Students in the magnet communications program at Yates High School recently launched a massive archiving project that will one day result in the digitization of more than 30 years of video footage.

Phase one entails the ingestion of hundreds of video tapes from the Yates magnet program dating back to 1980, containing footage of the school and its history, events, faculty, and students.

The ultimate goal of the project is to produce a digital archive on Blu-Ray discs that can be displayed at the school’s new facility and will be ready in time for the 40th anniversary of the School of Communications in 2018.

Yates’ new chapter of the Student Television Network is using the latest in digital content acquisition technology to ingest the legacy analog video into an updated iMac system. Students involved are acquiring skills that can be used in the media archiving industry, film and television non-linear video editing, and metadata management, which is an introduction to meta-tagging and understanding aggregate data for social media careers.