By the end of the ’80s, the first HDTV images were produced in Europe based on an experimental analogue standard of 1250 lines/50Hz. In this context, the 1992 Winter and Summer Olympic Games were the perfect stage to showcase this new way of video production and transmission. For the occasion, over 40 HDTV cameras were deployed with their support systems and facilities to produce more than 200h of HDTV content.

30 years later, these images have been digitized thanks to the efforts of the Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage, responsible for managing the IOC’s audio-visual heritage, from acquisition to preservation, and to making it accessible to its internal and external partners.

The project, developed with the technical support of INA and Memnon, covers the digitization of 138 D1 tapes (single and dual) and 380 1-inch HD1250 tapes.

The technical challenge involved the use of obsolete technology for playing back the legacy carriers while finding innovative ways to reconstruct the High Definition pictures using modern tools. The experimental nature of those recordings also caused a few unexpected issues that had to be dealt with during the process of migration. This all resulted in a very specific workflow that was tailored to accommodate those rare constraints.

During the session, we will share some of the images as well as the technical challenges described.

Sabine Haller-Neumann is working as Senior Manager of the Images & Sounds Archives at the Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage (DPT of the International Olympic Committee, Lausanne).
She graduated with a Bachelor’s (1995) and a Master’s in Information science (Geneva University, 1999) and worked as a librarian/documentalist in public and media libraries and as well as museums during the ’90s.
She worked for 7 years as an archive specialist and project manager in charge of document management in Telco company and got certified in project management (PMP, Prince2).
She joined the International Olympic Committee in 2007 as project and team manager within the Patrimonial Assets Management (PAM) Program, specifically in charge of organizing documentation of all photo and audiovisual archives and setting up together with IT & external providers a tailor-made archive preservation and publication platform.

Since 2019, she has been coordinating projects and operations within the Images and Sounds archives, managing a team of 18 preservation specialists and special task forces for Olympic Games activities.

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Graduated from EICAR in 2008 after training as a sound engineer, Etienne Marchand has since been working on a great variety of archive documents – audio, video and film – and on every aspect of the technical workflows: assessment, cleaning and physical restoration of audiovisual carriers; digitisation using manual and automatic processes; digital restoration and colour grading; quality control; conversions and transcoding; media delivery; digital archiving.

Etienne joined INA in 2015 as an operations executive within the Preservation, Delivery and Digital Archiving service. He’s currently working as a multimedia engineer on the design of new workflows, monitoring the digital media intake and on new methods for handling legacy formats.

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In 2004, Michel founded Memnon Archiving Services to address the challenge of the preservation of and access to the audiovisual heritage. Memnon innovated the audiovisual digitization market by developing new methodologies to allow large-scale digitization at affordable cost. Michel grew the company into the leading global service provider in the field. Since the acquisition of the company by ES Broadcast group, Michel continues to support Memnon activities in its global business development activities and to represent the Company in professional organizations.

Acervo Globo’s cloudification project aims to move the backup of our files to the cloud. We understand that such initiative provides greater cost efficiency, better access and more security for our content. Even with the high investment involved in moving to the cloud, the cloudification of Acervo Globo is an economically attractive project, as we no longer buy LTO media, and depend on the costs of an outsourced company that previously stored our security backup. The project flow is designed so that in case of failure to access some content on the main instance, our first instance backup (saved on media inside Acervo) is activated. The same content is only restored from cloud, our second instance backup, in case of a problem with the first one. Using the cloud only as disaster recovery, we mitigate the high cost of retrieving material from the cloud. Other gain is the greater ease of access to content. With the cloud, restoring content is now just a click away, whereas before it could take from one day to the other for the content to be accessible. In addition to efficiency, we gained a lot in security, as the media no longer runs the risk of physical displacement – that was previously necessary to arrive from the outsourced company to our archive. Another possible gain associated with the project is the use of technical resources that cloud provides, such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Training machines to identify Globo talents, for example, would allow for automatic indexing of characters in the treatment of our products, enriching the metadata and adding value to our content without burdening the teams. The cloud and its countless resources are part of a world that is now unfolding for Acervo Globo, showing all its possibilities – and also limitations.

Graduated in both History (UFF) and Communication (UFRJ), with a master degree in Social History of Culture (PUC-Rio), Raquel has been working since 2012 at the Archive Department of Globo, Brazil´s largest TV network. Along the years, she played different rolls as researcher, coordinator and, since 2020, specialist of archive. Among other challenges, she is involved with integrating, aligning and giving support to the six different sites where Acervo Globo is located, pushing foward modernization efforts.