A recent news report on the BBC website about recycling and repairing ‘old’ technology resonates strongly with the work of Greatbear.
The story focused on the work of Restart Project, a charity organisation who are encouraging positive behavioural change by empowering people to use their electronics for longer. Their website states,
the time has come to move beyond the culture of incessant electronics upgrades and defeatism in the face of technical problems. We are preparing the ground for a future economy of maintenance and repair by reskilling, supporting repair entrepreneurs, and helping people of all walks of life to be more resilient.
We are all familiar with the pressure to adopt new technologies and throw away the old, but what are the consequences of living in such a disposable culture? The BBC report describes how ‘in developed nations people have lost the will to fix broken gadgets. A combination of convenience and cultural pressure leads people to buy new rather than repair.’
These tendencies have been theorised by French philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler as the loss of knowledge of how to live (savoir-vivre). Here people lose not only basic skills (such as how to repair a broken electronic device), but are also increasingly reliant on the market apparatus to provide for them (for example, the latest new product when the ‘old’ one no longer works).
A lot of the work of Greatbear revolves around repairing consumer electronics from bygone eras. Our desks are awash with soldering irons, hot air rework stations, circuit boards, capacitors, automatic wire strippers and a whole host of other tools.
We have bookshelves full of operating manuals. These can help us navigate the machinery in the absence of a skilled engineer who has been trained how to fix a MII, U-Matic or D3 tape machine.
As providers of a digitisation service we know that maintaining obsolete machines appropriate to the transfer is the only way we can access tape-based media. But the knowledge and skills of how to do so are rapidly disappearing – unless of course they are actively remembered through practice.
The Restart Project offers a community-orientated counterpoint to the erosion of skills and knowledge tacitly promoted by the current consumer culture. Promoting values of maintenance and repair opens up the possibility for sustainable, rather than throwaway, uses of technology.
Even if the Restart Project doesn’t catch on as widely as it deserves to, Greatbear will continue to collect, maintain and repair old equipment until the very last tape head on earth is worn down.
A recent addition to the Greatear digitising studio is a BTS D-1 digital video cassette recorder.
As revolutionary as it was at the time, early digital audio and video tape recording is more threatened with obsolescence than earlier analogue formats.
Introduced in 1986, D-1 was the very first, real-time, digital broadcast-quality tape format. It stored uncompressed digitized component video, had uncompromising picture quality and used enormous bandwidth for its time. The maximum record time on a D-1 tape is 94 minutes.
Enormous is certainly the word for the D-1 tape! Compared with the so-called ‘invisible’ nature of today’s digital data and the miniDV introduced in 1998, this tape from 1992 is in comedy proportions.
D-1 was notoriously expensive and the equipment required large infrastructure changes in facilities which upgraded to this digital recording format.
Early D-1 operations were plagued with difficulties, though the format quickly stabilized and is still renowned for its superb standard definition image quality, sometimes referred to as a ‘no compromise’ format.
D-1 kept the data recorded as uncompressed 8bit 4:2:2, unlike today where compression is required for digital data to save space and time for practical delivery to the home, but sacrificing the picture and sound quality in the process.
D1 was supplanted by subsequent D models that recorded component (D-5) and composite (D-2 and D-3) signals.
In theory the work we do at Greatbear is very simple: we migrate information from analogue or digital magnetic tape to electronic digital files.
Once transferred, digital files can be easily edited, tagged, accessed, shared or added to a database. Due to the ubiquitous nature of digital media today, if you want to use your data, it needs to be in a digital form.
In practice however, there are a lot more issues that arise when migrating tape based media. These can stem from the obsolescence of machines (spare parts being a particular issue), physical problems with the tape and significantly, the actual person-time involved in doing the transfer.
While large institutions like the Library of Congress in USA can invest in technology that enables mass digitisation like those developed by Samma Systems, most transfers require operators to do the work. The simple truth is that for fragile and obsolete tape media, there is no other option. In the film ‘Living Archive – Preservation Challenge‘ David Crostwait from American digitisation company DC Video describes the importance of careful, real time transfers:
‘When a tape is played back, that tape starts from the very beginning and may run for 60-65 minutes straight. One person sits in front of that machine and watches that tape from beginning to end, s/he does nothing else but watch that tape. We feel this procedure is the only way to guarantee the highest quality possible.’
At Greatbear we echo this sentiment. We give each transfer individual attention so that the information is migrated accurately and effectively. Sometimes this means doing things slowly to ensure that tape is spooled correctly and the tension within the tape pack is even. If transfers are rushed there is always the danger that tape could get crumpled or damaged, which is why we take our time.
As an archival process digitisation offers the promise of a dream: improved accessibility, preservation and storage.
However the digital age is not without its archival headaches. News of the BBC’s plans to abandon their Digital Media Initiative (DMI), which aimed to make the BBC media archive ‘tapeless’, clearly demonstrates this. As reported in The Guardian:
‘DMI has cost £98.4m, and was meant to bring £95.4m of benefits to the organisation by making all the corporation’s raw and edited video footage available to staff for re-editing and output. In 2007, when the project was conceived, making a single TV programme could require 70 individual video-handling processes; DMI was meant to halve that.’
