Piql is excited to announce the new collaborative research and development project, AV Treasure.

This project will revive and give new life to film archives and provide a valuable resource to modern day film makers.

Eurostars and the Norwegian and Danish funding bodies are providing financing for this € 2 Million innovative research and development project. Piql will lead the project, working closely with project partners Vintage Cloud (DK), VIA University College (DK) and Valossa Labs (FI) over two years to develop this new technology.

So many new movies and documentaries relies on historic imagery. Without proper preservation efforts, much of our cinematic history can be lost forever or stuck buried on a dusty archival shelf.

The recent blockbuster, They Shall Not Grow Old, directed by Peter Jackson, was the result of bringing real, 100-year old footage of World War I back to life. The film’s restoration artists turned age-ravaged silent footage into colorised, dimensionalised and speed-corrected imagery with natural movement and appearance that allows viewers into the shoes of those who fought the war.

This was no doubt a challenging and time-consuming process for the film makers and researchers.

AV Treasure aims develop a platform to make this process simpler and easier, holding film and media material restored and preserved for posterity—available for future use. This will be achieved through digitisation, artificial intelligence, crowdsourcing and machine learning.

The new platform will be integrated with piqlConnect, allowing for digitised and digitally born footage to receive the highest standard of digital preservation and file treatment to enable current access and, importantly, access into the future.

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ABOUT VINTAGE CLOUD
Vintage Cloud is a world leader in the technologies required to ensure fast and safe digitisation and restoration of valuable film archives. Its goal is to help our customers quickly and easily monetize their assets by making them more accessible with tools that are cost-effective, innovative and intuitive and designed for the delicate task. Vintage Cloud was founded in 2012, and is headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark.

ABOUT VIA UNIVERSITY COLLEGE
VIA University College is a leading Danish university of applied science, focusing on areas such as health care, teaching, technology, business, design and media. VIA offers more than 40 professional degree programs at eight campuses across the Central Denmark Region. Educational programs combine research-based teaching with practical training in the public and private sectors. In addition to 20,000 full-time students, VIA has more than 20,000 annual participants in further education programs, making VIA the largest institution for further education in Northern Europe. Through research and development, VIA ensures that all educational programs are based on the latest knowledge, and contribute to the development of knowledge and practice.

ABOUT VALOSSA
Valossa, founded in 2015, is a deep technology company working on artificial intelligence software for video perception. Valossa develops unparalleled video recognition and content intelligence software products for businesses working with video. Valossa AI is a world-leading video cognition framework that enables a completely new generation of video analysis and profiling tools bringing forward new ways of monetizing video. The roots of the video AI company Valossa are in one of Europe’s leading computer science and AI labs at the University of Oulu in Finland.