Rimage helps to make the Imperial War Museum’s film archive more accessible
“We were looking for a system which could provide the additional functionality needed to enable timeline-based documentation and searching along with moving image and sound file encoding, while seamlessly integrating with existing systems”
Customer
Imperial War Museum
Challenge
To automate and streamline production workflow directly from Apple Mac computers
Solution
Rimage Professional Series
The film and video archive of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) is one of the oldest film archives in the world, with expanding collections extending to over 20,000 hours of film and videotape in a variety of formats. Previously, around one-third of this material had online documentation, but there was no online access to any moving images.
“We are privileged to have worked with some of the World’s great film archives and we are delighted to have been able to help the Imperial War Museum in its important work of making this very special collection accessible to a wider audience. An efficient workflow in producing discs for the end user is a key element in the complete package.”
Tone Blake, Cambridge Imaging Systems
The Challenge
A prestigious contract to supply the Imperial War Museum with advanced software, making its important film archive readily accessible to scholars and general public alike, has recently been completed by Cambridge Imaging Systems and incorporates Rimage disc publishing solutions.
Cambridge Imaging Systems is one of the World’s leading exponents of advanced archive management and develops systems that can encode, transcode and retrieve stills and video from huge archives. Clients include the BBC, British Pathe and Ministry of Defence, along with universities and news film management and distribution companies.
At the heart of the Imperial War Museum’s new system is the Imagen Media Control Centre (IMCC). This manages the workflow of ingesting, decoding, transcoding and distributing digital images via the Museum’s user friendly website.
The Solution
Researchers and the general public can now search for archived material and view contemporary footage and still images relating to world conflict over the past century. The new Imperial War Museum collections site (www.iwmcollections.com) enables anyone to watch 150 hours of film online, search detailed information on over 35,000 films and obtain clips for private viewing or commercial use.
The clips can be downloaded but selected items can also be mailed on DVD. This is a fully automatic process, enabled by integrating a Rimage Professional Series DVD publishing system at the Museum to Imagen. The ISO disc image is automatically generated by Imagen2 from the order information provided by the website and then sent to the Rimage publishing system to be burned and printed. The customer receives a professional looking disc printed with the corporate IWM logo, title of the assets and order number.
The Results
David Walsh, Head of Preservation of the IWM explained that the museum had a demanding brief when it invited tenders: “We were looking for a system which could provide the additional functionality needed to enable timeline-based documentation and searching along with moving image and sound file encoding, while seamlessly integrating with existing systems. The Imagen solution created by Cambridge Imaging Systems has enabled us to do this and we are very pleased with the result. The website really can bring history alive in your own home at a mouse click. ”
Tone Blake of Cambridge Imaging Systems believes that the new site will make a significant contribution in improving access to source material from such an important archive: “We are privileged to have worked with some of the World’s great film archives and we are delighted to have been able to help the Imperial War Museum in its important work of making this very special collection accessible to a wider audience. An efficient workflow in producing discs for the end user is a key element in the complete package.”
“We were looking for a system which could provide the additional functionality needed to enable timeline-based documentation and searching along with moving image and sound file encoding, while seamlessly integrating with existing systems”
David Walsh, Head of Preservation of the IWM