The project’s failure has been explained by its size and ambition. Another telling reason was cited: the software and hardware used to deliver the project was developed for exclusive use by the BBC. In a statement BBC Director Tony Hall referred to the fast development of digital technology, stating that ‘off-the-shelf [editing] tools were now available that could do the same job “that simply didn’t exist five years ago”.’
The fate of the DMI initiative should act as a sobering lesson for institutions, organisations and individuals who have not thought about digitisation as a long, rather than short term, archival solution.
As technology continues to ‘innovate’ at startling rate, it is hard to predict how long the current archival standard for audio and audio-visual will last.
Being an early adopter of technology can be an attractive proposition: you are up to date with the latest ideas, flying the flag for the cutting edge. Yet new technology becomes old fast, and this potentially creates problems for accessing and managing information. The fragility of digital data comes to the fore, and the risk of investing all our archival dreams in exclusive technological formats as the BBC did, becomes far greater.
In order for our data to survive we need to appreciate that we are living in what media theorist Jussi Parikka calls an ‘information management society.’ Digitisation has made it patently clear that information is dynamic rather than stored safely in static objects. Migrating tape based archives to digital files is one stage in a series of transitions material can potentially make in its lifetime.
Given the evolution of media and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries, it feels safe to speculate that new technologies will emerge to supplant uncompressed WAV and AIFF files, just as AAC has now become preferred to MP3 as a compressed audio format because it achieves better sound quality at similar bit rates.
Because of this at Greatbear we always migrate analogue and digital magnetic tape at the recommended archival standard, and provide customers with high quality and access copies. Furthermore, we strongly recommend to customers to back up archive quality files in at least three separate locations because it is highly likely data will need to be migrated again in the future.
We are currently digitising a collection of U-matic Ampex KCS-20 video tapes for Keith Barnfather, the founder of Reeltime Pictures.
Reeltime Pictures are most well-known for their production of documentaries about the BBC series Doctor Who. They also made Doctor Who spin-off films, a kind of film equivalent of fan fiction, that revived old and often marginal characters from the popular TV series.
The tapes we were sent were Ampex’s U-matic video tapes. For those of you out there that have recorded material on Ampex tape be it audio or video, we have bad news for you. While much magnetic tape is more robust than most people imagine, this is not true of tape made by Ampex in the 1970s and 1980s.
Nearly all Ampex tape degrades disgracefully with age. A common outcome is ‘sticky shed syndrome,‘ a condition created by the deterioration of the binders in a magnetic tape which hold the iron oxide magnetic coating to its plastic carrier. So common was this problem with Ampex tape that the company patented the process of baking the tape (to be done strictly at the temperature 54 Centrigade, for a period of 16 hours), that would enable the tape to be played back.
In order to migrate the Ampex video tapes to a digital format they have, therefore, to be dehydrated in our incubator. This is careful process where we remove the tape from its outer shell to minimise ‘outgassing‘. Outgassing refers to the release of a gas that has become dissolved, trapped, frozen or absorbed in material. This can have significant effects if the released gas collects in a closed environment where air is stagnant or recirculated. The smell of new cars is a good example of outgassing that most people are familiar with.
When baking a tape in an enclosed incubator, it can therefore be vulnerable to the potential release of gasses from the shell, as well as the tape and its constituent material parts. Removing the shell primarily minimises danger to the tape, as it is difficult to know in advance what chemicals will be released when baking occurs.
It is important to stress that tape dehydration needs to be done in a controlled manner within a specifically designed lab incubator. This enables the temperature to be carefully regulated to the degree. Such precision cannot of course be achieved with domestic ovens (which are designed to cook things!), nor even food dehydrators, because there is very little temperature control.
So if you do have Ampex tapes, whether audio or video, we recommend that you treat them with extreme care, and if what is recorded on them is important to you, migrate them to a digital format before they almost certainly deteriorate.
In February 2013 we digitised a VHS tape from Martin Smith, the 1994 documentary Life Can Be Wonderful. The VHS tape was the only copy of the film Smith owned, and it is quite common for Great Bear to digitise projects where the film maker does not have the master copy. This is because original copies are often held by large production companies, and films can be subject to complex distribution and screening conditions.
Life Can Be Wonderful is a film was about the life of his good friend Stanley Forman, a committed communist and major figure in British left-wing cinema, who passed away at the age of 91 on 7 February 2013. Forman’s dedication to communism remained a controversial issue until his death. Smith described his conflicts with his friend which ‘most often they centred on what I saw as his refusal to own up to the enormity of Stalin’s crimes. On camera he told me that I was his dear friend, “but not a dear comrade” and apologised for failing to convey “the spirit of the times”‘.
Stanley Forman is a fascinating figure in terms of the work we do at the Great Bear. He is described on the website Putney Debater as ‘the archive man.’ The site goes on to say
His company, Plato/ Education and Television Films (ETV), held a unique library of left- wing documentaries which amounted to the history of the twentieth century from a socialist perspective. Established in 1950 as Plato Films, the outfit was what would be called in Cold War ideology a front organisation, set up by members of the Communist Party to distribute films from behind the Iron Curtain. Under the slogan ‘See the other half of the world’, Plato provided the movement with a film distributor for documentaries from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, taking in China (until the Sino-Soviet split), Cuba, Vietnam and elsewhere, which would otherwise never be seen here.
