Category: digitisation expertise

Sharing insights and expertise around the digital transfer of audio and video assets

DAT restoration: The High – Martin Hannett Sessions

Record Store Day is usually ‘the one day each year when over 200 independent record shops all across the UK come together to celebrate their unique culture. Special vinyl releases are made exclusively for the day, in what’s become one of the biggest annual events on the music calendar.’ This year, due to COVID-19, Record… Continue reading DAT restoration: The High – Martin Hannett Sessions

Pre-Figurative Digital Preservation

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

Developments in Digital Video Preservation – CELLAR

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

Digital Video in Mixed-Content Archives

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

VHS – Re-appraising Obsolescence

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

Going CD-R-less – digital file-based delivery

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

Videokunstarkivet’s Mouldy U-matic Video Tapes

Last year we featured the pioneering Norwegian Videokunstarkivet (Video Art Archive) on the Greatbear tape blog. In one of our most popular posts, we discussed how Videokunstarkivet has created a state of the video art archive using open source software to preserve, manage and disseminate Norway’s video art histories for contemporary audiences and beyond. In… Continue reading Videokunstarkivet’s Mouldy U-matic Video Tapes

Mouldy DATs

We have previously written on this blog about the problems that can occur when transferring Digital Audio Tapes (DATs). According to preliminary findings from the British Library’s important survey of the UK’s sound collections, there are 3353 DAT tapes in the UK’s archives. While this is by no means a final figure (and does not include the… Continue reading Mouldy DATs

Codecs and Wrappers for Digital Video

In the last Greatbear article we quoted sage advice from the International Association of Audiovisual Archivists: ‘Optimal preservation measures are always a compromise between many, often conflicting parameters.’ [1] While this statement is true in general for many different multi-format collections, the issue of compromise and conflicting parameters becomes especially apparent with the preservation of… Continue reading Codecs and Wrappers for Digital Video

DVCAM transfers, error correction coding & misaligned machines

This article is inspired by a collection of DVCAM tapes sent in by London-based cultural heritage organisation Sweet Patootee. Below we will explore several issues that arise from the transfer of DVCAM tapes, one of the many Digital Video formats that emerged in the mid-1990s. A second article will follow soon which focuses on the content of… Continue reading DVCAM transfers, error correction coding & misaligned machines

Transferring Digital Audio Tapes (DATs) to digital audio files

At Greatbear, we carefully restore and transfer to digital file all types of content recorded to Digital Audio Tape (DAT), and can support all sample rate and bit depth variations. This post focuses on some of the problems that can arise with the transfer of DATs. An immature recording method (digital) on a mature recording… Continue reading Transferring Digital Audio Tapes (DATs) to digital audio files

Digitisation: methodologies, processing and archival practices

 We work with a range of customers at Greatbear, digitising anything from personal collections to the content of institutional archives. Because of this, what customers need from a digitisation service can be very different. A key issue relates to the question of how much we process the digital file, both as part of the transfer… Continue reading Digitisation: methodologies, processing and archival practices

Open Source Solutions for Digital Preservation

In a technological world that is rapidly changing how can digital information remain accessible? One answer to this question lies in the use of open source technologies. As a digital preservation strategy it makes little sense to use codecs owned by Mac or Windows to save data in the long term. Propriety software essentially operate… Continue reading Open Source Solutions for Digital Preservation

Early digital tape recordings on PCM/ U-matic and Betamax video tape

We are now used to living in a born-digital environment, but the transition from analogue to digital technologies did not happen overnight. In the late 1970s, early digital audio recordings were made possible by a hybrid analogue/digital system. It was composed by the humble transport and recording mechanisms of the video tape machine, and a… Continue reading Early digital tape recordings on PCM/ U-matic and Betamax video tape

Measuring signals – challenges for the digitisation of sound and video

In a 2012 report entitled ‘Preserving Sound and Moving Pictures’ for the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Technology Watch Report series, Richard Wright outlines the unique challenges involved in digitising audio and audiovisual material. ‘Preserving the quality of the digitized signal’ across a range of migration processes that can negotiate ‘cycles of lossy encoding, decoding and reformatting… Continue reading Measuring signals – challenges for the digitisation of sound and video

Copying U-matic tape: digitise via dub connector or composite video?

Digitising legacy and obsolete video formats in essence is simple but the technical details make the process more complex. Experience and knowledge are therefore needed to make the most appropriate choices for the medium. The U-matic video format usually had two types of video output, composite and a y/c type connector that Sony named ‘Dub’.… Continue reading Copying U-matic tape: digitise via dub connector or composite video?

Delivery formats – to compress or not compress

After we have migrated your analogue or digital tape to a digital file, we offer a range of delivery formats. For video, using the International Association of Sound & Audiovisual Archives Guidelines for the Preservation of Video Recordings, as our guide, we deliver FFV1 lossless files or 10-bit uncompressed video files in .mkv or QuickTime… Continue reading Delivery formats – to compress or not compress

Convert, Join, re encode AVCHD .MTS files in Ubuntu Linux

One of our audio and video archive customers has a large collection of AVCHD video files that are stored in 1.9GB ‘chunks’ as xxxxx.MTS files. All these files are of 60 minute and longer duration and must be joined, deinterlaced, re encoded to a suitable size and bitrate then uploaded for online access. This is… Continue reading Convert, Join, re encode AVCHD .MTS files in Ubuntu Linux

Audio data recovery from external USB drive using ddrescue

High resolution audio and video digital tape conversions can use large amounts of computer storage. 8 bit uncompressed Standard Definition (SD) PAL video runs at 70 GB per hour and 24 bit 96 kHz audio files at 2 GB per hour. As a result of this many of our analogue to digital tape transfers require… Continue reading Audio data recovery from external USB drive using ddrescue

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