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 a Grand Slam tennis match arises from it, like a speech bubble, communicating the machine’s power to capture the fleeting live event. The man’s stare into the domestic environment constructs desire in a way that feels entirely new in 1976: a masculinity that appropriates the private space of the home, now transformed as a location where media events are transmitted and videotaped.
The man’s gaze is confrontational. It invites those looking to participate in a seductive, shared message: videotape-in the home-will change your life forever.
In the 1970s Philips were leading figures in the development of domestic video tape technology. Between 1972 and 1979, the company produced seven models of the N-1500 video ‘TV recorder’. It was the first time video tape entered the domestic environment, and the format offered a number of innovations such as timed, unattended recording (‘busy people needn’t miss important programmes’), an easy loading mechanism, a built in TV tuner, a digital electronic time switch and stop motion bar.
The N-1500 converged upon several emergent markets for video tape. While SONY’s hulking U-matic format almost exclusively targeted institutional and industrial markets, the N-1500 presented itself as a more nimble alternative: ‘Compact and beautifully designed it can be used in schools, advertising agencies, sale demonstrations and just about everywhere else.’
Used alongside the Philips Video Camera, the N-1500 could capture black and white video, offering ‘a flexible, economic and reliable’ alternative to EIAJ/ porta-pak open reel video. Marketing also imagined uses for sports professionals: practices or competitive games could be watched in order to analyse and improve performance.
Although N-1500 tape machines were very expensive (£649 [1976]/ £4,868.38 [2016]), the primary market for the product was overwhelmingly domestic. In 2016 we are fairly used to media technologies disrupting our intimate, every day lives. We are also told regularly that this or that gadget will make our lives easier.
Such needs are often deliberately and imaginatively invented. The mid-1970s was a time when video tape was novel, and its social applications experimental. How could video tape be used in the home? How would it fit into existing social relationships? The marketing brochure for the Philips N-1502 offer compelling evidence of how video tape technology was presented to consumers in its early days.
One aspect highlighted how the machine gave the individual greater control of their media environment: ‘Escape from the Dictatorship of TV Timetables’!
The VCR could also help liberate busy people from the disappointment of missing their favourite TV programmes, ‘if visitors call at the moment of truth don’t despair. Turn the TV off and the VCR on.’
In the mid 1970s domestic media consumption was inescapably communal, and the N-1500 machine could help sooth ‘typical’ rifts within the home. ‘You want to see a sports programme but your wife’s favourite serial is on the other channel. The solution? Simple. Just switch on your Philips VCR.’
Owning the N-1500 meant there would be ‘no more arguments about which channel to select – you watch one while VCR makes a parallel recording from another.’ Such an admission tells us a lot about the fragility of marriages in the 1970s, as well as the central place TV-watching occupied as a family activity. More than anything, the brochure presents videotape technology as a vital tool that could help people take control over their leisure time and negotiate the competing tastes of family members.
N-1500 transfers
As the first domestic video tape technology, the Philips N-1500 ‘set a price structure and design standard that is still unshaken,’ wrote the New Scientist in 1983.
In a preservation context, however, these early machines are notoriously difficult to work with. Tapes heads are fragile and wear quickly because of a comparatively high running tape speed (11.26 ips). Interchange is often poor between machines, and the entry/ exit guides on the tape path often need to be adjusted to ensure the tapes track correctly.
Later models, the N-1700 onwards, used slant azimuth technology, a recording technique patented by Professor Shiro Okamura of the University of Electronic Communications, Tokyo in 1959. Slant azimuth was adopted by JVC, Philips and SONY in the mid-1970s, and this decision is heralded as a breakthrough moment in the evolution of domestic video tape technology. The technique offered several improvements to the initial N-1500 model, which used guard bands to prevent cross talk between tracks, and the Quadruplex technology developed by Ampex in the late 1950s. Slant azimuth meant more information could be recorded onto the tape without interference from adjacent tracks and, crucially, the tape could run at a slower speed, use less tape and record for longer.
In general, the design of the N-1500’s tape path and transport doesn’t lend itself to reliability.
As S P Bali explains:
‘One reason for the eventual failure of the Philips VCR formats was that the cassette used coaxial spools—in other words, spools stacked one on top of the other. This means that the tape had to run a skew path which made it much more difficult to control. The tape would jam, and even break, especially ageing cassettes.’ [1]
Philips N1500 (top) & Philips N1702 (bottom) machines in the Greatbear studio
Such factors make the Philips N-1500 series an especially vulnerable video tape format. The carrier itself is prone to mechanical instability, and preservation worries are heightened by a lack of available spare parts that can be used to refurbish poorly functioning machines.
If you have valuable material recorded on this format, be sure to earmark it as a preservation priority.
Notes
[1] S P Bali (2005) Consumer Electronics, Delhi: Pearson Education, 465.
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 refurbishment, and whether Terry accepted that obsolescence for analogue media was imminent, as many audiovisual archivists claim. Many thanks Terry for taking the time to write the article, we hope you enjoy it.
***
a gap inspection being carried out on an Ampex, half inch, two track, stereo replay head
Before I opened Summertone Ltd. I was for very many years, the Managing Director and magnetic head designer for the head manufacturing company Branch & Appleby. This was a specialist company serving the audio recording industry with magnetic heads as a supplier to Original Equipment Manufacturers in the analogue tape and film industry and for replacement heads for other types. B & A was particularly strong in the magnetic head supply for recording on perforated film for the synchronisation and editing of film sound, being the supplier of heads to many OEM studio film equipment manufacturers. The range of analogue heads designed and made by B & A was legion, ranging from 32 track 2 inch to 8mm film heads. B & A also supplied heads for other purposes, magnetic card readers and bank note verifiers being examples.
To be able to refurbish a magnetic head, it is essential to understand the working, the manufacturing principals and the materials used in it’s manufacture.
