As presented by Innocent Biratunganye (RTNB - ADADABU) at the 2019 FIAT/IFTA World Conference in Dubrovnik.

1. Shok of formats.
The case of National Televion of
BURUNDI,

2. RTNB

3. The Association of Burundi Audiovisual Archivists
has conducted reseach in the East Africa Region, a
region that covers six countries namely
Burundi,Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya and
South Soudan,This survey focused on the state of
archives in the region, their steps in the process of
digitizing their archival collection, the result is that
the five countries have the same problem except
south soudan , which is new in the group with no
archival to digitize,
Here we give the example of the public channels of
one of five countries, it is the National Television of
Burundi, As the topic that concerns us today is the

4. Is the choc of formats , I limit myself to problems of
format only,
We can not speak of the chock of format observed in
these five countries,without mentioning the genesis
of the public channels, here almost all thes chainnels
were initiated by the governors of these states who
were politician,
The latter fovored the dissemination of information
and brodcasts accordings to their editorial lines,
visual audio archives haven’t been preserved or
protected by the heads of institutions, so there is a
lack of proper budget to manage archives,

5. As digital Technology is the coding of
information according to the platform initiated,
we note that our channels haenderve privileged
the production and dissemination of their media
content without taking into account their archives,
This is the case for our EAC region,
This technology initiated by the hardware vendors
has fallen into the hands of some African
Decision makers who had no archival reflexes,
Heads of institutions that don’t care the archives
content,and have given importance to production
and dissemination only,

6. CURRENT DESCRIPTION IN BURUNDI AND
IN THE EAST AFRICA REGION,
Since 1970, this region of East Africa has opened
Televisions channels, records management staff
opted for the collection and storage of broadcasts in
order to maintain the maximum of archives, As
Technology is evolving at a rapid pace, this digital
media have their content confroted with a format
shock that sometimes degrades the quality of the
images,

7. This content that was produced under Dv pal in 4/3
on analog tapes is ingesting in a play box
environnement with MPEG -2 extension,
With the new 16/9 HD production system with MXF
extension the archiving system has trouble exploiting
this often heavy content,
This content with MXF extension is heavy and
archiving,
Our archive collection that RTNB owns is a product
of about thirty years and is produced under three
production systems,Namely the production on
Umatic from 1984 to 1995,production on Betacam sp
from 1996 to 2005,The production on the miniDv
tapes from 2002 to 2015,

8. on the shelves, and mension that this production was
analog to the image format 4/3 which was standard,
See picture on the shelves,

9. Archives Off line archives,

10. Picture 2

11. Picture 3,

12. Video Editing,
The editing on these tree forms of production
didn’t change anything and the format of
production was kept until the edition. At this
time period the archiving was manuel so the
document was kept on tape as it was broadcast.

13. THE EDITION DIFFUSION.
At RTNB as in other channels in the East Africa
Region,rebroadcasting was subordinated to the
archiving system because most of the programs
brodcast came from archiving service. With
rebrodcasting the management of a video
content should be compatible for all the services
(production, assembly, edition and archivage),

14. D.ARCHIVING
Here I am going to talk about a system of
archivage in two very different systems:
D1.Manual archivage.
The archivage in the time of the analogy had no
problem of format.
Content and this system of archiving was manual
with use of the manual and register files for
recording and filing document on tapes.

15. Transitional archiving,
This transitional archiving system for the
RTNB is a half digital system because we are
not in the digital totally as we are not at the
traditional one hundred percent, we are in
between with the digitalization of documents
we observe a variety of formats, which
causes the format shock that is the subject of
my presentation,

16. E,chok of format
• With the digitalization of production system,
we observed a hug gap with the production
system and the post production ,
• The archives with several formats are
subjected to an exploitation that meets the
technical requirements, we have archives with
various video extension,
• Example in MPEG2, AVI, MPEG4, MXF etc,

17. With all this kind of format, the archives are obliged
to have a capacity to resorve or to manage those
variety of formats,
The problematic of to lack software is a heavy
burden to the African archives especially since the
field of archives is forgotten,
An other problem of shoc format is how images
were shoted,
Now we broadcast in HD 16/9 and most of archives
are in DV pal 4/3, when we want to rebroadcast we
have to convert it in 16/9 and we observe the
quality of image deteriorates,

18. Make the image wich was in 4/3 to 16/9 for
rebrodcast implies the modification of
scales of the image from where we observe
which has lost its quality,
View videos below,

19. Video in HD 16/9

20. VIDEO IN DV PAL 4/3

21. Video converted from 4/3 to 16/9

22. With this system of image conversion to adapt
the archives, we noticed the denaturation of the
archives following the fast change of the
technologies of production and edition for this,
we notice that the archives need a particular
attetion in order to develop technologies
adapted to our archives without modifying the
original image,
This situation we have observed in East Africa
and deserves an anthusiasm and support from
audiovisual archives proffessionals all over the
world,

23. Developing a vast network of professionals will
reduce this wall that separates the African Archives
and the rest of the world,
I can not end this presentation without thanking
the FIAT/IFTA the association of Audiovisual
Archivists of Burundi as well as the welcoming
committe in Croatia which allowed us to come and
make known other realities that haunt the
audiovisual archival in the world especially the
EAST AFRICA COMMUNITY, by wishing you to
see one day organize a conference of FIAT /IFTA in
Africa,