Info 202 Fall 2011

The UK public television giant, BBC arguably holds one of the largest collection of natural history video footage in the world. This article in Techtarget describes the evolution of digital asset management practices in BBC and how they organized massive collection of broadcasted and non-broadcasted footage. For example, the natural history program, 'Life', produced in four years involving 2000 days of filming, traversed 150 global locations to deliver 3000 hours of HD video footage. 

Mike Gunton, Executive director of BBC natural history unit describes challenges associated with the digital media initiative and says that getting metadata right is fundamental to the program. The main problem faced by BBC is the proliferation problem.Obviously you cannot direct animals to act as per your script, still you want wildlife action and drama - That means people at field need to capture literally everything. For 10 episodes of 50 minute programs in the Life series, three thousand hours of footage lie behind as the source material and this trend is going to continue. The natural history unit is moving from 1k to higher definition 4k cameras resulting in more footage shot that ever before. 

Each sequence shot by the natural history field team should be first logged onsite against three editorial criteria: What is it? Where is it? What’s it doing? These three questions are more or less same as  Panofsky's three primary levels of meaning - Description, Identification and Interpretation - necessary for properly describing an artifact. Back in the studio base, the more professional qualitative metadata assignment is done before editing, and a final set of metadata elements like rights and re-use limitations assigned after post production. 

Mike Gunton gives a very interesting use case for the digital media initiative. BBC often gets requests to reuse a footage, partly to fulfill an obligation to license payers and partly as part of the corporation's effort to commercialize the footage. With a limited metadata system, popular shots get over-used, iconic images like 'chameleon’s tongue trapping a locust' lose their iconicity. A better metadata and effective retrieval system can enable an advertiser to get hold of an equally suitable alternative shot from the archive. In addition to that, BBC's drive is also aimed at improving production efficiency and collaboration across co-prodution partners in the US and other countries.