The Educational and Television Films archive is held at the British Film Institute, and some material is available to view on the JISC Media Hub website.
Screenshot of software encoding a file to MP3 used at the Great Bear
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 compatible .mov containers. We add viewing files as H264 encoded .mp4 files or DVD. We’ll also produce any other digital video files, according to your needs, such as AVI in any codec; any MacOS, Windows or GNU/Linux filesystem (HFS+, NTFS or EXT3.
For audio we offer Broadcast WAV (B-WAV) files on hard drive or optical media (CD) at 16 bit/44.1 kHz (commonly used for CDs) or 24 bit/96 kHz (which is the minimum recommended archival standard) and anything up to 24 bit / 192 kHz. We can also deliver access copies on CD or MP3 (that you could upload to the internet, or listen to on an ipod, for example).
Why are there so many digital file types and what distinguishes them from each other?
The main difference that is important to grasp is between an uncompressed digital file and a compressed one.
On the JISC Digital Media website, they describe uncompressed audio files as follows:
‘Uncompressed audio files are the most accurate digital representation of a soundwave, but can also be the most resource-intensive method of recording and storing digital audio, both in terms of storage and management. Their accuracy makes them suitable for archiving and delivering audio at high resolution, and working with audio at a professional level, and they are the “master” audio format of choice.’
Why uncompressed?
As a Greatbear client you may wonder why you need a large, uncompressed digital file if you only want to listen to your old analogue and digital tapes again. The simple answer is: we live in an age where information is dynamic rather static. An uncompressed digital recording captured at a high bit and kHz rate is the most stable media format you can store your data on. Technology is always changing and evolving, and not all types of digital files that are common today are safe from obsolescence.
It is important to consider questions of accessibility not only for the present moment, but also for the future. There may come a time when your digitised audio or video file needs to be migrated again, so that it can be played back on whatever device has become ‘the latest thing’ in a market driven by perpetual innovation. It is essential that you have access to the best quality digital file possible, should you need to transport your data in ten, fifteen or twenty years from now.
Compression and compromise?
Uncompressed digital files are sound and vision captured in their purest, ‘most accurate’ form. Parts of the original recording are not lost when the file is converted or saved. When a digital file is saved to a compressed, lossy format, some of its information is lost. Lossy compression eliminates ‘unnecessary’ bits of information, tailoring the file so that it is smaller. You can’t get the original file back after it has been compressed so you can’t use this sort of compression for anything that needs to be reproduced exactly. However it is possible to compress files to a lossless format, which does enable you to recreate the original file exactly.
In our day to day lives however we encounter far more compressed digital information than uncompressed.
There would be no HD TV, no satellite TV channels and no ipods/ MP3 players without compressed digital files. The main point of compression is to make these services affordable. It would be incredibly expensive, and it would take up so much data space, if the digital files that were streamed to televisions were uncompressed.
‘Every so often I’ll get the proper CD version of an album I’ve fallen in love with as a download, and I’ll get a rude shock when confronted by the sense of dimension and spatiality in the music’s layers, the sculpted force of the drums, the sheer vividness of the sound. The difference between CD and MP3 is similar to that between “not from concentrate” orange juice and juice that’s been reconstituted from concentrate. (In this analogy vinyl would be ‘freshly squeezed, perhaps). Converting music to MP3 is a bit like the concentration process, and its done for much the same reason: it’s much cheaper to transport concentrate because without the water it takes up a lot loss volume and it weighs a lot less. But we can all taste the difference.’
As a society we are slowly coming to terms with the double challenge of hyper consumption and conservation thrown up by the mainstreaming of digital technology. Part of that challenge is to understand what happens to the digital data we use when we click ‘save as,’ or knowing what decisions need to be made about data we want to keep because it is important to us as individuals, or to wider society.
At Greatbear we can deliver digital files in compressed and uncompressed formats, and are happy to offer a free consultation should you need it to decide what to do with your tape based digital and analogue media.
For a while now we’ve been working with film maker Jeanie Finlay on various projects, digitising archive video footage in varying tape formats and standards.
Her latest project, soon to be premiered in the US:
…is a film about truth, lies and the legacy of faking everything in the desperate pursuit of fame. The American dream, told by people who’d never even been to America.
We digitised a collection of VHS and Hi8 camcorder and full sized tapes and delivered Apple ProRes files for the edit.
See the trailer here:
The main work of Greatbear is to make analogue and digital tape-based media accessible for people living in a digital intensive environment. But once your tape-based media has been digitised, is that the end of the story? Do you never need to think about preservation again? What issues arise for information management in the future, and how do they relate to our actions in the present?
This year (2013) the National Archives in the UK are facing a huge challenge as the ’20-year rule‘, in which the government will be releasing records when they are 20 years old, instead of 30, comes into effect. A huge part of this process is the digitisation of large amounts of material so they can be easily accessible to the public.
