Fort Gordon calls on company to digitize video tape library.  
 
Atlanta – Crawford Media Management (CMM) announces its completion of digitization work for the Visual Information Branch of the U.S. Army Signal Corps based at Fort Gordon in Augusta, GA. CMM migrated nearly 2,000 programs, dating back to the mid-1960s, covering military technology of the times. As a result of this project, these materials can now be easily accessed, shared and distributed in a digital environment.

 Until early 2009, this historic content was stored on one-inch, BetaSP, U-Matic, D2 and DVCPRO source tapes. Most were “one of a kind” masters, many of which had started to deteriorate and would soon be unplayable. Using restoration techniques and SAMMA technology, CMM successfully preserved and encoded the Signal Corps footage in both professional editing and Web proxy formats.

 “The tapes covered wide spans of time and came to us in a variety of formats,” says Steve Davis, vice president of CMM. “We were able to help Fort Gordon replace a room full of old tapes with a cohesive digital media collection and metadata to identify the content.”

 “This was a difficult project,” says Randy Herald, Fort Gordon’s Visual Information manager. “We were faced with losing 40 years of valuable recorded history. Crawford took the bull by the horns, sorted out the many problems and delivered files of excellent quality that were good to go.”

Many of the Signal Corps programs are of great general and technical interest. Topics range from the history of the Signal Corps to speeches by Medal of Honor winners and lessons learned from Desert Storm. There is extensive coverage of the annual Signal Symposiums, combat communications training and even the “Basic Operation of the Apple Microcomputer System” from 1983. Many “Fort Gordon Weekly Reports” were also saved which will give future generations a good glimpse of life at the base throughout the years. For more information on the U.S. Army Signal Corps, visit www.gordon.army.mil.

About Crawford Media Management            

 Crawford Media Management (CMM), a division of Crawford Communications, Inc., provides services to help owners of large media collections with migration to a digital file-based environment. CMM offers digitization, archival storage, asset management and consultation. The mission of CMM is to help clients “over the hump” of digitizing large libraries of film, video tape and audio tape. CMM is focused on end-to-end workflow with special attention to management of metadata and selection of file types. For clients who do not have their own storage or asset management solutions, or who desire secure backup storage, CMM offers solutions customized to the clients’ needs.

www.crawford.com