greatbear audio and video digitising
audio and video tape transfer, digitising, preservation
We recently spoke to Martin Theophilus, Executive Director of the Museum of Magnetic Sound Recording based in Austin, Texas.
While the Greatbear studio is a kind of museum – it is full of old machines that we maintain and preserve – we wanted to know more about this ‘proper’ Magnetic Sound Recording Museum.
‘Watch out: the vegetarians are on the attack’ warned an article published in the April 1984 edition of the Meat Trades Journal. The threat? A new product that would revolutionise the UK’s eating habits forever. Gregory Sams’s VegeBurger invented a vernacular that is so ubiquitous now, you probably thought it’s always been here. While vegetarianism can… Continue reading Gregory Sams’s VegeBurger – Food Revolution
How do you start preserving digital objects if your institution or organisation has little or no capacity to do so? Digital preservation can at first be bit-part and modular. You can build your capacity one step at a time. Once you’ve taken a few steps you can then put them together, making a ‘system’. It’s… Continue reading Pre-Figurative Digital Preservation
We are living in interesting times for digital video preservation (we are living in interesting times for other reasons too, of course). For many years digital video preservation has been a confusing area of audiovisual archiving. To date there is no settled standard that organisations, institutions and individuals can unilaterally adopt. As Peter Bubestinger-Steindl argues,… Continue reading Developments in Digital Video Preservation – CELLAR
Digitising a unique collection of ¼ inch reel-to-reel audio tape recordings, made in the 1970s and ’80s for BBC Radio Stoke.
World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, which is sponsored by UNESCO and takes place every year on 27 October, is an occasion to celebrate how audio, video and film contribute to the ‘memory of the world.’ The theme for 2016 – ‘It’s your story, don’t lose it!’ – conveys the urgency of audio visual preservation and… Continue reading Happy World Day for Audiovisual Heritage!
Assessment and treatment is an important part of Greatbear’s audiovisual preservation work. Even before a tape is played back we need to ensure it is in optimum condition. Sometimes it is possible to make a diagnosis through visual assessment alone. A tape we received recently, for example, clearly displayed signs of ‘spoking.’ Spoking is a term used in… Continue reading Spoking – Treating and Assessing Magnetic Tape
It might be a familiar story to some people. At one point, say the late 1970s, you were in your early 20s and the main songwriter in a post-punk/ new wave band. You tried really hard to get it off the ground: moved to London, met the right people, played several memorable gigs. You worked… Continue reading The Containers – late ’70s new wave lives again
On a recent trip to one of Britain’s most significant community archives, I was lucky enough to watch a rare piece of digitised video footage from the late 1970s. As the footage played it raised many questions in my mind: who shot it originally? What format was it originally created on? How was it edited?… Continue reading Digital Video in Mixed-Content Archives
Monstrous Regiment were one of many trailblazing feminist theatre companies active in the 1970s-1990s. They were established as a collective very much built around performers, both (professional) actors such as Mary McCusker and (professional) musicians such as Helen Glavin. Between 1975-1993 Monstrous Regiment produced a significant number of plays and cabarets. These included Scum: Death, Destruction and Dirty… Continue reading Monstrous Regiment – Audio Cassette Digitisation
We couldn’t let the news that ‘Japan’s Funai Electric has announced it will end production of home videocassette recorders in July’ go by unnoticed.
Greatbear exist to make obsolete tape recordings accessible in the digital age. We often work with artists and record labels who use our services to digitise back catalogues and previously unreleased material.
VHS was a hugely successful video format from the late 1970s to early 2000s. It was adopted widely in domestic and professional contexts. Due to its familiarity and apparent ubiquity you might imagine it is easy to preserve VHS. Well, think again. VHS is generally considered to be a low preservation risk because playback equipment… Continue reading VHS – Re-appraising Obsolescence
U-matic made video cassette a core part of many industries. Flexible and functional, its popularity endured until the 1990s.
