The fundamental building blocks of a system of production News are: a component of “ingest”, for importing content from acquisition flows, a “storage”, which houses the audio-visual materials for the time of interest (short term archive term), components for editorial work, to export to publication channels, such as live news and the web, and final storage component.

This model seems to marginalize the long-term archive, but that is also an important source of content, provided that the access mode meet the requirements of speed and certainty of timing. The ability to package news and reports with original and not repetitive references is a quality factor of the product news and archival content made in times past, even remote, can be related to current events, as well as with the issues of columns or talk shows. But today, with the materials recorded on Betacam tapes, mostly analog, limited cataloging and need to check and reverse any interest segments, the archive is not found at all in the right situation.

The digitization process allows one hand to enter in the “storage” of the new system News a quantity of materials, selected by editors, in order to avoid a “vacuum departure”, that is, allowing to have immediately available, file mode, the content with greater likelihood of use, and, at the same time, responds to the needs of permanent preservation in digital form. The system requirements include the digitization in a standard format, suitable for reuse in production both immediately and in the long term, quality verification and documentation. The process should be as automatic as possible, so as to predict the execution time and reasonable costs. The scanning apparatus used, the Sony IMX video recorder with eVTR interface, which is the meeting point between traditional audio-video technology and computer, allows you to download the contents of the tape Betacam MXF-D10 file (now on use in SDTV production), as an ftp web service.

The storage of large amounts of these files, which require 30GB / hour of capacity, poses the problems of cost and of the archive security. The data tapes LTO4 type allow you to save a single file support for up to 26 hours of video to the quality of production and provide a good compromise between accessibility and cost of storage. Safety is ensured by duplicate and data integrity can be verified with the utmost precision.

The knowledge of the state of digital storage problems is the result of participation in PrestoSpace European projects (completed in 2008) and PrestoPRIME (active 2009-2012).