In November, I presented at the Public Television Quality Group’s conference in Boston. Over 300 people showed up at the two day conference to learn more about the transition from analog to digital broadcasting. The workshops offered education and training on the best practices for production from shooting to final delivery.

The presenters ranged came from a wide range of productions and experiences:

• Mark Schubin, a film historian
• Jeff Cronenberg, the series editor for Antiques Roadshow
• Douglas Trumbull, effects supervisor for movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner
• Steve Audette, award winning editor for FRONTLINE and NOVA
• Ben McCoy, cinematographer with 20 years experience shooting docs and programs such as FRONTLINE and NOVA
• Chris Fournelle and other FRONTLINE folks discussed different aspects of their jobs and what systems they had set up to deal with file-based media.

Many of the documents, video, power points and other output from the workshops can be found on the Quality Group web site.

My workshop discussed how productions can organize their materials with the aid of Media Production Organizational Tools that are freely available on Open Vault. My slides are available here: “In the Beginning: It’s all about Metadata”

I also mentioned if you catalog and archive your materials, you can then re-use them. Some examples of what WGBH does besides the series websites are:

• Open Vault – is a way of making materials available to the public, primarily for educational purposes
• Teacher’s Domain – Resources for teachers to incorporate media assets into their curriculum
• WGBH Stock Sales – A revenue generating site providing documentary filmmakers access to WGBH media.

There will be another conference on January 13th which I would urge production folks near Nashville to attend!

For more information about the conference, I recommend Chris Portal’s Blog.

— Alison Bassett, Compliance Manager, WGBH Media Library & Archives