When Altria, the parent company of Phillip Morris, was closing its Manhattan highrise in a partial relocation to Virginia, Betsy Rich of Briarcliff Manor and John Upshall of Katonah helped move boxes … to their office.
“Everybody thought their video assets had been identified and classified because the process was an ongoing one,” said Betsy Rich, co-founder of Strategic Video and Blue Horse Digital in Croton. “As people were packing up, more and more videos and assets were found ”¦ and many didn”™t know what to do with them.”
Rich said their company went in, packed up boxes and brought them to their facility to “get a handle” on it, as Altria had to be out of its office.
“We”™ve had clients and potential clients call us and many are wasting money on storage,” Rich said. “We can reduce rooms of video tapes to a couple of shelves or a video serve, so it”™s a huge space saver in addition to the preservation of material that could be a wasted asset.”
In a phrase they call “digital migration,” the underlying principles behind Strategic Video and Blue Horse Digital hold serious clout.
“One time we were working on a Beta tape for a client that was labeled as historical,” said John Upshall, co-founder. “The tape focused on two men, so I froze the image, did a Google search and discovered they were the founding fathers of the company.”
“One client had a history tape with a one-hour documentary on their CEO that aired on the History Channel ”¦ and they weren”™t aware they had it,” Rich said. “But that”™s often what happens ”¦ the people who originally created the material may have moved on, and at times, their work ends up sitting in a box.”
When Rich and Upshall began their video production firm and digital preservation company, they had years of experience. They both worked as producers at ABC and in 1991, transitioned into work for Reuter”™s and the corporate video sector. Slowly, they became disillusioned. “We weren”™t order takers,” said Upshall. “It wasn”™t really a fit and we found that some of our values were different.” So, the duo launched Strategic Video, a video production company, in 2004.
“Blue Horse Digital followed a year later after a client requested we transfer a video library to DVD,” Upshall said.
Though they sought out new business in the beginning, Upshall said their phones are ringing now. “We have about three new business meetings a week now, which is especially great in the bad economy” Rich said. They said they saw an approximate 500 percent increase in business in the past three months.
Their client list includes the likes of the Department of Labor, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, the Naval Research Laboratory, Hartford Insurance and Smucker”™s, whose video assets sit in brown boxes lining the perimeter of Rich and Upshall”™s Croton office.
“We did a big project for the U.S. Golf Association, which was daunting,” Rich said. “The entire legacy of golf and other sports often sit on tape ”¦ and if those tapes are analog or other formats which are becoming obsolete, historic information can be lost,” Upshall said.
Rich said corporations, organizations and government agencies can all utilize their services. “What we do is: create a business record. If a company has 5,000 tapes and happens to get a subpoena for a single interview, how do you find what you need?” said Rich.
After performing an assessment and classifying information, Upshall and Rich advise clients on the digitizing process, often recommending sensitive or deteriorating information be preserved first.
Clients can opt to compress their files, which allows for usage on servers, for editing or placement on DVD. Blue Horse”™s digital video asset manager (VAM) provides clients with a video server accessible from the desktop.
Whether a client is relocating and wishes safely to preserve records and classified information or simply wants to save space and reduce storage fees, Rich and Upshall stress the importance of preserving the past.
“As we move into a digitized world, we say, hey, what about the legacy of the past?” Upshall said.
For information: www.bluehorsedigital.com.