What does this have to do with the digitisation of tape you may be wondering? Well, mostly it provides food for thought. When you read the guidelines for the National Archives’ digitisation strategy, it raises many points that are worth thinking about for everyone living inside an information intensive environment, professional archivist or not. These guidelines suggest that many of the problems people face with analogue media, for example not being able to open, play or use formats such as tape, floppy disks or even digital media, such as a cd-r, do not go away with the move toward wholesale digitisation. This is summed up nicely in the National Archive’s point about digital continuity. ‘If you hold selected digital records that are not yet due for transfer, you will need to maintain their digital continuity. This means ensuring that the records can be found, opened, understood, worked with and trusted over time and through change’. This statement encapsulates the essence of digital information management – the process whereby records are maintained and kept up to date with each technological permutation.
Later on in their recommendations they state something which may be surprising to people who assume that digitisation equates to some form of informational omnipotence: ‘Unlike paper records, digital records are very vulnerable and will not survive without active intervention. We cannot leave digital records on a shelf in an archive – they need active management and migration to remain accessible in the long term.’ These statements make clear that digital records are just as vulnerable as their analogue counterparts, which although subject to degrading, are in fact more robust than is often assumed.
What is the answer to ensuring that the data we create is usable in the future, is there an answer? It is clear on whatever format we choose to archive data there is always risk involved: the risk of going out of date, the risk of vulnerability, the risk of ‘not being able to leave them on the shelf’. Records, archives and data cannot, it seems, simply look after themselves. They have to adapt to their technological environments, as much as humans do.
Over a several years, Greatbear has been collecting and restoring old audio and video tape machines. By trawling through the online car boot sale that is ebay, or travelling round the country to visit real ones, the collection has built up over time and now constitutes over seventy working machines and forty other machines that are used for spare parts and testing.
Amazingly, a good amount of the machines we have acquired have cost absolutely nothing: its all about having the canny knack of being in the right place at the right time, and knowing the right people. On several occasions we have been given fully functioning machines by film production houses who have been forced to make the latest technological transition because of changing industry standards. So what happens to these machines when their built-in obsolescence comes home to roost? They are either chucked in a skip, sold on ebay to a limited and sometimes lucrative market, or they are given to people like us who are continuing to make good use of them.
To give you a picture of how quickly technological and, consequently, monetary value changes, consider this brief example. In 1991 the value of a Sony BVW D75 was $32,000 (or $52,037/ £32,920 in today’s money), but today it is worth absolutely nothing. Despite their lack of monetary value in today’s market economy, videotape machines from the 70s, 80s and 90s are exceptionally well made. They were built to last and were designed for heavy use in editing suites, where tape was freeze framed, rewound and played back again and again on a daily basis.
Yet as technology develops, there is no more need for the AMPEX BVW 75, Panasonic MII, Sony U-matic VTR BVU-800 and others like them. These machines become inoperable artifacts, casualties of a market and quality driven, technological evolution .
We have recently completed a job for Quarry Faces, the Mendip Hills Community Heritage Project which has been funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Quarry Faces gave us 20 U-matic video tapes that were commissioned for a corporate video in the 1980s.
The Quarry Faces project aims to tell the industry’s story, produce teaching materials for both educational purposes and general interest, and create an archive to preserve images and memories of quarrying over time.
This video we digitised was shot by Coloroll Films of Kilmarnock in 1985, and was delivered to us on U-matic tape. It features a giant walking crusher at Foster Yeoman’s Merehead Quarry (Torr Works).
The video tapes we were sent were high band recordings, rather low band and of very good quality. One AMPEX U-matic tape however was problematic as the tape shell / mechanism had degraded over time and needed careful hand rewinding and reshelling in a known good and newer cassette shell.
When faced with damaged tape, often people automatically assume it needs dehydrating, a process that forces the moisture out of the tape through stable, precise, low temperature baking. However if this is not what is wrong with the tape, dehydrating or ‘baking‘ as it is more commonly called, may in fact damage the tape. If you bake acetate tape that was commonly used in the 1950s and 1960s for example, it would be destroy it.
Ampex filed for a patent for the correct temperature to recover Ampex tapes. The patent referred to “a typical temperature used is 54’C. and a typical effective time is 16 hours”.
The simple truth is, there is no all encompassing answer to know what happens to tape when it degrades, or when the cassette shell mechanism malfunctions, and each tape that is sent to us is of course individual. Digitisation and the art of restoring old tape is a relatively new area, and no one has yet made a machine that is able to precisely diagnose what is wrong with each individual tape when problems occur. Is the tape suffering from sticky shed syndrome or binder hydrolysis, or is it ‘vinegar syndrome’, a condition which afflicts acetate tape? Only through careful diagnostic work, which at Greatbear includes using our range of in-house test tapes, can the correct remedy be found.
From U-matic to VHS, Betacam to Blu Ray, Standard Definition to High Definition, the formats we use to watch visual media are constantly evolving.
Yet have you ever paused to consider what is at stake in the changing way audio-visual media is presented to us? Is viewing High Definition film and television always a better experience than previous formats? What is lost when the old form is supplanted by the new?
