XDCAM digital transfer project
Laura Ulens
Meemoo, the Flemish Institute for Archives, is a non-profit organisation committed to supporting the digital archive operations of cultural, media and government organisations.  One of meemoo’s core objectives is digitising endangered audio-visual heritage. Since 2013, meemoo has been working together with 10 regional broadcasters to safeguard their archives. From 2013 to 2020, we mainly prioritised the digitisation of analog archives, focussing on video tapes such as Betacam SP. In these digitisation projects, meemoo stuck to a certain procedure where the regional broadcasters prepared the tapes by barcoding, cataloguing and packaging, while the digitisation itself was executed by an external service provider, and the digital files were archived into the meemoo archive. In 2021 we set up a unique project for the digital transfer of a specific digital carrier format used mainly by regional broadcasters in Flanders: the professional disc or XDCAM, where the regional broadcaster functioned as both content and service provider.

XDCAM, a video carrier using optical disc, was in use by Flemish regional broadcasters from approx. 2007 until as recent as 2019. The aim of meemoo’s digital transfer project was to ensure the sustainable preservation of the material stored on these discs for two specific regional broadcasters.

Due to these discs’ unique character  - the use of an optical disc instead of tape - a custom approach which differed from meemoo’s previous digitisation projects was required. For this project we relied on a combination of meemoo’s experience with common digitisation practices and the digital ingest flow, as well as on the technical equipment and knowhow of the regional broadcasters.

The project allowed for the digital transfer and ingest of over 55.000 clips from almost 6000 XDCAM discs for the two regional broadcasters. However, this was not without challenges. From the registration of the carriers, to the transfer process, to the submission and subsequent ingest into the meemoo archival system several hurdles had to be overcome. This gave us valuable insights for the future on how to better approach these types of projects where the carrier lies somewhere on the border between the analogue and the digital.
approaches to preservation start 2 preserve