David Rice Screening The Future

AVPS Senior Consultant David Rice has been invited to speak at Screening the Future 2011: New Strategies and Challenges in Audiovisual Archiving to be held at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision March 14th and 15th. Screening the Future is being produced by the European Commission-funded Presto projects, a series of initiatives working to “develop solutions to preserve audiovisual content and provide services to share knowledge regarding audiovisual preservation”. The event will mark the launch of PrestoCentre — a self-sustaining continuation of the Presto projects — and participants “will help set the agenda for AV preservation in Europe, and benefit from interacting with leading institutions, funders, vendors, and policymakers”.

David will will be speaking with Skip Elsheimer (A/V Geeks) on the panel “Introduction to Transcoding: Tools and Processes”. From the programme description:

• “Digital formats evolve over time. This session will demonstrate the basics of transcoding and the utilities, strategies and challenges involved in efficiently providing access to digital audiovisual media collections. It will examine software-based tools and applications, identifying what to look out for, how to evaluate lossless and lossy transcoding methods, quality control, and verification.”

Those of you who have seen David’s and Skip’s Digitization 101 panels at the past several AMIA conferences know they are highly informative while also being highly entertaining and accessible to a wide audience, opening up the seemingly obscure world of digital video and audio in a way that is as tangible and revelatory as inspecting a film by hand. David has been developing some new avenues of investigation to discuss about transcoding, so this should be another great presentation.

Other speakers over the two days include Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive), David Rosenthal (LOCKSS, Stanford University), Jeff Ubois (PrestoCentre), Matthew Addis (IT Innovation), Richard Wright (BBC R&D), Peter Kaufman (Intelligent Television), Marius Snyders (PrestoPRIME Project), Jan Müller (Managing Director, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision), Paul Miller (Cloud of Data), and Seamus Ross (Faculty of Information, University of Toronto).

Full details and registration information can be found at http://screeningthefuture.eventbrite.com/
Also see
PrestoPrime http://www.prestoprime.org/
and
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision http://instituut.beeldengeluid.nl
for more audiovisual preservation information.