The 17 cultural institutions in San Diego's Balboa Park together have deployed a single Front Porch Digital SAMMA Solo to migrate the content of their media collections from analog videotape to secure digital storage. Ultimately, the project will not only preserve the media, but also enable the museums to open their unique and irreplaceable archives to virtual visitors via the Web. So far, some 700 of about 4000 videotapes have been processed.
SAMMA Solo automatically migrates content from videotape to digital files, monitoring the process frame by frame. Balboa Park's SAMMA Solo simultaneously digitizes content at real-time speeds into five formats: MXF-wrapped JPEG2000, high- and low-resolution AVC, Adobe Flash and QuickTime. The SAMMA Solo system is run as many as 16 hours a day by two interns and three members of the facilities' staff, none of them with technical backgrounds.