At Greatbear, we have a significant suite of working NTSC/ PAL/ SECAM U-matic machines and spare parts.
The early 21st century has been witness to numerous projects that document and interpret popular music histories. Whether dedicated to regional histories, such as the Manchester District Music Archive and Birmingham Music Archive, or genre specific, like the National Jazz archive or the English Folk Dance and Song Society’s ‘Full English’, digitsation has helped curators organise and publish material in new and… Continue reading The Genesis Archive – ¼” reel-to-reel tapes transferred
Motobirds, a 1970s all-girl motorbike stunt team from Leicester, have recently re-captured the public imagination. The group re-united for an appearance on BBC One’s The One Show which aired on 1 April 2016. They hadn’t seen each other for forty years. The Motobirds travelled all over the UK and Europe, did shows with the Original… Continue reading Motobirds U-matic NTSC transfer
Often customers ask us to deliver their transferred sound files on CD, in effect an audio CD-R of the transfer. Although these recordings can still be high resolution there remains a world of difference—in an archival sense—between a CD-R, burnt on a computer drive (however high the quality of drive and disc), and CD recordings… Continue reading Going CD-R-less – digital file-based delivery
The front page of the Philips N-1502 TV Recorder catalogue presents a man peering mournfully into a dark living room. A woman, most probably his wife, drags him reluctantly out for the evening. She wants to be social, distracted in human company. The N-1502 tape machine is superimposed on this unfamiliar scene, an image of… Continue reading Philips N-1502 TV Recorder
Below is a guest post written by Terry Summers from Summertone Ltd. We first encountered Terry because of his expertise refurbishing analogue magnetic tape heads. As one of the few, if not only, specialist UK-based company working in this area, we wanted to know more about Terry’s work. We were keen to understand the secrets of magnetic tape… Continue reading Guest post: Refurbishment of Magnetic Recording Heads – Terry Summers
The recent arrival of a Grundig C 100 (DC-International) cassette in the Greatbear studio has been an occasion to explore the early history of the compact cassette. The compact cassette has gained counter-cultural kudos in recent times, and more about that later, but once upon a time the format was the new kid on the… Continue reading Grundig C 100 and the early history of the Compact Cassette
Greatbear have just produced our 2016 ‘infomercial’. The 4-page document includes details of our work and all the formats we digitise. We are in the process of sending printed copies to relevant organisations. Please contact us to request a copy and we will pop one in the post for you. You can also download a… Continue reading Greatbear 2016 Infomercial
Media scholars, tinkerers and ‘thinkerers’ gathered in London last week for ADAPT TV‘s Hands on History Conference. ADAPT is a five-year research project based at Royal Holloway, University of London that aims to capture and analyse the complex histories of TV production from the 1950s to the present. A core part of the project methodology… Continue reading Hands On History Conference
At the end of 2015 Steve Lindsey, founding member of Liverpool art rock trailblazers Deaf School, stumbled upon two 1/2″ open reel video tape recordings of the band, tucked away in a previously unknown nook of his Dublin home. 2016 is the 40th anniversary of Deaf School’s first album 2nd Honeymoon. With the landmark approaching, Steve felt it… Continue reading Deaf School ½” open reel video tape transfer
Check out this selection of analogue video clips from problem tape sources such as VHS, Betamax, CV2100, Low Band U-matic, PCM audio. The video was compiled by Joe Johnson, who works in the Greatbear Studio. digitised-analogue-found-video-clips from Adrian Finn on Vimeo.
