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SWI MRC supports American Museum of the Moving Image With Multi-Format Video Encoding for Web Streaming and DVD Production
August 16, 2004 — New York
Scharff Weisberg Media Resource Center (MRC) formatted and encoded the streaming media component for American Museum of the Moving Image's (Moving Image) The Living Room Candidate exhibition. The project, which encompassed hundreds of presidential campaign commercials from 1952 to the present, was delivered on DVD and streamed on the Web supporting Windows Media 9 and Real Media.
American Museum of the Moving Image launched The Living Room Candidate: Presidential Campaign Commercials 1952-2004, an innovative online exhibition presenting more than 250 television commercials from every presidential campaign cycle since 1952, on July 1, 2004. Since then more than 100,000 viewers have visited the Museum's Web site (www.movingimage.us) where they can watch nearly four hours of vintage and contemporary political commercials. The site, which includes a searchable database and navigation organized by year and theme, demonstrates how advertising techniques and styles have evolved even as basic strategy has remained the same.
The exhibition includes such groundbreaking ads as the "Eisenhower Answers America" spots of 1952, the notorious "daisy girl" from Lyndon Johnson's 1964 campaign, Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" ads from 1984, and the controversial attack ads run by George Bush's 1988 campaign. The exhibition is completely up to date, with a selection of commercials from 2004 plus a sidebar exhibition, The Desktop Candidate, about the rapidly growing medium of Web-based political advertising. The comprehensive Web site also features commentary, historical background and election results.
The content was provided to the MRC on several tape formats, which they digitized uncompressed, color corrected and equalized audio levels. Clips were edited into sequences for each election year then encoded and mastered to DVD for exhibition by the Museum.
Next, MRC tackled the Web streaming aspect of the project. "The most challenging part was producing several streaming format files for each clip," commented the MRC's Josh Nissim. "We had to produce Sure stream files, which contain several bit rates within each file, so the server could select the most appropriate bit rate to match the user's connection."
"This project couldn't have been done without the MRC," said Carl Goodman, the Museum's Curator of Digital Media & Director of New Media Projects and Co-Curator of The Living Room Candidate"There was an incredible amount of material on all sorts of tape formats and in all sorts of conditions and someone had to make it all digital. We just gave everything to Scharff Weisberg and knew that they'd take care of it, including finding segments on tapes from which only small portions would be digitized. We simply described what we wanted and got it back from them with no problems. Scharff Weisberg was always willing to go the extra mile every time a problem arose outside the original scope of work," he added.
Goodman noted that the 300 separate clips (comprising 100-200 gigabytes of data) were delivered at a quality level that will give them a long shelf life and be able to meet any future exhibition or distribution needs.
The Scharff Weisberg Media Resource Center provides HD/SD post production services for the presentation professional. Services include presentation support; digital, non-linear editing; professional DVD authoring and HD/SD MPEG-2 encoding; multi-media compression services; and video transfers, duplications and international standards conversions.
The American Museum of the Moving Image is the only institution in the United States dedicated exclusively to the study of film, television, and digital media, and to examining their impact on American culture and society. A pioneer in its field, the Museum houses over 100,000 moving image artifacts. It presents many of these objects in its dynamic core exhibition Behind the Screen; annually screens more than 400 films; hosts notable series of personal appearances, lectures, and seminars; and operates an education program that serves 20,000 students and 1,500 educators each year. The Museum is located at 35 Avenue at 36 Street, Astoria, New York 11106.