One of the most costly, tedious and often delayed processes of establishing digital archives is the digitization of media assets. Samma Systems, founded and led by Jim Linder, one of the industry's most important players in the field of digital media archives, produces hardware and software solutions that enable automatic migration of content recorded on videotapes to file-based digital files.
Traditional workflows for archiving analog materials do not allow the migration of large quantities of magnetic materials in an efficient manner. These materials, archived in warehouses of hundreds of canals and libraries around the world, have a sword of Damocles pending since each passing year it becomes more difficult to recover them, due to the progressive deterioration of the media. On the other hand, the necessary equipment to read them is also beginning to be scarce (1 and 2 inch tape recorders in good condition, they are relics today).
The costs of a material digitization project are absolutely prohibitive for most of the organizations that own the content in Latin America. In addition, the quality control of traditional processes leaves much to be desired. According to Jim Linder, "without a fundamental change, many of the magnetic media where the world's audiovisual heritage resides will disintegrate before they can be saved." His company was created with the purpose of allowing other organizations to migrate their assets to a digital format quickly, cost-effectively and with the best possible quality.
Samma's name comes from System for the Automated Migration of Media Assets. The portfolio consists of hardware, software and flow process elements. The Samma allows a quick separation of the media that require special treatment and executes an automatic migration of the material. Linder argues that by separating tapes that can be migrated automatically from those that need to be treated in a special way, Samma allows you to maximize budgets and migrate more files with fewer resources. The process includes the physical inspection of the tapes, the review of their bibliographic cataloging, the separation of media that are too degraded to be processed automatically, mechanical cleaning and checking, automatic migration, consistent quality control and metadata generation throughout the entire process.
The Samma system is configured individually for the needs of each client. Non-technical personnel perform manual operations while an expert system, composed of hardware for audio and video analysis, records by means of a barcode, performs a specialized inspection, cleans, evaluates, monitors and documents the migration process and performs actions to identify and correct problems. According to Linder, a traditional manual system allows a trained technician to migrate six hours of videotape, while a Samma system can migrate 140 hours per day.
Samma sells or rents complete systems; however, the following components can be purchased individually, according to customer needs:
Samma Lite, designed for open reel tapes such as quad or 1". It offers coding and analysis without the robotic components used in complete systems.
Samma Prep., on the other hand, is a station for archiving masters in any type of media.
Samma Sync is a time base synchronizer and corrector with drop out compensation. According to Linder, this TBC is different because it has been designed to correct problems with old tapes.
Samma Clean is a computer-controlled tape inspection and cleaning system, which reports cleaning problems in the form of metadata via USB. This device is designed to work with U-Matic, Betacam and VHS tapes and cassettes. Linder argues that "traditional tape cleaners are designed to recycle media. This, on the other hand, addresses the problems of fragile tapes in an automated environment."
Finally, the Samma Motion JPEG 2000 capture card works as an audio encoder and decoder and video capture without real-time compression. It accepts 525i and 625i in 4:2:2 and 4 channels of AES audio.