At Greatbear we have the pleasure of seeing the different textures, tones and aesthetics of tape-based Standard Definition video on a daily basis. The fuzzy grain of these videos contrasts starkly with the crisp, heightened colours of High Definition digital media we are increasingly used to seeing now on television, smartphones and tablets.
At Greatbear we always have one foot in the past, and one foot in the future. We act as a conduit between old and new media, ensuring that data stored on older media can continue to have a life in today’s digital intensive environments.
In 2012 Greatbear digitised a selection of audio and audio-visual tape for the Heritage Lottery Funded exhibition, Music & Liberation.
The first job was to migrate a short film by a feminist film making collective called Women in Moving Pictures who were based in Bristol in the early 1980s. The film shows how the Bristol Women’s Music Collective were using feminism to politicise music making and includes footage music workshops, group performances interspersed with self-defence classes and intimate conversations.
Film still from ‘In Our Own Time’
Several copies of the film had been stored in the Feminist Archive South, including the master copies. Out of curiosity the U-matic copy was initially digitised, before the original was migrated to high definition digital format.
Film Still from ‘In Our Own Time’
Another job digitsed a series of rare recordings on tape, donated by Maggie Nicols. This included rare footage of the pioneering Feminist Improvising Group, whose members included Sally Potter, Georgina Born and Lindsay Cooper. One of the tapes was originally recorded at half speed, a technique used to get more recording time. We used the Nakamichi 680 Discrete Head Cassette Deck to play back the tapes at the correct speed to ensure the highest quality transfer.
We also digitised a series of tapes from the open improvisation collective Maggie co-founded in 1980, Contradictions. This included the performance ‘Madness in a Circle’ and many other creative experiments.
Music & Liberation re-opens at Space Station Sixty-Five in London for the last four days of its UK-wide tour on 10 January, so if you want to listen to the music or watch the films make sure you catch it.
With the work we are involved with we have to use, keep working and store a large amount of old and usually large tape machines and other electronics. With a couple of machines it’s easy to store and easy to connect but as you grow and the variety and scope of machines develops it can soon become a wiring and space nightmare.
Racks and patchbays are the answer and the time’s come to rewire our racks as many new / old machines have joined our collection as has different types of digitising work. Key to this is the need to accurately monitor and digitise several sources while having the flexibility to change the workflow quickly whenever.
Richard from westent is providing support in this video redesign and it will be an interesting challenge mixing the old with the new to get the highest quality transfers with the most efficiency.
Greatbear protects tape-based analogue and digital media from the wave of obsolescence faced by these formats. The speed of technological change in the 20th and 21st centuries has been, and continues to be, breathtaking. Consider the amount of tapes and machines that have been made since the invention of magnetic recording tape by Valdemar Poulson in 1894. Since then, the drive for efficiency and better quality has fueled the development of numerous formats which become eclipsed as each new product hits the market.
Close up of an individual V-MAG Head off an AMPEX 1″ Machine
Obsolescence for video tape is an issue for a number of reasons. Firstly the knowledge of how to repair older video machines is disappearing: as technology changes, people are no longer trained in the maintenance of such technology.
Another crucial issue is the lack of spare parts. For video tape machines, the most sought after parts are often drum heads. Video drum heads are difficult and expensive to make, they can’t be refurbished and there is no commercial market for them, which makes them rare and sought after.
The nature of recording an audio signal is different from recording a video signal. Because of this, video heads and the video tape transport had to be designed in a different way to audio heads. Audio drum heads are in fact easier to make and they can also be ‘relapped‘ (a sophisticated form of sanding down), so it is a fairly straightforward process to refurbish them.
Because of the specific problems facing video tape obsolescence we have to rely on ‘New Old Stock’, although sometimes it is possible to use parts from scrap machines. These are however less reliable because the drums heads are part of a mechanical process and if used extensively, they will inevitably be worn down.
Betacam Head Drum
One company – Video Magnetics Inc – remake video drum heads and specialise in the repair and alignment of Betacam SP, Digital Betacam, Betacam SX, DVCAM and DVC PRO recorders, cameras, camcorders and dockables.They do not however cover all the machines we use at Greatbear.
Luckily we are well stocked up with lots of spare parts, mainly through careful collecting with an eye to work in the future.
‘We’re not sure what on here’ is a common phrase used by customers who send tape to the Greatbear. Spurred on by curiosity or creative necessity, they contact us to help them solve the mystery.
This is exactly what documentary film maker Jeanie Finlay did when she sent us VHS-C and full size VHS tapes that were used in her forthcoming film The Great Hip Hop Hoax (2013).
Jeanie wanted us to deliver her digital files as Quicktime Pro Res files, an apple codec often used in professional film production because it offers a good compromise between quality and data size.
We are also digitising material for another of Jeanie’s films, ORION, which is currently in production. ORION is the story of Jimmy Ellis, an unknown singer, who was plucked from obscurity and thrust into the spotlight as part of an audacious scheme that had him masquerade as Elvis back from the grave.
We have a series of US NTSC US VHS tapes to digitise for the film which includes copies of out takes, interviews and concert footage of Orion. The tapes were sent to us by the official (and only) Orion fan club based in Norway.
A selection of images from the Greatbear engine room on a typical day at the office.
