Daily archives or Archives of the day is a very popular format for accessing specific archive content. What happens when we start to use the “old” daily news as a trigger for intergenerational dialogue? Can we understand each other better through archival footage?

Three generations in particular, Baby Boomers, Generations X and Millennials, are currently meeting each other on Facebook. Each has a different (or none) experience of life under socialism in Czechoslovakia. Across the generations, there are also different views on whether things were better before and where the current society is heading. News events from the 1970s and 1980s evoke a wide range of emotions. Comments on the Czech Television Archive’s Facebook page commonly include statements such as “the world was still fine then”, but also those that condemn everything from the old days. But does it have to be so black and white?

We think primarily about the relationship between the archival material, the archivist who selects the content, and the audience. Where, how and under what conditions can everyone safely meet and develop these relationships? Can we use a selection of events from the archive, well-aimed questions and sensitively guided discussion to create a space for cultivated dialogue among our viewers? And what can the audience teach us? Why do they watch archival footage? What does it evoke in them? Where, apart from social networks, can we meet and what form to choose? If we open ourselves up to dialogue and resist nothing, we may discover what else archives have to offer society.

At the end of 2023, adapted from the Mao Dun Literature Award work “Blossoms”, directed by Kar Wai Wong (HK), the Shanghai local television drama “Blossoms Shanghai” had been launched, with a great reputation. Shanghainese seem to have opened a memory gate, collectively returning to the vibrant 1990s. Many real-life scenes from the past appear in the drama, most of these historical images were provided by Shanghai Audio-Visual Archives.

In 2020, the production team of “Blossoms Shanghai” had contact with Shanghai Audio-Visual Archives. With the aid of the archives of the city of Shanghai in the 1980s to 1990s, they hope to dig deeper into the special historical period of Shanghai and the living conditions of its people. Also, they hope to realistically recreate the scene of the drama at that time.

In the following three years, the Archives provided senior professional editors and researchers with specialized consulting services for the production team, with dedicated personnel conducting targeted queries and organizing information. They provided over 60 historical video archives for the production team of “Blossoms Shanghai”, totalling over 1800 minutes. The production team of “Blossoms Shanghai” utilized these rich visual memories to create a 1:1 replica of the street scenes of the old Shanghai at the film and television base. The narrow alleyways, crowded staircases, and aisles filled with things all present the rich fireworks and contemporary atmosphere of Shanghai in the early 1990s in the drama.

From the initial historical scene reference needs of the cooperation to the copyright purchase of precious historical images for drama applications, the Shanghai Audio-Visual Archives and the production team have worked together to meticulously craft a sword for three years, showcasing the touching urban Shanghai of the 1990s. This form of market-oriented application has been continuously carried out by Shanghai Audio-Visual Archives for several years, providing services for multiple dramas, such as the scientist series film “Ye Shuhua” and “Yan Dongsheng”, the drama “Great Pudong”, ” Like a Flowing River”, “Faith Makes Great”, and so on.

Real historical images not only serve as an important reference for the production team, but also make the content presented in movies and TV dramas more convincing by examining details. In addition, the direct use of real historical images in the drama reflects the historical background while making the content of the film and television drama more creative. In the face of more diversified media communication methods, relying on the collection of historical images, Shanghai Audio-Visual Archives has also planned and produced a variety of short videos on themes, showing the audience the real historical images at that time on new media platforms such as the official WeChat channel and the official account, which has made many people relive the past life, popularize historical knowledge, and gradually build a social public library.

In addition to being a tool, technology has a transformative power. And in the field of audiovisual information management, traditionally based on a high investment in human resources, the use of algorithms has a substantial impact. After a first phase mainly focused on the use of automatic transcription and facial recognition tools, the ATRESMEDIA Archive is now evolving into the use of new generative AI. A technological project framed in a broader objective such as the transformation of the profile of the professionals who work in the Archive. What will be the identity of this new profile, its survival and its place in the ecosystem of television production, are the main incentive to actively promote and monitor from the Archive itself a technological change that sooner or later will in any case be unstoppable.

