DAMSmart Chooses General Dynamics Mediaware for RTHK Archive Project

General Dynamics Mediaware is providing frame accurate, lossless editing solutions to DAMsmart, a digital media asset management company, to assist in the editing of 21,000 hours of videotape from Radio Television Hong Kong’s (RTHK) archive. The project will make RTHK’s production archive available in a high-definition (HD) digital format to coincide with the introduction of their new digital terrestrial television service. General Dynamics Mediaware’s integrated compressed editing platform will be used as part of the solution being deployed to enable RTHK to realize significant increases in post-production efficiencies, reduce risk in the storage and access overheads inherent to physical videotape and, most importantly, ensure the content is digitized and secure for future generations. 

“The General Dynamics Mediaware solution was chosen by DAMsmart due to its single pass workflow, frame accuracy and lossless editing process,” said Garrick Simeon, managing director, General Dynamics Mediaware. “With our software, DAMsmart is able to significantly accelerate the archival process, avoid a transcoding process and maximise the quality of the file.”

As it is expected to take a year to complete the digitizing and archive process, ingest speed, quality and editing accuracy were all important factors in DAMsmart’s choice of solution providers. By using the General Dynamics Mediaware editor in conjunction with a Mediaflex Media Asset Management (MAM) suite from TransMedia Dynamics, DAMsmart will avoid the time-intensive task of an additional decode-re-encode step.

“By segmenting the original content, quickly and frame accurately, General Dynamics Mediaware’s software is doing the heavy lifting in this project and interacts seamlessly with our workflow solution,” said Joe Kelly, general manager, DAMsmart. “Compared with baseband alternatives, General Dynamics Mediaware’s solution edits up to 30 times faster without generational loss allowing us to speedily move forward with preserving the thousands of hours of video.”