Repairing, cleaning, baking, testing, sorting and transferring are our daily bread. The work is done to the backdrop of miscellaneous audio and audio-visual recordings ranging from early 1990s house music to ethnomusicological field recordings, corporate archives and everything else in-between.
As well as analogue tape, at Greatbear we also migrate digital tape to digital files. Digital media has become synonymous with the everyday consumption of information in the 21st century. Yet it may come as a surprise for people to encounter digital tape when we are so comfortable with the seemingly formless circulation of digital information on computers, at the cinema, on televisions, smartphones, tablets and other forms of mobile media. It is important to remember that digital information has a long history, and it doesn’t need to be binary or electronic – abacuses, Morse code and Braille are all examples of digital systems.
Digital Betacam tapes were launched in 1993 and superseded both Betacam and Betacam SP. Betacam remains the main acquisition and delivery format for broadcasting because there is very little compression on the tape. It is a very reliable format because it has a tried and tested mature transport mechanism.
While Digital Betacam is a current broadcast format, technology will inevitably move on – there is often a 10 year lifespan for broadcast media, as the parent company (SONY in this case) will cease to support the playing machines through selling spare parts.
We were sent some Digital Betacam tapes by Uli Meyer Animation Studios who are based in London. Uli Meyer make 3 and 2 D commercials, long and short films and TV commercials. 5-10 years ago the company would have had Digital Betacam machines, but as technology develops it becomes harder to justify keeping machines that can take up a lot of physical space.
Workflow in broadcasting is also becoming increasingly ‘tape less’, making digital tape formats surplus to requirements. Another issue facing the Digital Betacam is that it records information in Standard Definition format. With broadcasters using High Definition only, the need to transfer digital information in line with contemporary technological requirements is imperative for large parts of industry.
We have recently been digitising Betacam SP (‘superior performance’) video recordings, a cassette based component analogue format that is used extensively in the broadcast world. Betacam SP offered fantastic video and audio quality from its introduction in 1986, and a very similar digital cassette, Digital Betacam, is still used now.
Betacam SP was commonly used throughout the ’90s and ’00s and was not threatened with obsolescence as many older formats are. However Betacam VTR machines will soon become very hard to find spares for, thus becoming another threatened video tape format. Luckily at Greatbear we have every type of Betacam machine (PAL and NTSC) available, as well as spare parts (such as head drums), so we are able to migrate analogue formats to digital so they can be utilised by current media practitioners.
The tapes that have inspired this post are public domain tapes from the National Archives in the USA. They feature the tension filled politics of the Cold War, including footage of President John F. Kennedy, missile silos, Stalin, B29s taking off, graphics of the Iron Curtain, air raid warnings and people running into shelters. Collectively they give a powerful impression of Cold War international relations from the perspective of the American government.
The tapes were sent to us by renowned investigative journalist Paul Lashmar and were the raw material for his BBC Timewatch programme Baiting the Bear: How the real life Doctor Strangelove brought us close to Armageddon, aired in 1996.
Paul has covered many of the main news stories of the past 30 years related to terrorism, intelligence, organised crime, offshore crime, business fraud and the Cold War. He has written for newspapers such as the Independent on Sunday, the Guardian and the Evening Standard, is a regular TV and radio broadcaster and a lecturer in journalism at Brunel University.
We were recently contacted by Frank Whelan of the Comhaltas Regional Resource Centre who wanted us to digitise a recording of the Fleadh Cheoil traditional music festival in Buncranna, Co. Donegal in 1975.
Frank sent us an EIAJ ½ inch video that was recorded on a Sony High Density V-60H video tape for Helican Scan Video Tape Recorder. The tape was suffering from binder hydrolysis (often referred to as sticky shed syndrome), so needed treatment before it could be played. The tape was incubated and cleaned before the digitisation process.
The recording contains fascinating footage of solo and group performers from the biggest traditional Irish musical festival in the world. The first Fleadh Cheoil took place in 1951 and has happened every year since. Comhaltas are currently collecting archive material for every year the festival was held in order to create a document for future generations. The digitised film will go towards an exhibition and will be stored in a research facility focused on Irish traditional music.
This is an excerpt of the film that Frank kindly said we could use on our site.
Yet again bad capacitors have reared their electrolytic fluid! This time in a Grundig Video 2000 video tape player, or V2000.
Pictured above is a X2 mains film cap in the power supply of the video machine, made by Frako. This brand of capacitors are German and used in many Studer audio tape machines too which commonly have similar smoking fun such as the B67 and sometimes the A80.
A nice satisfying repair though – all Frako film and electrolytic capacitors were desoldered and replaced with 105 degrees rated Panasonics. The circuit boards on these type of machines are also well made with thick tracks so there’s little risk of lifting solder pads with this type of repair.
Other than their ageing capacitors and some dry solder joint problems these Grundig machines are excellent although as with many older domestic formats the important proprietory spares like the V2000 upper head drums are very rare new now so keeping these machines running will get harder and more expensive over time.
This format was commonly used in education and in industry and was much cheaper than the U-matic and one inch formats.
