Interact was responsible for the recovery and digitization of the videos and the photographic archives of AGESCI, the Italian Catholic Guide and Scout Association.
AGESCI is a juvenile catholic association founded in 1974 whose aim it is to contribute towards the personal training of young people during their free time on the basis of the principles of the scout method.
Requirements
AGESCI needed to digitize the photographic archives of ASCI and AGESCI, comprising about 3000 photographs.
Apart from the photographs, they also possessed a video archive made up of historical films in different formats 35 mm, 16 mm, 8mm and Super 8, which had to be recovered and digitized.
Performance
Interact was charged with digitizing the AGESCI video and photographic archives that then performed the following activities:
Digitizing the Photographic Archive
- Scanning and saving each photo;
- Balancing the light and colours and saving all the useful low resolution photos (jpg format) to link the archive to the archive software and the Web.
- Scanning the covers and the albums - the covers for the photos in the album were also scanned and in some cases the whole albums were scanned because there were handwritten phrases and particularly beautiful cuttings of major importance.
Recovering and Digitizing the Videos
- Chemical/physical recovery of the original media with inspection and remaking of joins and ultrasonic film washing,
- Transferring all the original films onto the new Digital Betacam;
- Creating systems for storing data;
- Telecine with colour correction (transfer from film to magnetic support);
- Manual digital restoring (dropout compensation, antiscratch, denoising, gamma correction, complete reconstruction of each frame, restoring the audio signal);
- Digitizing each filming on file;
- Storing all the encoded files on Hard Disk;
- Storing all encoded medium quality files on DVD.
Results
Digitizing the Photographic Archives
The photos were scanned in high definition (Tiff format) and low definition (jpg format). A final document has further been created (delivered in excel file), that indexes all the photos according to the preference Association on the bases of an accurate cataloging operation, aimed at ensuring as an effective and manageable consultation and traceability as possible.
Recovering and digitizing the videos
All the videos were digitized both in MPEG4-H264 formats (medium quality/internet broadcasting) and Mov/DvPal (high quality/editing). Some films received special recovery treatment and were created in digital master format. The files were stored on hard disk and are now available on DVD in MPEG4 format.
