FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2025

In RAI's massive digitisation of Betacam and IMX tapes, Quality Control was set up since the beginning to ensure the best possible result.  

However, QC activity must necessarily adapt to the required pace. Since the original carriers were retained for potential re-digitisation in case issues are later found with the digitised content, QC could tolerate a certain error rate, as errors would not be irreparable.

Over time it became clear that accessing again the original carriers is not viable, in addition to the fact that the players will not be available much longer than the digitisation process itself.

Quality of legacy content can be low for plenty of reasons: the original recording, past format migration, carrier deterioration and, finally, digitisation.

We decided to run a retrospective QC activity, on a representative sample basis, for assessing, with a different QC methodology, if quality lower than acceptable, due to specific criticalities, was not detected.

Retrospective QC is a means to obtain statistical knowledge about the results of digitisation so far. Knowledge useful for assigning value to the digitised content, making decisions about the original carriers, and evaluating how to proceed with ongoing digitisation.

A few aspects are worthy of attention. Retrospective QC was done having as input the same information that was available to QC operators, but viewing the whole content timeline, at maximum double speed. Provenance, together with year and context of production, were considered for assessing content quality. The quality of digitisation has been rated as either bad, low, acceptable, good, or very good, with only the first two levels requiring a retry of digitisation. This is because minor or short issues can be addressed through intervention on digital content at repurposing time.

The original acceptance decision was found correct for 98,7% of the sample. It’s a success, we are going to explain why.