That expertise is with Summertone and is the reason for its success. The various magnetic materials used (mumetals of various grades, vitrovacs, ferrites etc.) each require specialist equipment and methods of surface finish to obtain intimate contact with the recording medium. A fact that is frequently overlooked is that a refurbished magnetic head has a performance that is superior to when it was new! The reason is that the magnetic losses due to the gap depth are less. So refurbishment not only restores the head’s ability to contact the magnetic material correctly, having removed the uneven wear caused by the abrasive recording medium, but also gives the head an improved performance, essential for the reproduction of archive, sometimes damaged material.
Digital Changes
The audio industry has of course changed with the coming of the digital age, some say for the better, but others disagree. We refurbish analogue heads for studios and individuals that are dedicated to the recording and reproduction of sound with the full complement of all the harmonics that are lost with a digital frequency cut off. We cannot hear them, but they colour the overall sound picture that we hear. That is the reason for the continuation of the use and restoration of the abundance of analogue machines by our studio customers (and some private users also).
The magnetic head is the vital link with the medium and is essential that it is kept in tip-top condition.
There are also many archival organisations that require the services of head specialists. The British Film Institute for instance, prides itself with the fact that the preserved sound it achieves is in many cases superior to the original public performances. This is due to their keeping their magnetic/optical sound pickups in excellent order and then, after transfer, using modern digital techniques to manipulate and store the results. Summertone receives heads from all over the world for refurbishment and is proud and pleased to say that the percentage of heads that it receives for refurbishment that are not able to receive suitable treatment, is very small indeed.
The scarcity of machines can be a problem, but as the number of studios using analogue machines diminishes they tend to pass to dedicated companies and individuals who appreciate their importance and who go to great lengths to ensure they are kept in a working condition or used for spares, not thrown in the skip. We appreciate that this cannot go on for ever, but the indications at the present time are that there are many who have the expertise to help in the specialist areas needed to keep archive machines in good working order.
It is a fact that the older analogue machines seem to be so well designed and built that they have very few faults that cannot be rectified easily. For instance, last week we switched on a 1960s valve recorder that had not been run for very many years. It performed perfectly. Another just needed a simple capacitor replacement for it to also perform. The point we are making is that the older technology was, and still is, reliable and understandable, unlike many modern machines.
It is possible to build new tape head blocks from scratch, but that is really not economical due to cost. We can, and do, still have replacement heads made to my designs but only if it is justified to keep a valuable, scarce, rare format, machines functioning. There are heads around, both new and second hand that can be refurbished. These can be obtained by combining two machines both for mechanical parts and heads. Summertone also has a small stock of heads.
Obsolescence
I do not agree with the archivists who say that there is a 10-15 year span left to transfer material. Magnetic tape and film has stood the test of longevity without deterioration which is why it is still being used for digital archiving. More modern archive methods have been failing. With good maintenance, analogue machines have a good life left and spares are still able to be obtained and manufactured as they are understandable to good engineers. I am sorry to say that when Summertone closes, our expertise for magnetic heads will be lost as it has not been possible to transfer a lifetime of analogue experience to another, due partly to the lack of financial incentive.
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.
Grundig DC90 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 block.
The compact cassette also offered a more user-friendly experience for the consumer.
Whereas reel-to-reel tape had to be threaded manually through the tape transport, all the user of a compact cassette tape machine had to do was insert a tape in a machine and press play.
Format Wars
One of the less-emphasised histories of the compact cassette is the alternative cassette standards that were vying for market domination alongside Philips in the early 1960s.
One alternative was the DC-International system developed by the German company Grundig who at that time were a leading manufacturer of tape, radio and Hi-Fi systems.
In 1965 Grundig introduced its first cassette recorder, the C 100, which used the Double Cassette (DC) International system. The DC-International used two-reels within the cassette shell similar to the Compact-System promoted by Philips. There were, however, important differences between the two standards.
The DC-International standard used a larger cassette shell (120 x 77 x 12mm) and recorded at a speed of 2 inches per second. The Compact-System was smaller (100 × 63 × 12mm) and recorded at 1⅞ in/s.
Grundig DC-International compared to standard compact cassette
Fervent global competition shaped audio cassette production in the mid-1960s.
Grundig’s DC-International was effectively (and rapidly) ousted from the market by Philips’ ‘open’ licensing strategy.
Eric D. Daniel and C. Denis Mee explain that
‘From the beginning Philips pursued a strategy of licensing its design as widely as possible. According to Frederik Philips, president of the firm at the time, this policy was the brainchild of Mr. Hartong, a member of the board of management. Hartong believed that Philips should allow other manufacturers access to the design, turning the compact cassette into a world product….Despite initial plans to charge a fee, Philips eventually decided to offer the license for free to any firm willing to produce the design. Several firms adopted the compact cassette almost immediately, including many Japanese manufacturers.’ [1]
The outcome of this licensing strategy was a widespread, international adoption of Philips’ compact cassette standard.
In Billboard on 16 September 1967 it was reported: ‘Philips has scored a critical victory on the German market for its “Compact-System”, which now seems certain to have uncontested leadership. Teldec has switched from the DC-International system to the Philips system, and Grundig, the major manufacturer of the DC-International system, announced that it will also start manufacturing cassette players for the Philips system.’
Cassettes today
The portable, user-friendly compact cassette has proved to be a resilient format. Despite falling foul to the digital march of progress in the early 1990s, the past couple of years have been defined by claims that cassettes are back and (almost) cool again.
Cassettes from the 1960s and early 1970s carry specific preservation concerns.
Loss of lubricant is a common problem. You will know if your tape is suffering lubricant loss if you hear a horrible squealing sound during play back. This is known as ‘stick slip,’ which describes the way friction between magnetic tape and tape heads stick and slip as they move antagonistically through the tape transport.
