Jürgen Burghardt's paper, 'Asset Values Increased – New Technologies for the Automatic Transfer and Digital Preservation of Analogue Video-Cassettes', was selected one of seven top papers by the IBC/IET Peer Reviewing Panel. These exceptional papers were chosen from a record of 288 submissions and are selected for publishing in the IET Journal, 'The Best of IET and IBC'.

Jürgen's paper was presented in the IBC 2012 Session on 'Archiving and Retrieval of Video Assets - Quality Metrics and Workflow Processes'

Large amounts of legacy content is still stored on video cassettes and similar media with a limited shelf life. Conventionally, this archived material is converted into digital files for present-day viewing and storing using digital-to-analogue conversion in standard playback machines. New methods have now been developed to improve the processes of automatic transfer, digitisation and retrieval of these video assets. For example, direct digitisation of the RF tape signal and advanced image restoration processes, significantly improve the quality of these processes, and reduce the perceived visibility of many common artefacts. This session will describe how newly-designed metrics, processes and workflow systems can be used to improve the picture quality for archiving and retrieving video assets, and how new Service Oriented Architectures and cloud based systems can play their part.

'The Best of IET and IBC' is an annual joint publication between the International Broadcasting Convention and the Institution of Engineering and Technology. The IET is a formal member of the IBC's partnership board but, beyond this, it has a long-standing and close relationship with the organisation, through which they together encourage and promote professional excellence in the field of media technology.

It is encouraging that, despite the world's current economic difficulties, ingenuity, innovation and investment in media engineering continue undiminished, and we remain delighted to be able to publish papers of a high standard which manage to combine technical brilliance, real-world relevance and crystal clarity in a way which also makes them entertaining to read.
- Dr. Nicolas Lodge, Chairman IBC Technical Papers Committee & The IET Multimedia Communications Network Executive Team