The Oregon Research Institute, employing 32 scientists, is a nonprofit behavioral science research organization. Pursuing both basic and applied research, current grants focus on four core areas, adolescence and families, health research, education, and personality assessment. A major component of the institute's NIH funded research program involves the extensive use of video technology. Video activities include the recording and coding of social interaction between family members and friends, selecting segments for additional procedures and in-depth analyses, developing interactive video assessments, creating instructional videos, training observers and interventionists, and the national and international dissemination of findings and intervention/prevention procedures. Currently, all video data at ORI is acquired, edited and coded on tape-based equipment. Fifteen of our twenty-one interview, therapy and behavioral analogue rooms are equipped with analog cameras and microphones. Their signals feed back to a control room equipped with VHS recorders and monitors. Coding stations are equipped with VHS decks. There is no connection between the VHS playback units and coding computers or with the coding stations and the systems in the control room. The current process for retrieval, coding, cataloging, and archiving of tapes and related data systems is inefficient, even with the assistance of a database to track the tapes. Archiving is particularly problematic because videotapes are subject to deterioration over time with noticeable image quality loss. ? ? We propose a conversion to a Digital Video Data Asset Management System (DVDAMS) using an interconnected Silicon Graphics video server, controlled by a centrally programmed distribution interface. Computerized access for coding, review, and editing will enhance the methodology of several ongoing grants as well as those currently under review. Archiving and acquisition for productions will be improved with digital media, a more stable medium with no generational loss of quality. The production of interactive intervention or training programs will benefit as the DVDAMS will allow management of the related video components and direct access to them from our digital video editing equipment, as well an instant, non-linear, sequenced replay with digital overlays of instructional messages. The proposed system will also allow us to convert over six thousand hours of existing video data to digital format for future studies.