This squealing poses big problems because it can intrude into the signal path and become part of the digital transfer. Tapes displaying such problems therefore require careful re-lubrication to ensure the recording can be transferred in its optimum – and squeal free – state.
Early compact cassettes also have problems that characterise much ‘new media.’
As Eric D. Daniel et al elaborate: ‘during the compact cassette’s first few years, sound quality was mediocre, marred by background noise, wow and flutter, and a limited frequency range. While ideal for voice recording applications like dictation, the compact cassette was marginal for musical recording.’ [2]
The resurgence in compact cassette culture may lull people into a false sense that recordings stored on cassettes are not high risk and do not need to be transferred in the immediate future.
It is worth remembering, however, that although playback machines will continue to be produced in years to come, not all tape machines are of equal, archival quality.
The last professional grade audio cassette machines were produced in the late 1990s and even the best of this batch lag far behind the tape machine to end all tape machines – the Nakamichi Dragon with its Automatic Azimuth Correction technology – that was discontinued in 1993.
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 is the creation of simulated media environments that re-unite TV production crews with the specific machines they used in order to trigger sensory, practical and emotional memories.
Such embodied insights are largely absent from traditional historical research which is invested in maintaining a conceptual distance from ‘the past’.
This ‘hands-on’ approach can bring alternative historical perspectives alive by activating old machinery and the cultural practices attached to their use.
Tinkering
Andreas Fickers described these methodologies in his keynote as ‘experimental media archaeology.’
Tinkering and ‘playing’ with media technologies were presented as alternative techniques that can ‘re-sensitise’ researchers to the lost dimensions of media experience.
Such knowledge, which may resound as feelings of shock, disorientation or novelty, quickly become lost when media are normalised through everyday use.
Playing with old media as if they were new may offer crucial insights into what technologies enable us to do or think. Such activities are even valuable when a media tool breaks down.
Practicing Engagement
Practicing engagement was very much the defining feature of the conference.
The Projection Project based at Warwick University for example, explores the social and technical histories of cinema projection in the transition from analogue to the digital.
Lori Emerson discussed her work at the Media Archaeology Lab and Jason Papadimas, Sebastian Doring, and Jose Munoz tinkered with children’s toys and circuit boards to explore how cultural logics are socialised through the use of tools.
Many presentations focused on archiving software, video games and computational culture. Laine Nooney and Kevin Driscoll‘s presented their work on Softalk, an Apple II enthusiast magazine that circulated 1980–84, and Christian Hviid Mortensen from the Danish Media Museum discussed the challenges of curating video game culture.
Tape splices
Of most interest to Greatbear, because of its focus on magnetic tape, was Jessica Borge’s presentation on ‘The Secret Psychosexual Counselling Tapes of Dr Joan Malleson.’
Jessica recounted her research on a collection of clandestine recordings made by Dr Joan Malleson shortly before her suicide in 1956. During the course of her research Jessica realised that recordings were made without patients’ consent. This meant she could not write about the recorded content due to data protection issues.
Her focus then turned to the materiality of the tapes which enabled a close reconstruction of the scenarios in which the recordings were made.
Jessica’s presentation clearly speaks to the question of whether tape stock should be kept or destroyed post-digitisation. As a historian it was vital for her to see the original materials. Viewing the reels them enabled her to draw nuanced conclusions that would not have been possible if she had consulted access copies alone.
Yet keeping such artefacts, particularly when they cannot be played back in 10-15 years from now, will seem counter-intuitive and impractical for many archives, who are often have limited storage space available.
One way to ensure that the materiality of historical artefacts is recorded will of course lie in detailed metadata description. Jessica’s experience makes it clear the extent to which descriptive practices must go if the materiality of artefact is to be sufficiently captured in digital form. It is common place for extraneous information, such as writing on the tape box to be recorded in metadata records. Arguably the condition of the tape must also be recorded, including details such as splice marks or evidence of deterioration. These marks tell us crucial things about the environmental life of the tape and helps to place the object in its historical context, animating how it was used.
The Hands On History conference was a valuable opportunity for scholars and practitioners to meet and learn about these emerging historical methodologies.
The Network for Experimental Media Archaeology will continue to build on the connections made at the conference, and will act as a support hub for research, teaching and curatorial activities in this area. This is something Greatbear look forward to participating in, as preserving magnetic tape involves a lot of tinkering and a lot of learning.
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 was an ideal time to get the tapes digitised. The video transfers done in the Great Bear studio will contribute to the growing amount of documentation online celebrating the band’s antics.
Betwen 1976-1978 Deaf School were signed to Warner Brothers, releasing three albums.
Deaf School are described by music journalist Dave Simpson as ‘a catalyst band‘ ‘whose influence was great – who might even have changed pop history in their own way – but who never made the leap into the music history books.’
Deaf School nonetheless remain legendary figures to the people who loved, and were profoundly transformed by, their music.
Holly Johnson, who went on the achieve great success with Frankie Goes to Hollywood, described Deaf School as ‘the benchmark that had to be transcended. Someone had to make a bigger splash. After the “big bang” of the 1960s, they were the touchstone that inspired a wave of creative rebellion and musical ambition that revived Liverpool’s music scene for a generation.’
Camp and Chaotic
Deaf School’s performances were a celebratory spectacle of the camp and chaotic.
The band took their lead from art music projects such as the Portsmouth Sinfonia, an orchestra comprised of non musicians which anyone could join, regardless of ability, knowledge or experience.
‘Everyone who wanted to be part of Deaf School was welcomed and no one turned away. The music was diverse and varied, drawing on rock and roll, Brecht and cabaret,’ Steve told us.
Rare Footage
The ½” porta-pak video tapes feature rare footage of Deaf School performing on 1st December 1975 at the Everyman Theatre, one of Liverpool’s many iconic venues.*
The show was organised for Warner Brothers employees who had taken the train from London to Liverpool to see Deaf School perform.
