Recent Posts

Last week I attended TAG 2025, a global conference for technology leaders and practitioners in philanthropy. TAG is always a fascinating opportunity to jump into very different conversations and ways of thinking than I’m used to, which helps to usefully expand my vocabulary and frame of reference. This year’s conference was no different. Many of the conference sessions and informal conversations were focused on AI, as you might expect, but the tenor of these conversations was decidedly different than in years past.

Upon graduating from the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation in June, I was pleased to learn I had been awarded a Fellowship at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC), and that I’d be working under fellow Selznick alum and current RAC Sound & Moving Image Archivist Brent Phillips. In addition to my prior work experience as a professional film negative cutter and the recent Selznick program, the opportunity to train in an apprentice/colleague-style position at the RAC has been invaluable for rounding out my film archiving knowledge and skill set.

The Rockefeller Archive Center hosted its first DevOps4Lib summit this year on October 7th and 8th. I’ve written about DevOps4Lib before from the perspective of an attendee, but I, and the Digital Strategies team, have never hosted and facilitated an event like this before. The DevOps4Lib Summit is a two day unconference held for discussion and problem solving around DevOps culture and technology. It runs under the umbrella of the larger Code4Lib community and is a direct spin-off of that larger group. This was also my first time acting as an organizer and facilitator for an event like this, and I wanted to take a minute write about the experience.

Decision to Transcode Uncompressed Video Masters

Until the recent RAC adoption of FFV1/MKV, none of our 10-bit uncompressed video masters had been packaged or ingested into Archivematica. This is because Archivematica cannot easily accept large uncompressed video files, and because the extra size meant more compute resources. For this very reason, we created the new AWS pipeline to solve this challenge, and incorporated FFV1/MKV because of its interoperability.

The decision was made that the RAC would convert all prior uncompressed video files to FFV1/MKV so that our master holdings are structured towards a single digital preservation standard. This uniformity would enable consistency and accuracy when analyzing data and would decrease future challenges with packaging, storage, and queries.

In December 2023, a milestone in audiovisual preservation happened when the Library of Congress amended its Recommended Formats Statement (RFS) by upgrading the FFV1 video codec (version 3) in Matroska (.mkv) container from an “Acceptable Format” to its highest ranking: a “Preferred Format” for the preservation and long-term access of video materials. Indeed, this authoritative approval signified the culmination of a decades-long evolution, and this recommendation came with the endorsement from the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) after years of FFV1/MKV testing.

With these broad changes happening within the archival field around moving image preservation best practices, the Rockefeller Archive Center found itself at a crossroads with our own audiovisual digitization procedures.