Commercialisation of Motion Pictures Archives (COMPA)

Content owners in the UK have substantial archives of film and video materials dating back to the early days of film making and video recording. Some of this content is either damaged and/or of a quality too poor for commercial exploitation, and the prohibitive costs of picture restoration have rendered such content unusable and inaccessible. The objective of this project is to provide cost-effective ways to restore film and video programmes to yield valuable content that can be commercialised through web-based and packaged media platforms.
The innovative nature of this project lies in the degree of automation that will be employed using lowcost PCs to transform the economies of moving picture restoration and its commercial exploitation. The scope will include automated restoration of moving picture sequences, automated adaptation into multiple delivery formats, cataloguing of materials using appropriate tagging to enable effective context-sensitive search, and transfer of content into web-based platforms for archive and retrieval. Formats to be supported will include high definition video, automated Blu-ray Disc output, high quality standard definition video for broadcast, automated DVD output, and a variety of lower resolution representations for online delivery and preview. The project will work with commercial Media Asset Management systems that may be used as the basis of commercial exploitation platforms.