Preserve Your Legacy Media Now
Assess your legacy media and rescue the most important footage while you still can.
By Kyle Henke
Most companies have valuable historical media assets – film, tape, and old-school digital media – that should be preserved, properly archived, and made accessible. Very often, however, these assets are stored haphazardly, often in an inaccessible location. And although you might think these assets will keep indefinitely, they won’t. The clock is ticking, and you have limited time to preserve your assets at maximum quality.
The process for preserving your legacy assets should be informed by two considerations: accessibility and usability.
Accessibility
Digitally preserving your assets can bring new life to your collection, but you can only use your assets if you can easily find what you need, when you need it. Sharing digital assets, even legacy media, should be nearly effortless. We recommend you include digital copies of your legacy media and associated information in your digital media asset management system, so your team won't be doing the digital equivalent of rummaging through unlabeled boxes when you need that perfect shot of your founder or a significant company milestone from twenty years ago.
Usability
The goal is to get as perfect a copy of the original media as possible. (In some cases, this will be the last copy that may ever be made from old formats.) Generally, it’s recommended that you create at least three copies of your digitized content: a high-quality, “perfect” copy for future use; a smaller, viewable copy or proxy version for accessibility and easy viewing; and a long-term storage copy for deep archive, to be used only if something happens to the original.
The Process
Assess and Organize
Determine what media you have and what media you want to keep. Begin by assessing the information you have about your legacy asset library. Break it down into discrete information points, with standardized formats to make it easier for you to sort and determine exactly what you have by format, and begin the process of determining what you want to preserve in your digital asset management system.
Prioritize
Use the information you gathered to prioritize what you want to preserve digitally. You may not have direct knowledge of all the media, so this process will also allow you to sort out subsets of media that your colleagues can help to assess and determine which items should be preserved while capturing important information that will become your metadata and ultimately contribute in making your DAM system the single source of truth for your digital assets.
Digitize
Once you’ve determined which assets should be preserved digitally, you are ready to convert the assets into digitized content. You will likely need specialized equipment and a dedicated expert to do this, and it’s important to include a quality control checkpoint in this stage of the process.
Preserve
Bring your digitized assets and associated types of metadata into your DAM or MAM (digital/media asset management) system. Be sure to save an archival copy of all your assets to ensure their future use.
We Can Help
Digitizing legacy assets can be complicated and taxing when done in-house. Leveraging an external partner with dedicated resources – like Aldis – can make the process more efficient, attainable, and cost-effective. Let’s have a conversation!