Porta-pak open reel video was revolutionary for its time: It was the first format to enable people outside the professional broadcast industry to make (often documentary) moving images.
For this reason material captured on ½” videotape is often fairly eclectic and its edgy, glitchy aesthetic celebrated by contemporary documentary makers.
The Greatbear studio has certainly received many interesting ½” video tapes from artists and performers active in the 1970s. We also did an interview with researcher Peter Sachs Collopy who discusses how porta-pak video technology was perceived by artists of that era as a ‘technology of consciousness’.
Non-professional video tape recordings made in the 1970s are, nevertheless, fairly rare. At that time it was still expensive to acquire equipment. Even if videos were made, once they had served their purpose there is a strong possibility the tape would be re-used, wiping whatever was recorded on there.
With this in mind, we are in a lucky position to be able to watch the Deaf School videos, which have managed to survive the rough cuts of history.
Preserving 1/2 ” open reel video tape
The video of the Everyman Theatre performance was cleaned prior to transfer because it was emitting a small amount of loose binder. It was recorded onto Scotch-branded ½” video tape which, in our experience, pose very few problems in the transfer process.
The other tape Steve sent us was recorded onto a SONY-branded ½” video tape. In comparison, these tapes always need to be ‘baked’ in a customised-incubator in order to temporarily restore them to playable condition.
The preservation message to take away here is this: if you have ½” video tape on SONY branded stock, make them your digitisation priority!
Deaf School Now
Steve told me that members of Deaf School ‘always kept in touch and remained friends’.
Over the past 10 years they have reformed and performed a number of gigs in the UK and Tokyo.
In 2016 they are planning to go to the U.S., reaching out to ‘the pockets of people all over the world who know about Deaf School.’
Ultimately though Liverpool will always be the band’s ‘spiritual home.’
When they return to Liverpool the gigs are always sold out and they have great fun, which is surely what being in a band is all about.
—
* The Everyman archive is stored in Special Collections at Liverpool John Moores University. This archive listing describes how the Everyman ‘is widely recognised as a pivotal influence and innovative key player in regional theatre. A model of innovative practice and a centre of experimental theatre and new writing, it has thrived as a nurturing ground for a new breed of directors, actors, writers and designers, and a leading force in young people’s theatre.’
Many thanks to Steve Lindsey for talking to us about his tapes!
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 in Yugoslavia’s new wave history. They produced two albums, Dijagnoza (1981) (translated as ‘Diagnosis’) and Design for the Real World (1987), both of which, due to peculiar quirks of fate, have never received widespread distribution.
Yet this may all change soon: 2016 is the 35th anniversary of Dijagnoza, a milestone marked by a vinyl re-issue containing transfers made, we are proud to say, in the Greatbear studio.
In 2016 Design for the Real World will receive its first ever vinyl pressing. The name of the album was inspired by a UN project that aimed to create low financed, locally maintained technologies from recycled materials. It was previously only available on the CD compilation Archaeological Artefacts of the Technophile Civilisations of the Yesteryears (or Science Fiction as a Genre in the Second Part of the Twentieth Century).
AEG DIN Hubs
The tapes Dušan sent us were wound onto AEG DIN hubs (a hub being the round shape around which the open reel tape is wrapped). DIN hubs were used in studios in Germany and mainland Europe.
Compared with NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) hubs that were used in the UK/ US, they have a wider diameter (99mm/ 70mm respectively).
In a preservation context playing tapes wound on AEG DIN hubs is unnecessarily awkward. To digitise the material our first step was to re-spool Dušan’s tapes onto NAB hubs. This enabled us to manage the movement of the tape through the transport mechanism in a careful and controlled way.
Another problem we faced was that the BASF LGR 50 tape was ‘dry shedding’ a lot and needed to be cleaned extensively.
When tape dry sheds it clogs the tape heads. This prevents a clear reading of the recorded signal and risks seriously damaging both tape and machine if playback continues.
Apart from these issues, which are fairly common with older tape, the tapes played back well. The final transferred files reflect the crisp clarity of the original masters.
New Wave Music in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
In the late 1970s Dušan was captivated by the emergence of New Wave music in Yugoslavia, which he described as bringing ‘big musical changes.’
Alongside Enco Lesić, who owned an innovative commercial studio in Belgrade, Dušan helped to produce and record music from the burgeoning new wave scene. One of these projects was the compilation album Paket Aranžman / Package Tour. The album gained cult status at the time and continues to be popular today.
In the same studio Dr Spira and the Human Beings recorded Dijagnoza. Dušan’s technical role in the studio meant his band could take their time with the recording process. This is evident in the finished work which contain a number of energetic, committed performances.
The music is equally captivating: inventive rhythmical detours and absurd vocal expressions populate a polyphony of musical styles and surprises, conjuring the avant-rock histrionics of Rock in Opposition acts such as Etron Fou Leloublan and Univers Zero.
Listen to Dr Spira – ‘Kraj avanture otimača izgubljenog kovčega na Peščanoj Planeti’ / ‘The end of misadventure of the Raiders of the Lost Ark on the Dune’ – the lyrics sung by the women are ‘Stop digging and get out of the hole, the sand will collapse on us! The sand! The sand!‘
The master copies for Dijagnoza were cut in Trident studios, London, overseen by Dušan. During his visit to London he made 50, hand-numbered white label copies of the album. For a period of time these were the only copies of Dijagnoza available.
The grand plan was to recoup the costs of recording Dijagnoza through the commercial release of the album, but this never happened. The record company refused to pay any money because, from their perspective, the money had already been spent and the recordings already existed.
They did however agree to release the album two years later, by this time Dijagnoza and Dr Spira had already claimed a small corner of Yugoslavia’s new wave folklore.
