Steve Davis has come a long way since starting his career as an audio recording engineer.
Now his job is to make sure that the world’s sounds and “motion picture” records are stored permanently, never to be lost like old record albums or manila folders crammed with vital data that have become fodder for dust mites.
As senior vice president of Crawford Media Services, located in northeast Atlanta, Davis sees to it that Crawford’s 82 employees create, save, store and protect irreplaceable film, video and audio.
The company’s clients include the U.S. Army, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Coca-Cola Company.
Q. Describe the work at Crawford Media Services.
A. We specialize in digitization, archiving and management of digital media assets. We also offer creative editorial, finishing, compositing, sound design and audio mixing to the advertising industry, corporations, broadcasters, cable organizations and production companies.
Q. How did you start out?
A. At the bottom. I swept floors and poured coffee. I learned everything on the job, starting with engineering.
Q. What is post production all about?
A. You go shoot film or video. What comes back is not suitable to watch. To make a polished program takes a lot of craftsmanship. We have the equipment and the craftsmen. That's how we got our start in 1981.
Q. Give me an example of what the company does?
A. We work closely with the ad agency JWT, and their account is the U.S. Marine Corps. They have producers and people skilled at writing, shooting and editing the TV ads to recruit Marines. They turn to our post production area for additional editing, finishing and storing.
Q. So, in a sense, you are hired guns?
A. Whether it's helping to preserve footage for The Coca-Cola Company and the United Nations, or providing daily viewing files for hit shows like "The Vampire Diaries" and "The Walking Dead," we deliver specialized skills and equipment to meet those needs.
Q. What about saving all this material? Some people still have manila folders they can't find and information on computers that have crashed.
A. For nearly 50 years people have been shooting videotape and recording audiotape. The physical media doesn't last that long and now the world is file-based. Many companies with large film and tape collections have a real problem. We digitize those collections on a massive scale and provide a website so clients can search and browse their content.
Q. So, you're saying a lot of people still maintain content in old-fashioned ways?
A. Those video and audio tapes have been sitting on shelves for many years. They are at the end of their physical life. Making new tape copies is not a good plan, because tape machines are quickly becoming obsolete. It is crucial that those organizations with a lot of content start planning and budgeting to digitize their tapes, or much of their content will be lost.
Q. So what can you do?
A. Digitize the material. Aside from preserving it, there are many ways to repurpose it once it becomes file. We "migrate" information from one form to another so that it's easier to save and easier to find exactly what you want, exactly when you need it.
Q. How do you prevent the loss of important information?
A. To absolutely protect the data, you have to duplicate and store the copy at a remote location.
Q. Seems like just a few years ago we had paper records?
A. We still do, but companies are realizing that they are drowning in paper and they can't access the information they need.
Q. Do you do the kind of work that could be nominated for an Oscar, tape editing, putting stuff together, sound mixing, and so forth?
A. We do win Emmys, Peabodys and Sundance awards. Although we work on Hollywood features, the folks in L.A. get the Oscars.
Q. Give me an example of what you might do for the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
A. The U.S. Holocaust Museum has thousands of hours of recordings of interviews, shot in Europe and the United States. There are oral histories, people recounting what happened to them. One of the museum's missions is to keep it all from being forgotten. For the past several years the museum has been going through this digitization process because much of what they have is in danger of deteriorating. We are working to put up over a thousand clips on the Web. The ultimate goal is to make this available to the public.
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