ACADEMIA

IBM and Thought Equity Motion has announced that they are collaborating on a major film digitization and preservation project for the EYE Film Institute Netherlands. The project involves scanning and storing more than 150 million discrete DPX files. (Digital Picture Exchange is the worldwide standard for transferring film images to a digital medium with no loss of quality.)  

The collaboration between IBM and Thought Equity Motion cuts the long term data storage costs of EYE’s project by 50 percent, allowing EYE to store master quality files (2K DPX) instead of compressed proxy versions. This is achieved without increasing EYE’s local IT support costs, and in turn enables more of the Dutch national archive to be made accessible for theatrical, cultural, educational, and commercial use. As the face of Dutch cinema, both in the Netherlands and abroad, EYE is responsible for managing an extensive and internationally prominent film collection that features 37,000 films, some of which are more than 100 years old. 

“EYE’s archive project serves the critical mission of preserving the heritage of Dutch film and making it accessible throughout our country and the world,” said Emjay Rechsteiner, Curator at EYE. “Thought Equity Motion is enabling us to pursue this project with greater speed, lower cost, and enhanced flexibility, meaning we can focus on the curation and programming of our film rather than technology or infrastructure.” 

Thought Equity Motion delivers one of the industry’s most advanced application sets around large scale video archive management, including preservation, access, rich metadata management, and delivery. As part of its Platform Services offering, Thought Equity Motion is tapping IBM’s open source Long Term File system (LTFS), which uses LTO-5 tape drive technology to provide a simpler, more cost efficient way to access and manage massive video and film archives.  

By bringing together IBM’s LTFS for LTO-5 tape libraries with Thought Equity Motion’s advanced video library management platform, the two companies can offer media rights holders a scalable, integrated set of services for managing their video content, and enable greater efficiency and ROI to support a wider range of uses for video.  

“IBM is excited to announce this collaboration with Thought Equity Motion to accelerate their marketplace success in content preservation and access,” said Steve Canepa, general manager, IBM Media & Entertainment industry. “Combining Thought Equity Motion’s robust set of metadata, access, and delivery capabilities with IBM’s media solutions and storage technologies will dramatically enhance rights holders’ ability to profitably exploit the value of their video archives.” 

“This collaboration supports the rollout of our next generation of Platform Services for managing, delivering, and monetizing video libraries,” said Kevin Schaff, CEO and Founder of Thought Equity Motion. “Our work with EYE is an exciting example of how IBM’s LTFS standard creates a highly flexible ‘on ramp‘ for getting large archives into our platform at scale and helping rights holders increase the value of their video content.”