As a musician in Yugoslavia in the early 1980s Dušan told us he was ‘exposed to all kinds of music: East, West and everything else. We did not follow one mainstream and picked up things from all over the place.’ He described it as an ‘open world with dynamic communication and a different outlook.’
The musical world of Dr Spira is inspired by the ironic social awareness of artists such as Frank Zappa, Russian writer Nikolai Gogol’s fascination with the grotesque and the paranoid social commentary of Czech author Franz Kafka. Like many post-punk and new wave acts of the early 1980s, Dr Spira were concerned with how popular culture, language, myth and the media conditioned ‘reality’.
The song ‘Tight Rope’ dancer, for example, creates a fantastical world of Russian Roulette, as a blind- folded Tight Rope walker muses on life as a meaningless game constricted by the inevitable limits of individual perception:
‘It’s my turn to die- said the Violinist
I ain’t so sure about it- the Singer replied
What difference does it make- said the Ballerina
For all the Numbers destiny’s the same.’
These lyrics, presented here in translation, are examples of the satirical and often surreal humour used by Dr Spira which aimed to make the familiar seem strange so that it could be experienced by listeners in a completely different way.
Memory studies scholar Martin Pogačar explains that ‘the whole new-wave “project,” especially being a youth subculture, was meant to be fun and an accidental social revolt, in the end it turned out to be a seminal landmark in the (musical) history of Yugoslavia. This inherently variegated and far from one-dimensional genre, loud in sounds and sophisticated in texts, decisively redefined the boundaries of Yu-rock music.’ [1]
With the re-issue of Dijagnoza andDesign for the Real World, the legacy of this movement, and the contribution of Dr Spira and the Human Beings in particular, will continue to resound. [2]
Notes
[1] Martin Pogačar (2008) ‘Yu-Rock in the 1980s: Between Urban and Rural, Nationalities Papers’, 36:5, 815-832, 829. DOI: 10.1080/00905990802373504.
[2] Huge thanks to Dušan for talking to us about his life and work.
The UK is unique in this regard. In Australia, for example, the approach to audiovisual preservation appears more integrated (if no less fraught!)
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia make no distinction between audio and video tape in their Deadline 2025: Collections at Risk position paper. It is the endangered status of all magnetic tape collections that are deemed a preservation priority.
Preservation Specifics
From experience we know that the preservation of videotape brings with it specific challenges.
It cannot be subsumed into a remit to preserve moving image archives in general.
‘Film formats have changed little in the last 50 years. Videotape, however, has seen many changes and various formats have come and gone. Videotape formats are in a constant cycle of change, driven largely by the market interests of the manufacturers of the hardware. Any preservation strategy for archival materials must be prepared to embrace a culture of format migration as the commercial market develops and new formats become the industry standard. The only variable is when, not if, collections require to be transferred.’
Machine Provision
It is worth reiterating what public campaigns to preserve audio and film heritage make patently clear: recordings on magnetic tape have a finite lifespan, and the end of that lifespan is alarmingly near.
In years to come, one of the biggest challenge for the preservation of video tape in particular will be sourcing working machines for all the different formats.
In a recent hardware inventory conducted in the Great Bear studio, we noted that video tape machines outnumbered audio tape machines by 40%. This might be comforting to hear, and rest assured, we are well stocked to manage the range of possible video tape transfers that come our way. Yet this number becomes less impressive when you consider there are over 32 different video tape formats (compared with 16 audio), with very little degree (if any) of interoperability between them.
In comparison with audio tape, and in particular open reel formats which can be played back on a range of different machines, video tape offers significantly less flexibility.
The mechanical circuitry of video tape machines can be immensely complex. Due to the vast market turnover of video formats, these machines often used ‘immature’ technology.
To put it bluntly: proportionally there are less videotape machines, and those machines were not built to last.
Viewed in this light, the status of video tape archives, even compared with audio tape, seem very precarious indeed.
The cultural value of video tape
Why, then, has video tape been persistently overlooked?
Why have we not received calls to ‘save’ video tape, or confront its undeniable ‘fragility’?
Patterson believes that videotape, in comparison to film, has historically been perceived as a ‘broadcast thing,’ or used predominantly in amateur/ domestic settings.
The perception of videotape’s cultural value affects both the acquisition and preservation of the medium.
Patterson explains: ‘Public film archives rely on people depositing things because there is no money for acquisition. If people find rolls of film they have the sense that it might be interesting. Videotape, especially video cassettes, don’t make people think in the same way. If people have a box of VHS cassettes, they are less likely to see it as important. Even at the point when home move making became more democratised, the medium they were using seemed more throwaway.’
The relatively small amounts of video tape collections being deposited in regional film archives is, James believes, a ‘public awareness issue.’ This means they ‘don’t see nearly enough or as much videotape’ as they want. This is a pity because amateur collections may hold the key to building a varied, everyday picture of regional histories uniquely captured by accessible videotape technologies.
Despite comparatively uneven acquisition, ‘most regional archives have significant quantities of videotape.’ In MACE these are ‘mostly broadcast’, deposited by ITV Midlands, on formats such as Beta SP, 1”C, uMatic, VHS and smaller quantities of digital video tape. MACE’s material is migrated to digital files on an order-by-order basis—there is no systematic plan in place to transfer this material or place them in a secure digital repository post-transfer.
This has implications for the preservation of challenging mediums, such as videotape, which require specialised technical infrastructure and skills, not to mention the people power necessary to manage large amounts of real-time transfers.
There is also the comparative difficulty, until recently, of video digitisation, as Dave Rice explains:
‘Archival communities that focus on formats such as documents, still images, and audio have had longer experience with digitisation workflows, whereas the digitisation of video (hampered by storage sizes, bandwidth, and expenses) has only recently become more approachable. While digitisation practices for documents, still images, and audio include more community consensus regarding best practices and specifications, there is much greater technical diversity regarding the workflows, specifications, and even objectives for digitising archival video.’
