The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Beeld en Geluid) maintains 70 percent of Dutch audio-visual heritage. With around 700,000 hours of television, radio, music and film, Sound and Vision is one of the largest audio-visual archives in Europe.

As part of a public contract, Sound and Vision plans to transfer more than 100.000 hours of Dutch broadcast audio to mass storage systems before August 2014. In addition to preserving this material, a significant portion will be made available for public access through various services.

The largest part of this aural heritage is currently stored on analog quarter-inch tapes and R-DAT cassettes.

Cube-Tec delivered QUADRIGA workstations for the parallel ingest of material from 32 tape machines. 16 Telefunken M15A reel-to-reel machines and 16 Sony DAT-Recorders will be used for playback. All the Telefunken machines were modified by Cube-Tec with the new universal OptoSensor hardware to detect and document torn tape, bad splices and separation tape.

In addition to the analog material, there is also a backlog of about 30 terabytes of digitized audio material that must be quality checked. Missing technical metadata have to be inserted. As DOBBIN will run around the clock, undesignated processing time will be used for fully automated inspection of the backlog. Process rules are individually defined in the DOBBIN Rendering Farm to classify the technical quality of each file. The critical files will then be spot-checked by an operator.

Cube-Tec and the audio digitizing team at Sound and Vision have developed a highly optimized workgroup solution based on CubeWorkflow. CubeWorkflow is fully integrated within the existing IT infrastructure, which includes a cataloging system and an external storage-provider (Technicolor). CubeWorkflow controls the QUADRIGA and DOBBIN audio and metadata process chain.

CubeWorkflow ensures that each member of the archive group has access to all necessary information throughout the process, ensuring the best possible results. CubeWorkflow streamlines the flow of work and detects and prevents operating errors. With this new system, the project leader has the ability at any time to view a detailed overview of the progress of the work and what kind of special cases have come to light. The installation at Sound and Vision in Hilversum is already at the final stage.