Data Damage and its Consequences on Usability

Data Damage and its Consequences on Usability

DAVID Deliverable D2.1 reports on digital audiovisual data damage and its consequences on usability. It reports, from inquiries targeted at broadcasters and TV archives, on collected evidence of damage, on the consequences of loss events in terms of the impact on visual and audible properties of the content. Main potential sources of damage are identified depending on their origin analogue, digital, and system-originated problems. Commonly used mitigation procedures are presented.

The problems addressed are divided between:

• Analogue-Born content problems: problems affecting digital contents, when caused by their analogue origin.
• Born-Digital content problems: problems affecting born-digital contents (head-clogging, bit rot, file crash, full file loss, role of backups, interoperability problems, MXF-related interoperability problems…).
• System problems and mitigation procedures: System-originated problems, and the procedures for addressing these.

Major conclusions of the report are:

• That the most widely used approach to prevent file corruption was to keep three separate copies of each file in three different places, thus keeping the risks of loss to a minimum level.
• That incompatibility problems between file encodings, wrappers, and tools are becoming more and more of a problem, requiring testing at many levels.
• That complex media asset management systems appear to be more and more vulnerable to risks due to hidden dependencies and interoperability problems, often revealed on the occasion of a migration or a component update.

Full details of the report can be found in DAVID D2.1 Data Damage and its Consequences on Usability