This point was echoed by Megan McCooley, moving image archivist at the Yorkshire Film Archive. She told me that preserving film stock is relatively manageable through careful control of storage environments, but preserving video is more challenging because of the lack of firm ‘protocols in place’ to guide best practices. It is not the case that videotape digitisation is simply ‘off the radar’ and not seen as an issue among moving image archivists. Rather the complexity of the process makes systematic video digitisation ‘harder for regional archives to undertake’ because they are smaller, lack specialised technical video facilities, and are often dependent on project-based funding. Patterson also commented that within regional archives there is a ‘technological knowledge gap’ when it comes to videotape.
Are the times a-changing?
There is the sense, from talking to Megan and James, that attention is beginning to turn to video preservation, but until now other projects have taken precedence. This is the case for the BFI’s national Unlocking Film Heritage project where the main stipulation for digitisation funding is that nominated titles must originate on film.
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 of early video as a technology of consciousness. Can you tell us a bit more about this idea? Did early users of portable video technology use video in order to witness events?
Absolutely! Technology of consciousness is a term I found in communications scholar Fred Turner’s work, particularly his essay on the composer Paul DeMarinis (“The Pygmy Gamelan as Technology of Consciousness,” in Paul DeMarinis: Buried in Noise, ed. Ingrid Beirer, Sabine Himmelsbach, and Carsten Seiffarth [Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 2010], 23–27). Every technology affects how we think and experience the world, but I use this phrase specifically to refer to technologies whose users understood that they were doing so. The quintessential examples are psychedelic drugs, which people use specifically in order to alter their consciousness. For many videographers in the 1960s and 1970, video was like a drug in that it helped a person see the world in new ways; a cartoon in the magazine Radical Software proclaimed, for example, that “Video is as powerful as LSD” (Edwin Varney, Radical Software 1, no. 3 [Spring 1971]: 6). Part of all of this was that following Aldous Huxley, people believed that psychedelics made it possible to break down the barriers of the individual and share consciousness, and following media theorist Marshall McLuhan and theologian/paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, they believed that new electronic media had the same effects. In my research, I trace these ways of thinking about technologies of consciousness back to the influence of philosopher Henri Bergson at the turn of the century. So yes, people were using video to witness events, but just as importantly they were using video to witness—and to reinterpret, and even to constitute—themselves and their communities.
As specialists in the transfer of video tapes we often notice the different aesthetic qualities of porta-pak video, uMatic, VHS and DVCAM, to name a few examples. How does ‘the look’ of a video image shape its role as a technology of consciousness? Is it more important how these technologies were used?
It’s striking how little discussion of aesthetics and the visual there was in venues like Radical Software, though of course art critics started writing about video in these terms in the late 1960s. People were often more interested in what differentiated the process of shooting video from film and other media, in its ability to be played back immediately or in its continuity as an electronic technology with the powerful media of television and computing. Sony’s first half-inch videotape recorders, using the CV format, had only half the vertical resolution of conventional television. CV decks could still be hooked up to ordinary television sets for playback, though, so they still became a way for users to make their own TV.
What’s your favourite piece of video equipment you have encountered in your research and why?
I have several Sony AV-3400 portapaks that I’ve bought on eBay, none of them quite in working order. Those were the standard tool for people experimenting with video in the early 1970s, so I’ve learned a lot from the tactile experience of using them. I also have a Sony CMA-4 camera adaptor which provides video out from an AVC-3400 portapak camera without using a deck at all; I’ve used that, along with digital equipment, to make my own brief video about some of my research, “The Revolution Will Be Videotaped: Making a Technology of Consciousness in the Long 1960s (see below).”
In your research you discuss how there has been a continuity of hybrid analogue/ digital systems in video art since the 1970s. Given that so much of contemporary society is organised via digital infrastructures, do you think analogue technologies will be reclaimed more widely as a tool for variability in the future, i.e., that there will be a backlash against what can be perceived as the calculating properties of the digital?
I’m not sure a reclaiming of analog technologies will ever take the form of an explicit social movement, but I think this process is already happening in more subtle ways. It’s most apparent in music, where vinyl records and analog synthesizers have both become markers of authenticity and a kind of retro cool. In the process, though, analog has shifted from a description of machines that worked by analogy—usually between a natural phenomenon such as luminance and an electrical voltage—to an umbrella term for everything that isn’t digital. In the context of moving images, this means that film has become an analog technology as the definition of analog has shifted—even though analog and digital video are still more technically similar, and have at times been more culturally related, than film and analog video. So yes, I think there’s a backlash against precision, particularly among some artistic communities, but I think it’s embedded in a more complex reclassification of technologies into these now dominant categories of analog and digital.
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.
The recordings were made, Golding’s daughter Judy Carver tells us, in ‘the space of a few days during September 1976. He went up to London and stayed for a few nights, spending the whole of each day reading the novel aloud in a studio. He found it very hard work, and was extremely tired by the time he’d finished. We all remember the date for a particular reason. He went to Waterloo to catch the train home, phoned my mother, and she greeted him with “Hello, Grandpa!” My eldest son, their first grandchild, had been born that morning.’
Excerpts from the transferred tapes will be uploaded to the commemorative and educational website www.william-golding.co.uk, helping to meet the ‘steady demand’ for Golding-related material from documentary makers.
Judy is currently organising the Golding family archive which ‘holds a great deal of material in written, audio and visual form.’ A large amount of the written archive will be lent to the University of Exeter, building on the landmark deposit of the handwritten draft of Lord of the Flies that was made in 2014. ‘We are giving some thought as to how to archive family photos and other items.’
As with organising any archive, Judy admits, ‘there are many and various tasks and problems, but it is a fascinating job and I am lucky to have it.’
***
Many thanks to Judy for answering questions about the recordings for this article.
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 U-matic tape, there were no issues with the transfer.