We usually see Scotch and Sony branded tape stock in this format. The Sony tape, is absolutely unplayable and dangerously so. It becomes ‘sticky’ or suffers from binder hydrolysis as Ampex audio tape commonly does. The tape will squeal loudly on any fixed guides and often stop moving around the head drum often damaging the head tips.
This tape can be restored and recovered but must be dehydrated at a very stable and constant low temperature. We’ve found this tape takes much longer than audio tape in this process and it’s also necessary to address any tape pack slip too. Custom winding machines are essential here as winding this tape on the vintage machines necessary for playback is too aggressive.
The image to the right is a tape we received and has an uneven tape pack and a small amount of mould growth too.
After dehydrating, winding and cleaning the tape and and tape pack looks more like this:
Contact us, of course! No seriously, how to transfer video to dvd or any other digital format is a very simple concept but the reality can be pretty complex. As with much mature technology, the domestic video formats and machines were often made pretty straightforward to use and hid much of the complexity of analogue video from us.
The simplest methods are to use the few machines ready made for the transfer purpose but these were only made for the most common video formats. Several manufacturers made VHS to DVD units and these can work well if MPEG2 DVD Video is the only format you require.
The problems come for the less common formats and when the tapes themselves start exhibiting physical problems.
Times are changing though and even the most common domestic formats like VHS will soon become harder to work with. While it’s still possible to buy older video machines that may work and your old video machine at home or in the attic may still work this situation is changing fairly quickly.
Very few manufacturers carry a full range of spares for their older machines anymore and often what stock they have, once sold is never remade. Even in the professional and broadcast markets companies like Sony only guarantee spares support for equipment up to 10 years from manufacture.
What this all means is that to support a range of legacy, analogue video formats as we do, constant sourcing of parts, parts machines, obsolete service manuals and older specialist knowledge is vital. This isn’t always easy or cheap and highlights one of the key issues in digitising video tape.
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 quite a task in computer time and file handling. These small domestic cameras produce good HD movies for a low cost but the compression to achieve this is very high and does not give you a file that is easily edited. The .MTS files are MPEG transport stream containers for H264 encoded video.
There are some proprietary solutions for MacOS X and Windows that will repackage the .MTS files into .MOV Quicktime containers that can be accessed by MacOS X or re-encoded to a less compressed format for editing with Final Cut Pro or Premiere. We didn’t need this though, just a reliable and quick open source workflow.
The first and most important issue is to rejoin the camera split files.
These cameras use FAT32 file systems which cannot handle individual files larger than 2GB so they split the .MTS video file into chunks. As each chunk in a continuous sequence references the other chunks these must be joined in the correct order. This is easily achieved with the cat command.
The rejoined .MTS files can now be reencoded to a more manageable size using open source software such as Handbrake. We also needed to deinterlace our footage as it was shot interlaced and it would be accessed on progressive displays. This will increase the encoding time but without it any movement will look odd with visible artifacts.
Finding the ‘sweet spot’ for encoding can be time consuming but in this case was important as projected text needed to be legible but the file sizes kept manageable for reasonable upload times!
Celebrate What? is a documentary we transferred and created DVD access copies for its director recently. He only had a VHS copy of the 8mm original unfortunately but it’s still a great piece of history about St Pauls, the St Pauls Carnival and Bristol.
If anyone can recognise themselves or anyone else, please contact the director, Colin Thomas by email, ctbr03509 at blueyonder.co.uk
2 U-matic video tapes were discovered of a Black Roots live performance in Bristol in the 1980s. We were able to restore, digitise and make the umatic transfer of this recording as a high quality, uncompressed Quicktime file then encode and author a DVD for future release by Bristol Archive Records.
Some information supplied by the label:
Black Roots were Bristol’s premier Reggae band throughout the eighties and having gone their separate ways in the nineties they reformed last year and will be rekindling the magic with an intimate hometown gig at the Fleece on Friday September 9th, the show coincides with the release of “Black Roots – The Reggae Singles Anthology”, released on Bristol Archive Records in collaboration with Nubian Records, this release showcases all of the band’s singles released during their first decade and as an extra bonus the CD issue comes coupled with a DVD of the band’s 1986 video release “Celebration” recorded at the long gone Studio nightclub in Bristol. This show will be something special and likely sell out so book your tickets early and don’t miss out.
We were very excited recently when Chris Bradfield from Soundscommercial uncovered a previously unseen batch of EIAJ half inch reel to reel video tapes. In the process of looking for 1976 footage for their event, Spirit of 76, we uncovered many other gems. One of these goals was the famous hat-trick scored by Kevin Mabbutt against Manchester United at Old Trafford in 1978. Mabbutt is one of only two players in Football League history even to have done this and this footage was never recorded anywhere else!
Unfortunately this large batch of valuable recordings had been stored in damp, unheated conditions and had suffered. The tape had deteriorated in several ways.
Mould growth was evident on some tapes
The oldest tapes from the early 1970s were shedding oxide severely and had little lubrication left in the binder.
Binder hydrolysis, often called sticky shed was evident on other tapes.
Each issue needed a different process to treat the tape. The common assumption that ‘tape baking‘ will restore all unplayable tape is not true. It is just one solution to one of these issues and can cause more problems if used incorrectly. Deteriorated video tape is much less forgiving than audio tape when attempting transfer and must always be handled and processed with extreme care. Crinkled, curled, edge damaged tapes are next to impossible to restore back to their original condition and it’s common that more damage can occur when owners are desperate to transfer footage.