Pilar Auserón Marruedo is a senior Media Archive Specialist at ATRESMEDIA, where she has developed her career in audiovisual documentation and content management. She specialized in the integration of metadata and artificial intelligence tools into archive workflows. Her work focuses on improving access, searchability, and the editorial use of audiovisual archives across multiple platforms. Pilar has played an active role in transforming the traditional role of the documentalist into a more dynamic, cross-functional profile, contributing to innovation in content generation and data-driven storytelling. She is particularly interested in the intersection between language, technology, and media, and in how these elements shape the future of archival work.

A Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network (RCNN) is being introduced to rectify inherent flaws in the SECAM format, a system extensively utilised for archiving and production from 1967 to the 1980s in many countries. Videos, preserved on archived magnetic tapes, like two-inch tapes that encapsulate the full bandwidth of the composite signal, and U-Matic format tapes that conserve colour using a “colour under” scheme.

These systematic artefacts, originating from past technological choices rather than ageing, were barely perceptible on 65 cm CRT TVs during their broadcast era. However, they are now deemed unacceptable for display on contemporary technology.

In the PAL format, traditional signal processing techniques enhanced the demodulation and separation of luminance and chrominance. Yet, these methods, such as linear filtering with comb filters or FFT domain filtering, are incompatible with the FM modulation of colour in SECAM. To our knowledge, no technology was previously available to enhance the quality of demodulated composite SECAM video. The proposed RCNN tackles systematic imperfections like blurring (resolution loss), mutual crosstalk between chrominance and luminance, 12.5 Hz colour flicker, and chroma and luma noise. The flicker of horizontal lines is a consequence of the unfiltered vertical sampling of chroma in the SECAM standard.

To train the RCNN, a degraded dataset was generated by processing recent videos through a physical SECAM modulator/demodulator chain. The RCNN also transforms interlaced frames into progressive images, thereby enhancing visual quality and rendering them more suitable for further processing by other super-resolution AI techniques. The processing is executed at a rate of several frames per second on a recent GPU on the already demodulated image YDrDb. This enables the treatment of programmes that have already been digitised and compressed, without requiring access to the original composite video.

Louis Laborelli joined INA research department in 1992 to work on computer assisted animation and later moved to video processing. Holder of a Magistere (Master) in computer science and engineering from Nice/ Sophia Antipolis University and an MBA from Sorbonne (IAE) he contributed to multiple European projects in the domain of video restoration and super-resolution like EU Project AC072 Aurora, Project IST-1999-11628 Brava, FP6-IST-507336 PrestoSpace and FP7-600827 David. He is also the inventor of a contact less 78rpm and 33 rpm disk digitizer. His current interests are in the use of generative AI techniques for video production and restoration.

The state television series, ‘Yuruparí: Popular Traditional Art’, documented cultural expressions of peasant, Afro and indigenous populations in Colombia, leaving a memory of the sociopolitical configurations in the midst of the armed conflict of the 1980s. Being the most complete ethnographic record of its time, with rituals, festivals and songs declared Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, the preservation of this collection after its censorship, invites us to reflect on access and restitution policies, in order to unveil untold stories and embedded narratives.

Following the beginning of its restoration in 2013 led by the colombian institutions of Proimágenes Colombia, RTVC-Señal Memoria and Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano, as well as the lead researcher Juan Suárez PhD and international organizations such as the National Museum of African American Culture-Smithsonian/Blake McDowell, FIAT/IFTA, amongst others, 24 of the 86 episodes in 16mm have been completed.

The central figure of Gloria Triana, its main director, has led the conventional narrative around this archive. However, based on the documentation management and contextualization with a gender perspective of the private, state and community archives around this collection, more than 25 participating women who constitute part of Colombian audiovisual history have been made visible; Ann Marie Lóök, Beatriz Barros and María Ema Frade are just some of them.

