The Digitization Station

A cart with a stack of video equipment mounted in it. There are rack rails along the sides, where one of the pieces of equipment is mounted. The equipment has been arranged so that it fills the available space in the cart almost completely.

From bottom to top the cart consists of an Uninterruptible Power Supply, a Digital-S Deck, a VHS player, two DV-CAM decks and an AJA Io-XT

Working as a technician for College TV Fort Wayne I was tasked with assembling a system to digitize the station's historical archive. This archive goes into the late 1990s and therefor had a multitude of different media which needed to be ingested. Further, operation of the system needed to be straightforward enough that it could be operated by someone with minimal training. As an additional bonus I managed to make the system self contained within a rollable rack, requiring only a wall power connection and a single thunderbolt cable to the computer.

All of the equipment used in this project was already owned by College TV, but none of it was connected. In order to build the station I first started by figuring out how to connect the Io-XT to the computer, and then worked down the signal chain to the VHS and Digital-S players. The signal degredation caused by consolidating the system into a single signal chain was inperceivable, and made the system significantly easier to use beause each deck, when empty, would simply pass the signal to the next deck in the chain. Thus the user only needs to change settings when going between the Digital S and the VHS players.