As digital media assistant for Accounts of the Conflict, it’s my job to organise, convert and preserve whatever files may become part of the project. When contributors transfer their files for uploading, you don’t know what you may get. It’s important to have a workflow plan that can easily be followed for each file.
Copy. Preserve. Deliver.
1. Make a copy of whatever files come in
It’s important to have a copy of the exact file, or files, that come in. Not only is it essential to store an original version of what’s handed our way, but important details should also be taken note of. These include the file type, size, and date of creation. Once this data has been documented, it would be emailed to the story provider, to act as confirmation of the transaction specifics. This is good practice, as it keeps both parties in check, making it less likely to disagree about certain happenings if something were to go wrong.
The most popular file formats we have been dealing with are:
Sound: .wav
Image: .jpg
Video: .mp4
There is an abundance of other file types that we can accept, which brings us to step two…
2. Make a copy for preservation
The Accounts of the Conflict project is being designed to last for the foreseeable future. This makes the second step vital. Popular file formats change all the time, so does the equipment used to create the file in the first place. It’s important to convert the original file, if needed, to a version that is of high quality, widely recognisable, readable on the majority of editing software, and contains as much metadata, within reason, as possible.
Here are the current formats that we convert files into for preservation reasons:
Sound: .flac
Image: .tiff
Video: .mov
The formats suggested above for sound and images are commonly accepted as the best choice for preservation. There is no commonly agreed format for video to preserve files. One popular suggestion is .MOV. When exporting a video as a Quicktime (.mov) file, it’s possible to select lossless codecs (where no quality is lost at all), but this can make the file size unreasonably high. There are other codecs within Quicktime that enable you to save the video at a more reasonable file size, while still securing the quality and metadata of the video, which is why .mov is our chosen preservation format of choice.
For more information on what formats are best suited for preservation, click here.
3. Make a copy for web
Finally, we make a final conversion for delivery to web. The goal here is to create a high quality sound, image, or video file, while keeping its size to a minimum.
The web formats we are currently using are:
Sound: .mp3
Image: .jpg
Video: .mp4
For video, we make sure they’re converted with a H.264 codec, which is the current most popular codec for creating high quality video that eliminates unnecessary data in order to lower the file size.
For more information on the best video formats to use for web, click here.
- Managing Files in a Digital Archive - 28th April 2014
