Converting from 3/4" video to digital. Our company has approximately 27,000 hours of video stored on 3/4" video tapes. We have begun the process of converting the video digitally with the current setup:


Sony U-MATIC VO-5850 &amp; Sony UVW-1800 Betacam
AJA FS1 &amp; AJA Io XT
Macbook Pro


We are going through the process tape by tape and need to choose a vendor to assist us in the digital conversion process. 

My questions are


Does anyone have experience with or can recommend a service provider in the New York Metro area? 
Are there any recommended steps / equipment we should consider incorporating into our current and future process?
Is there additional information we should incorporate that would help with selecting a Media Asset Management system?
How should we go about storing the digital files inexpensively?


Any help is appreciated.

All the best,

Kevin
Assuming DVD quality would be enough, you may consider archiving 720p mpeg-4 files with a bitrate of 2 Mbits, which would equate roughly to 1 hour = 1 GB data.

That would mean 27,000 hours = 27,000 GB = 27 Terabytes.
So you need to consider a 50 TB storage system (including redundancy and overhead) and a tape backup system as well (LTO-6 has an uncompressed capacity of 2.4 TB per tape, so that would be relatively easy and cheap, the entire archive would fit into 13-14 tapes).

Higher quality requirements would increase the bitrate, hence the GB/hour ratio, and all values should be adjusted accordingly.

The tough part is the actual acquisition... analog video tapes have to be read at normal speed so 27,000 tapes, assuming 1 hour each, means 27,000 hours = 675 weeks = almost 10 YEARS... !!! To hope finishing this in a reasonable time (say 2 years), your company would need to set up at least 5 acquisition stations each with its own tape unit and computer (and operator). The operators, while saving, should monitor that there are not problems with the cassette and fill the metadata into the DAM system.

DAM systems, there are many, also open source, the choice depends on the use that will be made of the resulting digital video archive.