No longer a dusty storehouse of videotape or film, the digital archive has taken a new role as critical, active element in the workflow. By following some simple strategies, you can protect digital assets from ingest to long-term archive, optimize storage through automatic archive, and streamline workflows for monetizing content.

To get the most out of your archive solution investment, we recommend you follow these six archive strategies:

Strategy 1: Archive Early: Preserve raw footage in the archive

If your cameras have reusable capture media, you’re losing the natural backup tape that videotape or film provided.

Strategy 2: Archive Often: Use automatic archiving to reduce clutter

Like an office refrigerator that everyone uses, but no one owns, shared storage can get out of control. Automatically migrate stale data to a low-cost archival media.

Strategy 3: Archive Direct: Empower everyone to archive and retrieve directly

An easy-to-use interface lets editors and producers search and retrieve content for re-use, so they can get started working on new projects immediately.

Strategy 4: Archive Open: Avoid proprietary workflow components

Your archive shouldn’t be tied to your hardware vendor, a shared file system or to a specific DAM provider. Open solutions last longer.

Strategy 5: Archive Near, Archive Deep: Set up intelligent multi-tier archives

Not all archive content is created equal. Your archive should know whether the content is on the near-line or deep archive and let you access it transparently.

Strategy 6: Archive Forever: Plan for large-scale preservation projects

A dusty storehouse of tape can be a content gold mine. Archive solutions built for large-scale preservation projects let you monetize that content-before it’s too late.

For a detailed white paper on the Digital Archive in Media Workflows, visit: http://atempo.com/products/digitalArchive/resources/wp_primetime_dl.asp

To hear Janet Lafleur speak in a recent webcast alongside Cynthia Parrish (Harrris) and Jim Sipple (Willow Creek Community Church) – watch here.