We were able to restore all the tapes to a playable condition and make uncompressed quicktime files of these.
Below is a clip from a later recording. We are not able, unfortunately, to show the Kevin Mabbutt clip yet.
Unseen to 32 years, although there could possibly be other tapes in the vaults at Abbey Road.
This NTSC U-matic transfer to uncompressed quicktime files was a damaged tape that at some point in its life had been ‘eaten’ by a greedy U-matic machine! The tape shell also had some plastic debris inside that needed removing before it was safe to attempt loading and migration.
We’re very happy to be working with Mike Wright and the Archive for Mathematical Sciences and Philosophy on a large scale and ongoing transfer, restoration and online management programme.
We have several time base correctors and frame synchronisers at our disposal. One recent addition is a new old stock (NOS) CEL Tetra. This is an early 1990s motion adaptive Standards Converter for PAL, SECAM, NTSC 3.58 and NTSC 4.43 systems. A very flexible unit with composite, Y/C (S-Video), U-matic DUB High Band/Low Band and component inputs and outputs.
Out unit still has its shipping caps over the BNC sockets and looks unused but after 5 minutes of power a cloud of white smoke billowed out of the cooling fan accompanied by a pungent smell. The Shaffner EMI mains filter had a nasty, sticky brown residue leaking out and all around the back of it. This is the second TBC that I’ve had this happen to. I’d assumed these units get left on for long periods when used in broadcast applications which would hasten their demise. According to their website, the mean time between failures (MTBF) of their recent products is around 2,000,000 hours! Our CEL TBC doesn’t look like it’s done more than 30 minutes so maybe there’s been some dodgy electrolytic fluid in these units just like the motherboard capacitor problems between 2000 and 2003.
We use time base correctors and frame synchronizers all the time in the transfer and digitising of analogue video tape.
One of our more flexible and high quality units had recently developed an annoying and very obvious fault on its video outputs. While the unit was working there were faint but distinct horizontal lines on the video. This phenomenon is often called a hum bar and can be caused by ground loops.
In this case we isolated the unit from the rest of our installation and using a separate power point the problem was still there. Looking at the unit itself it is a very deep and heavy 1U case with two 40mm cooling fans at the rear corners. It is quite old too and being designed for continuous studio use is likely to get hot and have been on for very long periods.
The video fault appeared to be AC ripple ‘riding’ on the DC power. It was time to look at the electrolytic capacitors in the power supply.
Although I could have tested each one, all these caps were old and only rated for 3000 hrs at 85 celcius so they all had to go! Here’s a list of them:
The only one hard to find was the large 400v dump one. Most units now are thinner and taller but eBay came to rescue here.
This shotgun approach worked beautifully and the fault had gone. While tracing the exact fault is always the best way, capacitor often get a hard life and will not last indefinitely, especially in switch mode power supplies.
A recent addition to our video arsenal is this rare 1976 vintage 1/2″ colour reel to reel machine.
This has needed some work to get it functioning well such as new belts, hardened grease cleaned off the mechanism, etc but is now able to transfer colour recordings made in this format of reel to reel video.
A more detailed article on the repair of this will appear soon as will information about our other reel to reel video machines, the Hitachi / Shibaden EIAJ machine, the Sony CV-2100 skip field VTR and the enormous Ampex VPR-2B 1″ video machine… and we’ve got two of these!
We’ve been honored recently to have won a large contract to help in the digital migration of an extensive educational video archive by the transfer from U-matic archive copies to uncompressed video files.
While the archive had been stored in an suitable environment and rarely if at all played, they had not survived well. The Sony branded tapes from the 1970s and 1980s all exhibited binder hydrolysis or sticky shed syndrome. We were still able to get good transfers though using our range of U-matic machines, particularly the Sony BVU-950P and For-A Time Base Corrector.
Greatbear recently helped the Streetscene section of Bristol City Council in an investigation in a serial flytipper.
DVD footage of the flytipper had been taken by a member of the public of flytipping activity but this DVD had other unrelated footage on that needed removal. The DVD was also damaged and needed slow, repeated reading to rip the MPEG stream successfully.
Using MPEGstreamclip it was then straightforward to trim the stream, resave and create a new DVD with just the necessary footage.
Over the last 12 months we’ve seen this side of our business grow and adapt to the range of transfer needs that individuals, businesses and media creation organisations have.
We are able to support a wide range analogue and digital, consumer and professional video formats from the late 1970s onwards such as: Betamax, VHS, SVHS, VHS-C, Video 2000, 8mm, Hi8, U-matic, Betacam, miniDV, DVCAM, etc.
We offer straight video transfer to DVD and a higher quality transfer service to DV or uncompressed AVI which can then be supplied on hard drive, edited, encoded to a very high quality DVD or supplied on digital tape.
We pride ourself on our positive, friendly service and are happy to give advice over the phone or by email. When you call us you won’t be stuck in a voicemail system or told we’re an internet company so don’t like speaking on the phone!