Red Beat formed in High Wycombe in 1978. After building up in solid fan base in the Home Counties they moved to London to pursue their musical ambitions. In London they recorded an EP that was released on Indie label Malicious Damage and did what most do it yourself punk bands would have killed to do: record a John Peel session. They also supported bands such as U2, Killing Joke, Thompson Twins and Aswad.
Originally inspired by New Wave acts such as Blondie and XTC, their later sound was more experimental, influenced by bands like PiL, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Killing Joke.
Roy Jones, singer and driving force behind getting Red Beat’s archive digitised explains that ‘we wrote together by jamming for hours till something sparked.’ Later evolutions of the band had more of a ‘pop orientation’ underscored by ‘a dark sound that fused Punk and Reggae and Tribal Beats.’ Songs by the band include the sci-fi inspired ‘Visit to Earth’ , ‘Ritual Sacrifice,’ a lamentation on the futility of war and ‘Searching for Change’, which explores the need for personal, spiritual and political transformation.
Video Synthesizers
In 1982 Red Beat formed their own indie label, Manic Machine Products, and released two further singles ‘See/Survival’ and ‘Dream/Dream Dub’, both distributed by Rough Trade.
The video of ‘Dream/ Dream Dub’ is the only existing video footage of the band at the time.
Roy’s motivation for sending it to Greatbear was to get the best quality transfer that he will then remaster, add a clean sound track to and upload to the Red Beat youtube playlist.
Of particular interest is ‘Dream/ Dream Dub’s use of video synthesizer footage which was, Roy tells me, ‘quite unique at the time. This footage was then edited with two tape analogue technology which is slow and not as accurate as modern editing.’
As Tom DeWitt explains ‘technically, the video synthesizer is more complex than its audio cousin. Video signals cover a frequency spectrum 100 times greater than audio and must be constructed according to a precise timing synchronization which does not exist in the one dimensional audio signal.’
In the early 1960s and 1970s, synthesizing video images was an emergent form of video art. Artists Shuya Abe and Nam June Paik created one of the first ‘video devices intended to distort and transform the conventional video image.’ [1] Part of their aim was to challenge the complacent viewer’s trans-fixation on the TV screen.
In the 1970s the artistic palette of the video synthesizer evolved. Bill Hearn was instrumental in developing ‘colorisation’ in 1972, and in 1975, Peter Sachs Collopy tells us, he incorporated this tool into ‘a full-featured synthesizer, the Videolab, which also produced effects like switching, fades, dissolves, wipes, and chromakey.’ [2]
‘Colourisation’ is a big feature of the Red Beat video. It refers to the ability to change the appearance of colours by mixing either the red, blue and green elements or the video colour parameters: luminance, chrominance and hue. In ‘Dream/ Dream Dub’ the red, green and blue colourisation is applied, accentuating the primary colours to give the image a garish, radioactive and extra-terrestrial quality.
Want more Red Beat?
If this article has sparked your curiosity about Red Beat you can buy their albums Endless Waiting Game and The Wheel from itunes.
The final word about the band must go to Roy: ‘We were part of a vibrant music scene. Other people enjoyed more success than us but we had a great time and created some great memories. I don’t think many people would remember our music but there are a few who buy our albums and remember seeing us live. We created our own bit of rock’n roll history and it’s worth documenting.’ [3]
Notes
[1] Chris Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 136.
[2] Peter Sachs Collopy ‘Video Synthesizers: From Analog Computing to Digital Art,’ IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 2014, 74-86, 79.
[2] Thank you to Roy for generously sharing his memories of Red Beat and to Peter Sachs Collopy for sharing his research.
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 create a home recording studio with capacity to simultaneously record 128 tracks of audio, a process known as ‘mega-tracking’.
Similar to other early digital audio technology such as PCM 7030 and DAT, ADAT utilised recording methods originally developed for analogue video tape.
In analogue video the use of helical scanning and rotating recording/ playback heads was the means to produce the larger bandwidth necessary to capture the analogue video signal.
Helical scanning was logically re-purposed for recording digital audio because it similarly requires substantial bandwidth (the original ADAT recorded at a sampling rate of 48 kHz/ 16 bits).
Recording revolution
According to George Petersen ‘the Alesis ADAT changed the entire recording industry, beginning a revolution of affordable recording tools. Overnight, the cost of digital studio recording plummeted from a sizeable $150,000 for the Sony PCM-3324 24-track to a relatively modest $12,000 for three ADATs at their original $3,995.’
Figures from the Audio Engineering Society suggest that ‘20,000 were sold in its first year from October 1992 to November 1993 and 80,000 sold by 1998.’
Sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne argues that ‘ADATs were symbolic of the democratization of audio recordings and changes in the audio industry,’ facilitating ‘the rise of amateur recording and a whole “semi-professional” realm of small studios, often located in homes or other less-than-optimal acoustic spaces.’
ADAT at Greatbear
At Greatbear we receive relatively few ADAT recordings in comparison with analogue multi-track formats.
This may be because ADAT is ‘recently obsolescent,’ and for everyday reasons users of this technology have not got around to migrating their archive to digital files.
Like all early digital audio formats recorded on tape, however, ADAT raise specific preservation concerns.
As we have stressed before, tape-based digital recordings do not degrade gracefully. They are subject to catastrophic rather than moderate signal loss. If the original recording has errors that prevent the ‘smooth’ playback of the tape (e.g., from clogged heads or the presence of dust), or there is any kind of damage to the tape surface (scratches or mould), this will create irreversible drop outs within the preservation copy.
As an emergent format used by people with a range of technical expertise, it seems reasonable to expect ADAT recording practices to be a little unsettled and experimental. The physical strain on both tape and transport in a heavy production environment must also be considered (the shuttling back and forth of the tape mechanism), as this would have shaped the quality of the original recording.
