accurate lossless preservation quality, broadcast quality mezzanine, and proxy. SAMMA can produce up to five different simultaneous digital output files in real time in a wealth of formats. SAMMAsolo is founded on a scalable, modular architecture allowing up to eight SAMMAsolo systems to be controlled simultaneously by one operator using a centralized control interface, and so can grow organically to meet demand.
