For Immediate Release
April 23, 2005

Media Matters Gives Presentation on Video Preservation File Format Research at 2005 Boston Cyberart Conference

Cambridge, MA – April 23, 2005 – Justin Davila of Media Matters LLC spoke as part of the Ideas in Motion: Innovations in Dance, Movement and Technology section of the 2005 Boston Cyberart Conference held at Simon Hall at MIT. The conference examined the creative connection between two of Boston’s most vital forces – the arts community and the high-tech industry. Mr. Davila discussed a report Media Matters completed in May of 2004 for the Dance Heritage Coalition on a digital video preservation file format useful for dance recordings.

The Ideas in Motion section of the Conference featured an international cast of artists, performers and engineers and explore the questions raised by the demand for new processes and methods of integrating the live with the digital on both the artistic and cultural level. The Digital Video Preservation Reformatting Project, commissioned to Media Matters by the Dance Heritage Coalition in 2003, provides a technical foundation to those engaged in dance documentation and preservation, as well as others who use videotape to document their experience. Using dance videotapes as the testing focus, the final report recommended the most appropriate methods of transferring analog videotape to digital files for preservation purposes.

Mr. Davila, a senior researcher on the project and System Architect for SAMMA, the automated migration system Media Matters has developed, explained how Media Matters examined various picture and sound (essence) file types as well as documentation file types while investigating uncompressed and lossless compression. Experimentation was performed in making MXF and AAF "container" file types and included a wide variety of preservation codec candidates at different bit rates to determine the best tradeoff for dance material. Scientific and/or engineering approaches were used to evaluate the results, leading Media Matters to recommend Motion JPEG2000 as the preferred digital file.

With most of the presentations being performance oriented in nature, Mr. Davila’s presentation on what is needed to preserve these performances was greeted with wide enthusiasm. Afterward, Mr. Davila spoke with many of the attendees on issues related to digital preservation and handed out softbound copies of the published report.

Media Matters LLC has over a dozen years of expertise with media migration, and is dedicated to taking traditional migration strategies into the 21st century by researching, developing, and deploying cutting-edge digital media technology focused specifically on the needs of archives and the challenges of magnetic media. Working closely with the Library of Congress, the EU’s PrestoSpace consortium, and other international organizations, Media Matters is developing next-generation processes and standards for automated media migration.

For further information or a free copy of the Digital Video Preservation Reformatting Project report contact Steve Kwartek at 212-268-5528 X113 or skwartek@media-matters.net.