The latest in a long line of esoteric musical recordings moving through the tape transports in the Greatbear studio is a collection belonging to Dušan Mihajlović. Dušan was the main song writer in Yugoslavian new wave band Dr Spira and the Human Beings / Doktor Spira i Ljudska Bića. Dr Spira have a cult status… Continue reading Dr Spira and the Human Beings – BASF LGR 50 tape on AEG DIN Hubs
The UK’s audio collections have Save Our Sounds. The BFI recently launched Film is Fragile to support film preservation in the UK. Yet something is missing from these impassioned calls to preserve audiovisual heritage. As 2015 draws to a close, there is no comparable public campaign focused on the preservation of videotape. For James Patterson, from… Continue reading Video Tape Preservation – The Final Frontier
We first encountered the work of Media Historian Peter Sachs Collopy during research for a previous blog article about video synthesizers. His work was so interesting we invited Peter to do a short interview for the blog. Thanks Peter for taking time to respond, you can read the answers below! We were really struck by your description… Continue reading Video and Technologies of Consciousness: An Interview with Peter Sachs Collopy
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is widely heralded as a classic of 20th century English literature. The book adorns English Literature syllabuses throughout the UK, its provocative events continue to inspire debate about the nature of humanity and ‘civilisation.’ We recently transferred an audio cassette recording of the Nobel-prize winning author reading his famous novel.… Continue reading William Golding’s Lord of the Flies Audio Cassette Transfer
The latest eclectic piece of music history to be processed in the Greatbear Studio is a U-matic Low Band video of ‘Dream/Dream Dub’ by Red Beat, a post-punk band that was active in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Despite emitting a strong wax crayon-like odour that is often a sure sign of a degraded… Continue reading Red Beat: U-matic Low Band Transfer and Video Synthesizers
The Alesis ADAT digital multi-track tape recorder is an iconic piece of early 1990s audio recording equipment. ADATs used consumer S-VHS video tape to record up to 8 tracks of digital audio. They were modular, meaning that each machine could be synched with up to 15 other ADAT machines. It was therefore possible, in theory, to… Continue reading ADAT digital multi-track recorders
The scale of digitisation jobs we do at Greatbear often varies. We are asked by our customers to reformat single items to large quantities of tape and everything else inbetween. Reformatting magnetic tape-based media always takes time and care. Transfers have to be done in real time; if you want a good quality recording there… Continue reading Audio Cassette Parallel Ingests
Greatbear have recently worked with the British Stand Up Comedy Archive (BSUCA) to reformat a number of Digital Audio Tapes (DATs) and U-Matic video tapes from their collection. Established in 2013 and based at the University of Kent’s Special Collections, the BSUCA aims ‘to celebrate, preserve, and provide access to the archives and records of… Continue reading British Stand Up Comedy Archive’s audiovisual collections
This article is a bit late to break this news, but it is worth highlighting again in case you missed it first time round. In May 2015 the British Library were awarded over £9.5 million pounds by the Heritage Lottery Fund to help them deliver their hugely important Save Our Sounds project. We told you… Continue reading Save Our Sounds’ £9.5 million boost
As a business situated in the heart of Bristol, Greatbear is often called upon by Bristol’s artists to re-format their magnetic tape collections. Previously we have transferred documentaries about the St. Paul’s Carnival and films from the Bristol-based Women in Moving Pictures archive. We also regularly digitise tapes for Bristol Archive Records. We were recently approached by author… Continue reading Phil Johnson’s the Wild Bunch VHS video
We recently received a fascinating collection of tapes from the archive of Robert Chenciner, an ethnographer with over thirty years experience studying the cultures, human rights and current affairs of Daghestan. Daghestan is located in the north Caucasus region, its neighbouring countries are Azerbaijan, Chechnya and Georgia, while its eastern border is flanked by the… Continue reading Type IV Metal Cassettes and Robert Chenciner’s Daghestan Collection
One of the most interesting aspects of digitising magnetic tapes is what happens to them after they leave the Greatbear studio. Often transfers are done for private or personal interest, such as listening to the recording of loved ones, or for straightforward archival reasons. Yet in some cases material is re-used in a new creative project, thereby translating… Continue reading Re-animating archives: Action Space’s V30H / V60H EIAJ 1/2″ video tapes