In this way, in an exercise to recover the oral memory of the production team, the participation of the populations represented in the collective cataloging of their episodes, and the making of a film with the found materials, this project proposes different approaches to reread the sociopolitical narrative(s) imposed in the series and delve into the challenges of access, reuse and promotion of public archives in Colombia.

Laura Alhach studied Anthropology at Universidad de los Andes, and two Master Degrees in Ethnographic Documentary Film at UCL and Film Archives at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola. She has been Editorial Coordinator of the Audiovisual, Sound and Interactive Media Public Policy of the Ministry of Culture, as well as Consultant for the National Cinematography Council and Secretary of Culture of Bogotá. Laura co-founded the audiovisual experimentation community, Tres Mil Malas, from where she is developing a hybrid research, collective cataloging and creation project with the archival materials of the documentary series ‘Yuruparí’, and the film exhibition program “Costas: International Exhibition of Cinema and Memory of the Diaspora”. She is also an active member in the “C3: Non-Aligned Film Archives” research group coordinated by Léa Morin, and part of the ARDER Collective.

In the audiovisual archive of the Bayerischer Rundfunk, speaker diarization systems are used to extract metadata from audio content. These systems can automatically annotate who spoke when in an audio stream, but yet their performance does not match the one of an archivist given the same task. That calls for evaluation. Therefore, as the final project of my traineeship, I have developed an application for testing the speaker diarization systems used in the Bayerischer Rundfunk, introducing scores and error rates.

As of yet, an interactive prototype has been built, showcasing a user interface for the application. Furthermore, it has been laid down how to access the speaker diarization systems via API, and several Python scripts have been written for converting mining results as well as importing metrics from an open-source benchmarking toolkit. This toolkit provides a set of classes to compare the output of speaker diarization systems to perfectly annotated reference data. Finally, a series of tests has been conducted which has proven the concept to be applicable for reproducible testing.

Using the application, single versions of speaker diarization systems as well as different speaker diarization systems can be compared quality-wise. This will make it easier to decide whether to implement said services, and secure the audiovisual archive’s data quality.

After completing the “Texte.Zeichen.Medien” master’s program in Literary Studies at the University of Erfurt, Frank Hebestreit started his traineeship at Bayerischer Rundfunk in Munich in co-operation with the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt. In late 2023, he graduated as Information Specialist (“Wissenschaftlicher Dokumentar”). At the Bayerischer Rundfunk, his work revolves around the evaluation of software tools for automatic metadata extraction. Furthermore, he is concerned with the automation of archival workflows by implementing text and audio mining services.

INA is a French public company whose first mission is to preserve and develop a vast collection of audiovisual and audio archives from French public radios and TV channels.

Due to the quantity of rights managed and the large number of rightsholders in the collection of INA’s archives, exploiting it involves taking risks.

In order to limit risk exposure, INA has developed a politic of collective agreement conclusion with CMOs (for the authors rights) and unions (for the performers rights). In the same time, individual agreements are concluded / negotiated with third-party property rights (rightsholders non-members of CMOs, coproducers, organizers of sports events / shows, multiple rightsholders of contents previously incorporated in INA’s archives (photo, phonograms, literary works, etc.).

INA’s Legal Department also have to deal with rights of the personality, image, freedom of expression, private life… and others (with the IA, RGPD).

Our purpose is to facilitate the work of our operational teams with clear guidelines on each subject. A legal team at the INA’s Legal Department is dedicated to the legal analysis of our contents with the perspective of an exploitation to manage the risk. INA has launched a project to create a SI which enables to combine the legal data on the contents and the royalties data in order to simplify the decision making. However, human intervention is still necessary to appreciate the risk and the opportunity of an exploitation.

Johanna Dong is a Legal Project manager at the INA since 2019, working on crosscutting issues at the Legal Department. She holds a Master degree in Intellectual property Law from UPEC (Paris Est) and a DU in International Litigation. She works in the areas of literary and artistic property and in the media law particularly in the music and audiovisual sectors.

