Berlin

Berlin (/bərˈlɪn/, German: [bɛɐ̯ˈliːn]) is the capital of Germany and one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.5 million people, it is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union. Located in northeastern Germany on the banks of Rivers Spree and Havel, it is the centre of the Berlin-Brandenburg Metropolitan Region, which has about six million residents from over 180 nations. Due to its location in the European Plain, Berlin is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. Around one-third of the city's area is composed of forests, parks, gardens, rivers and lakes.

First documented in the 13th century and situated at the crossing of two important historic trade routes, Berlin became the capital of the Margraviate of Brandenburg (1417–1701), the Kingdom of Prussia (1701–1918), the German Empire (1871–1918), the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) and the Third Reich (1933–1945).Berlin in the 1920s was the third largest municipality in the world. After World War II, the city was divided; East Berlin became the capital of East Germany while West Berlin became a de facto West German exclave, surrounded by the Berlin Wall (1961–1989) and East Germany territory. Following German reunification in 1990, Berlin was once again designated as the capital of united Germany.

Archive

An archive is an accumulation of historical records or the physical place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime, and are kept to show the function of that person or organization. Professional archivists and historians generally understand archives to be records that have been naturally and necessarily generated as a product of regular legal, commercial, administrative or social activities. They have been metaphorically defined as "the secretions of an organism", and are distinguished from documents that have been consciously written or created to communicate a particular message to posterity.

In general, archives consist of records that have been selected for permanent or long-term preservation on grounds of their enduring cultural, historical, or evidentiary value. Archival records are normally unpublished and almost always unique, unlike books or magazines for which many identical copies exist. This means that archives are quite distinct from libraries with regard to their functions and organization, although archival collections can often be found within library buildings.

Institut national de l'audiovisuel

The Institut national de l'audiovisuel (or INA, French for National Audiovisual Institute) is a repository of all French radio and television audiovisual archives. Additionally it provides free access to archives of countries such as Afghanistan and Cambodia. It has its headquarters in Bry-sur-Marne.

Since 2006, it has allowed free online consultation on a website called ina.fr with a search tool indexing 100,000 archives of historical programs, for a total of 20,000 hours.

Recordings

In the 1980s, it issued a large number of recordings on the label France's Concert Records. In the 1990s it launched its own label INA mémoire as the historical recording label of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel, and of the archives of Radio France.

History

The Institut national de l'audiovisuel was founded in 1975 by a law of 1974 with the purpose of conserving archives of audiovisual materials, research relating to them and professional training. In 1992, legal deposit was extended to television and radio, and the institute was to be the depository. This led to the establishment of the Inathèque in 1995, with the aim of conserving and making its holdings available to researchers and students. It was opened to the public in October 1998, at the Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand. In 2002, legal deposit was extended to cable and satellite television and in 2005 to terrestrial digital television. From September 2006, the institute has been responsible for archiving 17 radio and 45 television services amounting to 300,000 hours per year.

Stock footage

Stock footage, and similarly, archive footage, library pictures and file footage is film or video footage that can be used in other films. Stock footage is beneficial to filmmakers as it saves shooting new material. A single piece of stock footage is called a "stock shot" or a "library shot". Stock footage may have appeared in previous productions but may also be outtakes or footage shot for previous productions and not used. Examples of stock footage which might be utilized are moving images of cities and landmarks, wildlife in their natural environments and historical footage. Suppliers of stock footage may be either rights-managed or royalty-free. Many websites offer direct downloads of clips in various formats.

History

Stock footage companies began to emerge in the mid-1980s, offering clips mastered on Betacam SP, VHS and film formats. Many of the smaller libraries that specialized in niche topics such as extreme sports, technological or cultural collections were bought out by larger concerns such as Corbis or Getty Images over the next couple of decades.