Cinémathèque of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation Relies on Active Circle

The Cinémathèque de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles relies on an Active Circle SA‘s infrastructure to preserve and promote the Belgian film heritage and other digital assets, as part of an ambitious government-driven digitization plan.

Created in 1946, the Cinémathèque is the Belgian institution responsible for preserving the film heritage and promoting it towards the general public and the education sector. It manages a collection of Belgian and international films and a huge collection of documentaries. Since 2009 it started a digitization of Belgian contemporary films under the PEP’s plan.

For the storage infrastructure supporting this digitization, the Cinémathèque opted for a hierarchical storage system based on the Active Circle software using a disk tier and an LTO tape tier. The choice was mainly driven by openness guidelines.

“The audiovisual world has struggled with the proprietary thinking of the manufacturers a long time. The open formats represent the future, and Active Circle has a good grasp of this“, underlines Alain Goossens, director, The Cinémathèque de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles.

The digitization process starts by reading the film from the original media and by converting it into two different formats for long-term preservation and for publishing on the web. After verifying the quality, both the media files and its metadata are written to the Active Circle storage.

The Cinémathèque has digitized more than a thousand films up to now, and continues at the rate of one per day.

“Active Circle helps us fulfill our mission of permanent conservation and promotion of the heritage,” concluded Goossens.