PeoplesArchive:
Preserving Greatness
Apple technology is at the heart of a new video resource that delivers the world’s great and good via the Web. If you are a veteran of your field and have made unique or even world-changing contributions, you may be a candidate for PeoplesArchive.
The idea is ambitious and inspiring, and yet simple: an online video-on-demand resource, powered by Apple technology and available on a subscription basis, which will eventually contain hundreds of interviews with the world’s greatest living scientists, filmmakers, artists, product designers, writers… the list is endless.
“PeoplesArchive Designer Building DVD-ROMs with Director
Footage is shot on location on DV and editing kept to a minimum — coughs and extraneous noises are removed. The end result, for each individual featured, is a wealth of stories of between one and six minutes in length that inspire and educate in equal measure. The site is currently being beta-tested and the final subscription-based version will go live towards the end of April 2004. What’s more, the life story of every individual featured on the site will soon be available to buy on DVD-ROM.
The service already boasts the life stories of mathematician Michael Atiyah, filmmaker Jules Engel and physicist Freeman Dyson, among others, with more shining examples of greatness being added with every passing month. In some instances, the footage serves to reinforce the arguments and ideas of the protagonists, but more interestingly, in other cases — such as that of the physicist Edward Teller, who helped create the first atomic bomb — an individual’s testimony can help shed new light on their actions, providing historians with valuable new source material on which to base future studies.
“Integrating Quicktime Pro with AppleScript has allowed us to build a full-service video prodcution pipeline.”
“The quality of the films is key to the enterprise”, says Information Architect Dr Christopher Thorpe. “We don’t just want a film of someone talking, we want viewers to feel like they’re really there, listening to the person telling their life story”.
This idea is central to PeoplesArchive. The quality of the footage is extremely high, thanks in part to the video codecs used to process the material and also to the delivery method. “You can see individual hairs on the speaker’s head”, enthuses Thorpe. “It was essential that the technology allowed us to show this level of detail, so that you feel a sense of connection with them”.
The technology behind PeoplesArchive was supplied almost exclusively by Apple, including the Xserves and Xserve RAID used to compress, host and serve the movies, as well as software as such as AppleScript, QuickTime and iMovie, all of which are used extensively in the production process.
Apple Professional Services, the consultancy arm of Apple’s business, was also heavily involved in the project, writing, on behalf of PeoplesArchive, a failover system for the file server and helping with the installation and configuration of the archive’s server cluster in its data centre.
AppleScript automation is at the very heart of PeoplesArchive — in some respects, it makes the whole thing possible. “This is the core of the project”, confirms Thorpe, “when you’re dealing with as many files as we are, automation is the only way. There are also some very time-consuming processes — such as exporting and compressing video — that AppleScript can perform at night or when part-time workers are out of the office. It’s like having extra members of staff”.
“Custom AppleScripts have been used in the PeoplesArchive architecture. By facilitating interaction between the compressor and the database, the output of the compressor can be catalogued and sorted according to our requirements, and made available for upload to the site”.
QuickTime is another Apple technology that has helped make the archive a reality. “Integrating QuickTime Pro with AppleScript has allowed us to build a full-service video production pipeline”, says Dr Thorpe. QuickTime has the additional advantage of being platform and codec independent, which means all QuickTime files are guaranteed to work on both PCs and Macs, and will also work with new codecs that come on stream. Thorpe is also enthusiastic about iMovie: “It’s ideal for our purposes — we can have editors who haven’t encountered iMovie before up and running in a matter of minutes”.
“There are some very time-consuming processes - such as exporting and compressing video - that AppleScript can perform at night or when part-time workers are out of the office.”
In terms of hardware, the decision to base the online resource on Xserve and Xserve RAID was motivated by performance and cost. Thorpe says: “The Xserve came out top on performance and price and it also gave us flexibility in that we could, if we wanted to, use the spare processing power for production tasks”. He adds: “It’s also good to have an end-to-end solution where the development platform matches the delivery one”.
PeoplesArchive employ four dual processor Xserve cluster nodes as application servers, which is unusual as Xserve cluster nodes are normally used in High Performance Computing (HPC) environments; Thorpe explains: “We chose the cluster nodes because we didn’t need the storage capacity of the standard Xserve — we are using the RAID array for storage — and essentially they are grid Web server nodes, we have no need for them to have displays, we just want cheap multiple high density boxes with the option of adding additional ones at a later date, if needed”.
Another key piece of hardware in the PeoplesArchive project is the Power Mac G5. “This is a real revolution for us”, says Thorpe. “We can now process all the stories for each person, often in excess of 100 QuickTime movies, in 24 hours on one dual 2GHz machine. We now have three G5s and are writing a distributed compressor that will allow us to dramatically reduce the time between finishing editing and going live”.
