Getting Started with QCTools

What is QCTools?

QCTools (Quality Control Tools for Video Preservation) is a software tool that helps users analyze and understand their digitized video files through use of audiovisual analytics and filtering to help users detect corruptions or compromises in the results of analog video digitization. The goal of the project is to cut down the time it takes to perform high-quality video preservation and direct time towards preservation issues that are solvable, for example identifying tapes that would benefit from a second transfer, saving not only the precious time of preservationists and institutional resources, but giving collections a necessary advantage in the bigger race against time to preserve their significant cultural artifacts. QCTools incorporates archival standards and best practices for reformatting and capturing metadata that enables the long-term preservation and of and access to the original artifact, the digital object, and the associated catalog record.

Who can benefit from using QCTools (and how)?

Potential users of the quality control tools include specialists and non-specialists:

What is the Workplan?

Initial development within this project will span two years (2013 and 2014). The first part will focus on the development of tools for use in the repository workflow and archival digitization environments. The central piece of the tool set is the development of a data format to document and express quality control, analytical, and visual qualitative data across the frames of a digital video, QCTools report. The data format will be designed to be transparent, understandable, plottable, flexible, and efficient to store analytical data on a frame-by-frame basis. Alongside the development of the data format will be the design, testing, and release of an open source, multi-platform tool to generate this report from referenced digital video files as well as tools to analyze and visualize the collected data according to locally defined priorities and thresholds.
The second part of the development will focus on designing a software application to simplify generation of QCTools reports for batches of digitized video. The software applications will enable the archivist to depict the contents of the QCTools report as graphed data, revealing trends, averages, and extremes of the signals stored within the digitized video. The applications can also be used to set thresholds of tolerance for the extent to which the reported digitized video signal can veer from expected trends of best practices (such as video out of a legal range, extended drop-outs, changes in). The QCTools will also facilitate sorting of collections of digitized video according to the presence of digitization issues to enable the archivist to focus quality control and assessment of video on the digitized content most deserving of attention.
An ongoing focus of the project will be the deployment of the full toolset and dissemination of findings and training materials to archivists, media and preservation specialists, as well as all areas of the humanities where access to reliable information on digital preservation standards and practices is not easily accessible.

What video formats does QCTools accept?

QCTools accepts a variety of video formats, including *.avi, *.mkv, *.mov, and *.mp4, as well as a diverse selection of codecs. Uncompressed 8-bit formats are ideal for the most accurate interpretation of the video. QCTools relies on FFmpeg's libavcodec and libformat libraries to analyze and playback video which allows QCTools to support a wide variety of digital audiovisual formats.

How can I integrate the QCTools export feature into my workflow?

QCTools currently a frame-by-frame analysis in CSV format. These files can be integrated into your preservation metadata. Later versions of QCTools will support more comprehensive reporting.

What is the QCTools license agreement?

QCTools is licensed under a Free BSD License. Please see the License tab for more information about this license and what it means.

What about my audio?

QCTools does not support audio at this time, but will in future releases.

I don't know what [this error] is called.

You may be able to find the answer in the A/V Artifact Atlas, which is closely associated with QCTools. The AV Artifact Atlas is for use in the identification and definition of the technical issues and anomalies that can afflict audio and video signals.

Which graphs are useful to look at for [this] video format?

The YUV and Diffs (Y values, U values, V values, YDiff, YDiffX) are beneficial to all video formats. The TOUT (Temporal Outliers) filter is targeted to detecting white noise such as white speckle pattern you may find in damaged VHS tape. The HEAD (Head Switching) filter is meant to quantify visible playback issues at the bottom of analog frames of video caused by head switching.

What is YUV?

YUV are channels that hold data about video. The Y channel carries the luma. This is the information on the brightness of a video. Mostly white images will have a high number and mostly dark images will have a low number. The U and V channels both carry information about the chrominance, or the color of the video. The range in these fields while change as the colors of the image changes.