IMDS (Iron Mountain Digital Studios) is the successful result of a carefully considered decision on the part of Iron Mountain’s Film & Sound Division, now known as IMES (Iron Mountain Entertainment Services), to include, along with its well-known offering of ultra-secure physical archiving of media assets, an additional “key” service – a service that had never before been offered by any entertainment industry archiving company.
The new key service they contemplated was a complete studio and technical-operations facility located inside one of their secure vault facilities. Further, it was to be specifically and tightly focused on digital archiving, i.e., the restoration, migration and preservation of media assets. Their vision, in a nutshell, was that these two services (both physical and comprehensive digital archiving) when combined would minimize risk, lower costs and, at the same time, increase delivery speed, offering clients a safer, cheaper, easier and quicker way to manage their media assets for the present and in the future.
That decision, made in late 2007, has developed into what could be called in sporting terms a “game changer.” What began with a small 3,000-square-foot, purpose-built studio inside the Iron Mountain, Boyers, PA, vault now operates in three locations (PA, CA and NJ), the flagship of which, after an investment of several million dollars, occupies the entire 14th floor of the Hollywood, CA, vault. It is here that the Digital Content Repository (DCR) resides. One might safely say that in the area of entertainment media asset management, the game that 2007 decision is changing is the way Hollywood does business.
Here are some pertinent facts about IMDS and its current business areas:
The DCR
The four-acre Hollywood vault facility includes a 200,000-square-foot physical archive, data center and state-of-the-art comprehensive digital-archiving operation (IMDS Hollywood), occupying 10,000 square feet on its own.
At the core of the digital infrastructure is the 2 petabyte (PB) online DCR. It is not what is commonly known as a server farm, but can be more accurately described as a very specialized cloud or storage-pool configuration in triplicate, wherein clients can store (and retrieve on demand) their digital assets. It allows for instant recall of all incorporated data with 0 bit loss and includes automated data management and protection over time at no extra cost. Additionally, 100 PB of near-line robotic storage is available to assist in preserving all types of entertainment media assets that are judged OK to access at a bit more than a moment’s notice.
The DCR is presently online, ready for use and picking up new customers at a rapid clip. One of the newest offerings is a metadata-tagging service for object recognition on a scene-by-scene basis (as well as speech-to-text transfer) at very attractive rates. This creates revolutionary partnerships that reduce the major data-ingest burden which clients normally find is closely related to the process of monetizing archives.
Film
IMDS now offers high-resolution digital-film scanning up to 4k on DPX and other uncompressed files. Additional ancillary services, such as sonic cleaning, film prep, and restoration and MAG (or optical sound) transfers, are also offered. Secondary video file-delivery options are available for reference purposes in ProRes or other reference formats per the client’s request.
Clients can also view film in real time on one of the few archival-quality viewing tables of this caliber in the country before committing to scanning services. This allows them to review and sort footage before final scanning, while still offering the opportunity to identify what might otherwise be unknown content on film rolls, thus saving money by scanning selectively. It also allows for real-time video recording of the viewed content to proxy-resolution video files that can then be incorporated into the DCR for future use as part of a remote-access scan-on-demand feature
Video
Two of the best Ampex 2” Quad video machines available anywhere (average lock time one second as opposed to the five- or six-second standard) now reside at IMDS as an important part of their unparalleled collection of legacy recording and playback equipment.
Four lines of 1″ PAL format machines have been added to complement the existing six lines of 1″ NTSC.
IMDS now provides tape-to-tape migration, e.g., 1” to D5 and HDCAM SR, as a first step in up-conversion of existing video content originating from film that can then be used for archival- quality video dailies. These dailies would in turn be viewed as part of the decision-making process on future film scanning.
IMDS can currently capture over 16 simultaneous streams of video from a variety of formats ranging from 10-bit uncompressed frames (e.g., DPX files) to compressed video files (e.g., JPEG2K) and has added DCT, D6 and other rare formats such as EIAJ to their collection.
Audio
IMDS has a vast collection of legacy machines, affectionately known as “the museum,” capable of playing back assets held on any obsolete format, from wire recordings to the raised-groove stampers used in vinyl record manufacturing.
There are, for instance, 25 ATR 102/104 machines currently available with all associated types of noise reduction. On the digital-capture side of the equation, an equal number of Sonic Studio soundBlade™ products with integrated noise- and hum-removal tools can capture raw audio at up to 192 kHz/32 bits. IMDS understands that achieving the best possible playback of obsolete formats is only half the battle; efficiently migrating that playback to digital is the other half. Ultra-high sampling rates are therefore used in the digital-capture process to guarantee zero bit-rate loss for up to 50 years. Simply put, this means the asset will sound identical in audio quality to an immediate playback of the original high-resolution digital capture if that same asset is retrieved and played back again 50 years later.
One transfer project for a prominent celebrity client utilizing 12 Nakamichi Dragon cassette machines playing back simultaneously in real time is now under way. This results in one transfer suite using mastering-grade hardware and software (including various noise-canceling and restoration tools) being able to produce up to 50 complete transfers in an eight-hour shift.
Data
IMDS and IM data backup and recovery services are expanding rapidly, now migrating (on average) 15 projects per month. One project for a prominent Web site hosting vendor requires migrating 6,800 old SDLT tapes to the current LTO-5 format, while simultaneously upgrading the original NetBackup™ catalog to the newest format of its kind via scripting and software development. Additionally, IMDS is assisting some government agencies in developing seven- and nine-track data-tape migration procedures to future-proof their archive preservation efforts.
Graphics
Print-scanning services are growing, and negative-scanning efforts are being further developed to include ultra-large transparencies of 24 inches by 24 inches and larger at up to 600 PPI resolution. This business area is expanding rapidly, so much so that there have been requests to integrate data-entry and metadata-tagging capability from the DCR to tag images previously digitized by clients in order to provide for more efficient access and potential monetization.
The end result of this vision and these consistent successes is that the name Iron Mountain Entertainment Services surfaces again and again as the de facto standard against which digital and physical archiving of media assets should be measured, making it the trusted partner to the entertainment industry in this critically important space.
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