National Diet Library Newsletter
No. 181, February 2012
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Ina, a unique institution for preservation, access, research, production and
training in the audiovisual domain
This article is written by Mr. Daniel Teruggi, Head of Research, INA, based on his lecture held on October 18, 2011. (related article: NDL Newsletter No.180)
The <<Institut National de l'Audiovisuel>> started functioning in 1975. Its existence results from the dissolution of the former National Office for Radio and Television (ORTF) and the creation of independent national societies in charge of different sectors of the broadcast domain. The Institut National de l’Audiovisuel or Ina as it is now called was entrusted with various transversal missions as: audiovisual archives conservation, training in broadcast and audiovisual, research, musical research and experimental broadcast production.
Since 1975, these initial missions have strongly evolved and today Ina has become a leading actor of the digital audiovisual domain and one of the largest on-line digital repositories in the world. The main historic mission of Ina is to archive France’s National Broadcast production since the beginning of Radio and Television; 1.5 million hours of contents are conserved, with 800,000 hours of Television and 700,000 hours of Radio. A particular aspect of the collection, is that the production rights of these contents have been transferred to Ina; Ina is a National institution, however since its mission is to make these contents accessible to professionals and the public, Ina has the possibility to develop a commercial activity at a National and International level.
Since 1992 a new mission has been given to Ina consisting in the responsibility of capturing and conserving all Radio and Television production in France (public and private) as a Legal Deposit Mission. Contents thus conserved are made accessible for research purposes only, within the premises of the National Library, where a centre named Inathèque permits researchers and professionals to study Radio and Television. Today 103 Television channels and 17 Radio channels are captured continuously, recorded, indexed and made available. The total amount conserved is of 1,000,000 hours of Television and 1,400,000 hours of Radio (2 Million 400,000 hours in total), with an annual increase since 2009 of 500,000 hours per year. This mission is now expanding to the Internet, where Ina is capturing more than 6,000 French websites related to communication and media.
The French law gives three other missions to Ina: Training and Education, Research and Production. Professional training is a historical mission for Ina, the quick evolution of technology and production needs a continuous update for all professionals managing or producing contents not only for broadcast but equally for multimedia, games or journalism. More than 280 courses directed towards more than 5,500 professionals are done annually and have place Ina as the major institution in the audiovisual domain for training. In the last 13 years a new activity has been developed through higher education, where students can obtain degrees up to a Master level in different technical, production, history or preservation domains. 13 degrees and 380 students constitute the essential of Ina Sup, the school for media and production.
Research is another historical mission for Ina; it is oriented towards the problems related to preservation, indexation and exploitation of audiovisual works, in close relationship with the needs and evolutions of the institution. In parallel to this highly technological research, this Department has a specialized group called GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales or Musical Research Group), which, since 1958, works in the innovative domain of music and technology, with a large historical tradition of production, tools and theoretic research. Research, Professional training and Higher Education are united within Ina in a specific department called Ina Expert.
Archives constitute a unique source for production and permit to analyse and understand the past. More than 50 television programs are produced or coproduced every year permitting young or confirmed producers to study the past of the country and to propose original productions that bring to the broadcast audience an understanding of history and society.
Ina’s Preservation and Digitization Plan
Ina, within its preservation mission, has to deal with a large array of formats and programs reflecting the history of broadcast since its beginnings. As all audiovisual archives, Ina faces carrier degradation as well as obsolescence of players and a global decay of quality and accessibility to its contents. In order to palliate to this slow destruction process, measures were taken since the end of the nineties in order to assure the conservation of the collections. A large scale Preservation and Digitization Plan was thus launched in 1999, with the ambition to digitize all endangered collections before 2015. This plan has since preserved more than 850,000 hours of radio and television, and will have digitized all Ina’s analogue collections before 2017.
This represented a huge effort in terms of organization, funding and technology. Collections had to be analysed in order to understand their preservation state and processes put into place to be capable of dealing, internally and through external Service Providers, with the management, transport, transfer and documentation of more than 6 million items.
Preserving the analogue assets through digitization had a double objective: to create a new digital original for each analogue program, preserved at the highest possible quality and becoming the reference for future uses (DIGITAL Betacam). To transcode the original thus obtained to a production format (MPEG2), ready for exploitation and also accessible at low-definition for browsing (MPEG4), selection and indexation.
The result of this process permitted to create one of the world’s largest on-line collections of audiovisual material: the professional service Inamediapro, open to registered persons, where all the digitized collections (850,000 hours) can be searched and visualized, and users can select documents or excerpts for their professional use. More than 35,000 documents are thus used every year within radio and television. A second website, ina.fr permits general public to freely access more than 260,000 documents reflecting France’s past and history.
In parallel the legal analysis of all the digitized contents was done, in order to be able to exploit as easily as possible the contents on a commercial perspective, in order to satisfy the increasing demand for archival material for television news and production.
Ina Signature
In a world where images increasingly circulate through media and Internet, it is important to keep track of their circulation and use; mainly when the interests of more than a 100,000 right-holders are involved. This is why Ina has developed, through the work of its Research teams, a technical system to track and monitor the use of Television content. This system, called Signature, is based on the extraction of fingerprintsi from images in order to analyse how the images are used within different contexts.
Professional users obtain images from Ina and use them for broadcast productions; these images circulate and are reused in different conditions and are sometimes even found on the web (unauthorized). The Signature software and environment permits to extract fingerprints from images that leave Ina and then, through a monitoring process done on broadcasters and on certain websites, check if the images are used with or without authorization. This software has brought wonderful results and has helped establish a confidence relation with right-holders and their representative institutions. It is a robust solution, permitting to identify identical images even if they have been modified (enlargement, colour changes, added logos) as often done in post-production.
The Presto projects
The Research department in Ina has closely followed the evolution of Ina within the Digital world and digital preservation. Important European research projects have been developed since 1999 in collaboration with Europe’s most important broadcast institutions as the BBC in the UK, Rai in Italy, ORF in Austria and B&G in the Netherlands as well as with many companies and universities working in the audiovisual domain. This collaboration based on digitization and digital preservation, has permitted to develop original tools and approaches to this domain, through three major projects called Presto – PrestoSpace – and PrestoPRIME.
The ambition of these projects was to develop the necessary technology that would permit to accelerate and optimize the preservation of audiovisual material:
- Presto (1999 – 2002) permitted the conception and development of dedicated machines to accelerate and optimize preservation of analogue material to a digital format
- PrestoSpace (2004 – 2008) worked on all the Preservation chain, from digitization to access, including storage, metadata extraction, documentation and publication
- PrestoPRIME (2009 – 2012) is dedicated to digital material: how to survive when contents are digital? The project develops Tools and environments for long-term digital preservation. It also has launched a competence centre called PrestoCentre, available to all archives wishing to advance in the digitization and exploitation of their audiovisual contents.
The PrestoCentre, one of the strong achievements of the PrestoPRIME project
This quick overview gives a vision of Ina, its trajectory and evolutions. Probably one of the outstanding facts is the efficient combination of a strong archival activity linked with exploitation, research, training and production. All of them gravitate around the main mission and concern, which is keeping France’s Audiovisual heritage and assets alive.
Daniel Teruggi
Head of Research
Ina
iFingerprints are very small digital representations of images, capable of being easily identified and searched
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