Sandrine Lardeux is the Head of Department of Rights, Acquisition and Royalties (DDAR) of INA Legal Department. She holds a Master degree in Economic rights and Communication from Toulouse University and is also licensed as an attorney in France (Paris Bar). She has worked in audiovisual sector for twenty years and has a strong knowledge of legal issues of managing collection of archives.

Considering the growing popularity of podcasts due to their inherent convenience for consumption in areas such as deepening knowledge and entertainment, and taking the example of the Rai Play Sound platform, where original podcasts can be found, in addition to the radio offering of new and/or repertoire programs, we will analyse, through concrete examples, the methods and verification processes implemented by Rai’s Rights Management Department when rights clearances are requested in order to use archive material in new in-house or third parties podcast productions.

We will examine the different types of contracts, from the oldest ones, which only provided for radio and television rights, to the newest ones where exploitation within podcasts is already provided for in the contractual clauses, explaining what risks we take and why. Rights Management Department follows Rai’s Legal Department’s guidelines , but its decisions are also the result of comparisons and evaluations made for each individual case based on various factors: whether internal use or commercialization of the podcast is envisaged; the nature of the repertoire requested (movies, entertainment, investigations, sports, etc.); whether the podcast consists of the full retransmission of a program already broadcasted or whether the material must be inserted into a new work.

We will also discuss cases where the Fair Use principle can be applied for the free use of archives (for example, for purposes of criticism, comment, information, teaching, instruction, or research).

During the presentation, we will show some specific and potentially critical cases, discussing how we behave in the presence of material protected by copyright and agreements between Rai and collecting societies.

Andrea Mauri graduated in law at Sapienza University of Rome. He has been working in Rai since 1995. From 2010 his role in Rai Teche is to check and manage rights situation about Rai tv programmes, giving all information to customers about utilization and restrictions of footage. He was in charge of training courses in Rai project on the new “Rights Database”. He is a journalist and a writer. His novels are published in Italy and his reports and short stories have appeared in literature reviews and on blogs.

Gabriele di Majo is an audiovisual archivist at Rai Teche. After the degree in Literature and Philosophy – course DAMS (arts, music and entertainment) at the University Roma Tre he works for a brief period at Fandango (Italian entertainment company), in the office of the music supervisor and publisher. Later, after an experience in Boston where he works at the Italian consulate, he returns to Italy to work at Metaverso, an Italian cinema distributor. In 2008 he started working in RAI at Rai Teche. Currently he works at the Rights Archive department in collaboration with Rai Com, for the commercial exploitation of the RAI archive and he is in charge of clearance rights for the internal editorial projects at Rai Teche.

This session will explore how the BFI approached its largest ever rights clearance project, researching over 30,000 titles and clearing rights for 13,000 film and TV works for a new streaming service in UK libraries, BFI Replay, as part of the recently completed Heritage 2022 programme. I’ll show how we devised our approach to compliance & risk across the multiple layers of rights and the different categories of rights holders and works, and the tools, processes and policies we developed to support this work and the results we achieved. I’ll share some of the main obstacles we faced, like the information gap, and how we engaged with rights holders and consider some of the longer term challenges that can be created by project driven rights work.

Annie Shaw has worked in copyright since 2000 and joined the BFI in 2004. She manages the contract & royalties system for BFI’s distribution & sales catalogues and, since 2012, she’s been responsible for delivering the rights work for the BFI’s archive digitisation programmes, Unlocking Film Heritage and Heritage 2022, developing the policies and workflows for rights research, clearances, negotiations and risk assessment. Annie was responsible for developing rights management for BFI Player and BFI Replay. She runs staff training on copyright and is keen to help build greater copyright awareness and confidence for those working in the sector. She has written for the Journal of Film Preservation and is a member of the Europeana Copyright Community Steering Group and UKLACA and regularly works with academic partners on copyright projects.