Televisual: Associated Mediabase

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Associated Mediabase

Associated Mediabase was formed by Associated Newspapers to handle its move into electronic media systems. As part of this move, the company installed an image database system. Associated Mediabase wanted the system to go live populated with 10,000 key pictures from its existing picture library, and contracted Televisual to provide this service.

Before starting the project, Televisual worked with Associated Mediabase to draw up a job specification. In conventional pre press scanning in a newspaper, pictures are scanned to publication size as colour separated CMYK images. This is unsuitable for an electronic archive as pictures may be published at any size, and on a variety of media, some printed, and some electronic, such as the Internet. Also, to minimise storage space, pictures were required in JPEG compressed format. Consequently the starting point was to establish a scanning specification and to provide test scans to ensure that the specification was being adhered to, and that the quality was acceptable.

The specification also had to cover image classification. In a picture archive system each picture requires a text description which subsequently will be used by users to retrieve the pictures they require. In a conventional picture library images are filed in a simple structure, normally by name for pictures of people, and by location or event (e.g. road accident) for other images. Whilst this system will translate to an electronic picture archive, it does not give the rich search environment that is possible with more detailed text descriptions. This in turn results in large numbers of images being retrieved from simple searches, making editorial decisions more difficult. Unfortunately published picture captions are of little help in this area, as they describe the news event that the picture illustrates, rather than the picture content itself. The solution to this is to develop a text description methodology to provide the richer content. Typically for a daily newspaper environment this will include such items as mood and action as well as information such as photographer, date and copyright owner.

Once the job specification was developed, picture digitisation could begin. Pictures were batched in boxes containing between 500 and 750 images, most of which were colour prints. These were shipped to Televisual by overnight courier. Throughout the project Televisual manned to meet library requirements for retrieval of urgent material, and provided 24 hour access to material. The library in Associated Newspapers installed an ISDN line to enable it to receive urgent pictures from Televisual.

The bulk of the scanning was done on 356 bit print scanners hosted by PC workstations running Microsoft NT. Adobe Photoshop was used for scan management, and a relational database programme provided caption management and statistical information. The use of Microsoft NT was key to the project , providing true multi tasking capability. This allowed each operator to input the text description information for each picture whilst it was being scanned. Given that text input and scanning both take roughly the same time, this effectively doubles throughput. It also minimises text quality problems as the text and image are handled by the same person at the same time, rather than as isolated batch processes.

Once scanned pictures were converted to 24 bit RGB and JPEG compressed. they were than written to CD ROM with their accompanying text description. The CD ROM’s were then dispatched to Associated Mediabase, with the hard copy images following once the CD ROM had been received and approved for database loading.

The complete project took approximately fourteen weeks to complete

Last Updated: Tuesday 16 May 2006 - 15:42

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