Who won the International Federation of Television Archives 2018 ‘Excellence In Media Preservation’ award?

Who won the International Federation of Television Archives 2018 ‘Excellence In Media Preservation’ award?

You guessed it, DAMsmart and SBS took honours in the “Excellence in Media Preservation” category for its SBS’s Preserving Australian TV History Digitisation Project at the recent FIAT/IFTA Archive Achievement Awards.

“The FIAT Award win is fabulous international recognition of SBS’s commitment to preserving its truly unique, multicultural broadcast assets for future discovery, education and enjoyment. It also highlights and acknowledges the superior work of all involved in the project, including our digitisation partner DAMsmart whose knowledge, professionalism and support was crucial to this success.”

Maddy Kortegast, SBS’s Manager – Archives & Digitisation Project.

The receipt of this award is the culmination of over five years of DAMsmart and SBS working together to digitise over 42,000 videotapes from SBS’s broadcast archive. The collection contains truly unique content that has been created by the broadcaster to entertain, inform and engage multicultural Australia since 1980. The content on Betacam, DVCPro, MiniDV and 1” was digitised using Lossless JPEG2000 for preservation, DV50 for the broadcast master and an H.264 proxy. This digitisation project transformed SBS’s physical tape collection into a useable digital archive, ready for today’s contemporary broadcast environment.

At the conclusion of the project, SBS, together with DAMsmart, nominated the project in the FIAT/IFTA awards program. The awards, developed by FIAT/IFTA, the International Federation of Television Archives, are designed to honour outstanding archival initiatives and projects in the International broadcast sector that significantly improve how the archives are preserved, managed and used.