The NAS drive with the BCN collection digitised by Silver Trak Digital NZ and DAMsmart NZ being handed over to the Chair of BCN by Mark Gibbs, the NZ High Commissioner to Niue.
When Pacific Cooperation Broadcasting Limited (PCBL) required the digitisation of hundreds of priceless tapes for the Broadcasting Corporation of Niue (BCN), they turned to digitisation and media asset management specialists Silver Trak Digital NZ and DAMsmart NZ.
Niue is a tiny island in the middle of the Southern Pacific Ocean, affectionally known as The Rock. Only 18km wide and 60 metres high, its closest neighbour is Tonga which is 600km away. There are a total of 1,400 people living in the country, making it the second smallest country in the world by population (beaten only by Vatican City). With only one commercial flight a week in and out of Niue, one hotel, one supermarket and a small number of cafes and restaurants, the country needed true specialists to help it with its valued digitisation project.
Peter Fraser, PCBL Chief Financial Officer, who played an integral part in archiving tapes for the project, explains a fire at the BCN studios in 2020 meant BCN has been temporarily operating out of multiple different public buildings during the rebuild. Peter says, “After the fire, all the archival S-VHS and DVCAM videotapes were moved to Fale Tau Taoga Niue – the Niue national museum – and stored in boxes in their airconditioned storeroom. At this point we researched and found the best digitisation specialists in the region to help us preserve these invaluable memories. Those specialists were Silver Trak Digital NZ and DAMsmart NZ.”
After the digitisation project was signed off by the Niuean Prime Minister, Hon Dalton Tagelagi, General Manager of Silver Trak NZ and DAMsmart NZ David Elder joined Peter in finding, checking, barcoding and packing the collection of tapes to be flown back to Aotearoa New Zealand for digitisation.
David says Niue is so humid that every time anybody stepped out of the air conditioning, their glasses immediately fogged up. He added, “It was clearly important to keep the tapes in their boxes in a cool room, only exposing them to the outside conditions for as brief a period as possible. We did this right up to the moment they were delivered to the flight.”
When the tapes arrived at the Silver Trak/DAMsmart NZ office, work began in earnest registering and cleaning the tapes to prepare them for digitisation. David adds, aside from those S-VHS tapes which showed significant mould, the biggest issue was keeping the S-VHS machines alive. “They are an old format and one that was not very popular, so we scoured the country finding extra machines. At the start of this project DAMsmart NZ owned four S-VHS machines – we now have a total of 13. This project was particularly sensitive and at some points delicate, but it all came together perfectly by the end,” he explained.
Reflecting on the project, Peter says there were several reasons PCBL chose Silver Trak Digital NZ and DAMsmart NZ to manage this most valuable of projects. Peter concluded, “Those reasons centred on their knowledge, expertise and skill in digitising even the most fragile of assets and the results speak for themselves. The project was completed, and everything transferred to portable NAS drives and I’m happy to say PCBL and BCN are delighted with the results. So much so, that we have asked SilverTrak and DAMsmart for a proposal to digitise several hundred more tapes. Many thanks to David Elder and the entire Silver Trak Digital NZ and DAMsmart NZ team for their professionalism and for delivering us such an excellent end result.”