WSB TV Newsfilm Collection

The WSB-TV Newsfilm Collection includes several thousand 2000' 16mm film reels of Atlanta news footage, primarily from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. This is one of the most complex collection situations in the archive, as it predates the creation of BMA. Below are a few key notes that will help you understand the collection better:

• Each reel has a reel ID that looks like wsbn_0000. Each reel is intellectually divided into clips that correspond to unique stories on that reel (typically each story is a few minutes), and each clip has an ID that looks like wsbn00000. The numbers bear no intellectual relationship (wsbn59431 could be on reel wsbn_0241, as both are sequentially and independently numbered).

  • Requests may come in for timecode from a reel or timecode from a clip. If the timecode is from the clip, you will (in all likelihood) still be using the reel file, but will have to find the clip within the reel to start as your zero point. This is because, before newsfilm was migrated into Collective Access, it existed in a legacy database where everything was organized at the clip level. In Collective Access, they are organized at the reel level, with annotations coded into the display as annotations.

• Unlike WSB-TV Video collections, the Newsfilm is entirely the domain of BMA to distribute and license. Because of this, and the material within the collection, it is one of our most commercially used and researched collections.

• At a minimum, all reels have been transferred to U-matic proxies which we have digital copies of. These are the "File Master" items (check current file location here), which are still in folders subdivided based upon the original LTO that they came to us from the digitization vendor on and are named FMUGA0000.mxf.

  • If we have not completed a new scan of the film in-house (or paid for a new scan from a vendor), then these U-matic proxy copies are the next-best copy. If someone wishes to use footage from the collection in a rushed timeframe and/or does not wish to pay for a new scan (if one does not already exist), then these are the files that we pull the footage from.
  • Some of these files have an audio issue where there are two tracks attached to the file, but most of the true audio is on the second track. Depending on the method in which you cut a clip or a create a screener, this second track could be removed resulting in a silent or staticky clip that should actually have audio (but note that there are many silent clips within the collection). If this is the case, you should use this script to merge the audio tracks before cutting or transcoding.