In the Greatbear studio we have several ADAT machines (the Alesis M20, ADAT XT and ADAT LX20) ready to transfer your tapes.
We deliver transferred files as individual, synchronised track ‘stems’ and use ADAT ‘sync’ and optical cables to ensure an authentic born digital workflow.
Perhaps now is the time to remix that early digital multi-track masterpiece…
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 British stand-up comedy and stand-up comedians.’
In 2014 the BSUCA became one of the University of Kent’s 50th anniversary ‘Beacon Projects‘.
Beacon Project funding will support work to ‘catalogue, preserve, digitise, and make accessible the existing collections, and identify new relevant collections.’
We are honoured that project archivist Elspeth Millar took time out of her busy archiving schedule to tell us a bit more about the BSUCA.
She told us:
‘I’m really enjoying the variety of material that I get to work on, including printed material (posters, flyers, letters, notebooks), audio-visual material on a range of formats (audio cassettes, VHS, DAT, MiniDisc, U-matic), and also born-digital records held on obsolete formats (such as 3.5” floppy disks).
In addition the content of the material is, of course, really interesting, and I feel that I am learning a lot from our collections, including about the history of stand-up comedy (from the alternative cabaret movement, to alternative comedy, to the comedy ‘industry’ today) but also political and social topics (for example Mark Thomas’ collection includes a lot of material on the arms trade and large corporations). We are also holding events with some fantastic comedians (Richard Herring, Stewart Lee, Mark Thomas, and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Jo Brand, Alexei Sayle, Susan Calman) so it is wonderful to hear comedians themselves reflecting on their work and on material that they have deposited with the archive.’
You can keep up to date with the latest news from the BSUCA archive on twitter and view images from their collections on flickr.
Read on for more from Elspeth. Her answers cover issues such as selection and appraisal decisions, metadata and dissemination plans for the BSUCA.
They also provide useful insight into the digital preservation tools BSUCA use to manage their digitised and born-digital assets.
Once again, massive thanks to her for responding to our questions and best of luck to BSUCA in the future.
BSCUA Responses to Greatbear Questions
1. What motivated you to get the tapes you sent to us re-formatted now? i.e., what kinds of selection and appraisal processes were behind the decision?
The British Stand-Up Comedy Archive has AV material on a number of audio and moving image formats, magnetic and optical, including audio compact cassettes, MiniDiscs, DATs (Digital Audio Tapes), VHS, DVCams, Audio CD and U-matic tapes. None of these formats are suitable for archival storage and all material will need to be digitised or transferred from their original carrier to digital files. We can carry out the digitisation (or digital transfer) of some audio in-house and we have started our project by transferring material originally captured or stored on MiniDiscs, Audio CDs, and audio compact cassettes1. After assessing all the formats we currently have it was decided to outsource the digitisation of DATs and U-matic tapes. Both of these are priority formats for transfer from a preservation perspective2 and after some research I learnt that DATs can be problematic to transfer due to ‘DAT compatibility’ and dropout problems3. In addition, we have neither a DAT machine or U-matic machine already within Special Collections or within the University, and with the number of recordings on these formats currently limited, it was felt that it would not make sense to purchase already obsolete equipment, which would then need to be professionally maintained.
The other important reason for transferring the tapes of course was for accessibility, so that we can make the recordings accessible to researchers. In addition, our funding is currently only for one year4, so it is vital to ensure that audio-visual material on obsolete formats are transferred during this first phase of the project.
2. Can you tell us how metadata helps you to describe, preserve and aid discovery of the Stand Up Comedy archive.
Providing information about our audiovisual items (and resulting digital items) is incredibly important from both an access and preservation perspective. Metadata about analogue items (and subsequent digital files) and born-digital files will be included in the cataloguing collections management system used by the British Stand-Up Comedy Archive (which is part of the University of Kent’s Special Collections & Archives). The catalogue records will include descriptive metadata and administrative metadata. Metadata which comes under the ‘descriptive metadata’ heading describes the item/file and includes a summary of the contents of the recording, all of which helps to make recordings discoverable for researchers. This metadata is also vital from a preservation perspective as it allows archivists to retrieve and identify files. Metadata which comes under the ‘administrative metadata’ heading provides information to help manage the file(s)/recordings, and includes information related to Intellectual Property Rights (including copyright) and preservation information such as the file format and the digitisation/digital transfer. Researchers will be interested in some of these issues (e.g. copyright, as this determines how archived recordings can be used) but from a digital preservation perspective this metadata is extremely important as it records information about the format of the digital file, information about the original carrier, as well as fixity information, to measure whether the file has changed over time.
This metadata will be recorded in our catalogue and will be searchable via the University of Kent’s website and in the future some archive aggregators. However, we are also experimenting with different processes and tools for embedding metadata in files, and researching different metadata standards for this. The benefits of embedding some metadata within the file include the removal of the risk of losing the link between the metadata and the digital file that it is describing. In addition, metadata embedded in born-digital master and digitised master files can also be transferred to ‘access’ copies (generated at a lower specification/resolution) which will also assist in user accessibility. Embedded metadata has its limitations and it is not that flexible, which is why we are using a dual approach of embedding some metadata, but also keeping this information externally in our catalogue.
3. How do you manage, and plan to manage digital audio and audio visual materials in the Stand Up Archive? What digital preservation tools do you use?
The first process in managing digital AV materials in the BSUCA is to think about the file formats that we will use for long-term preservation and access. For audio material we are digitising as LPCM (Linear Pulse Code Modulation) in a Wave format (.wav) wrapper. The addition of embedding metadata into these wave files extends the file to become BWF .wav files, the standard recommended by the International Association of Audiovisual Archives (IASA).5
Deciding upon a file format for digitising moving image has been trickier, as the Greatbear team have already written about on this blog; we hope to get underway with digitisation of VHS in September and we are looking at using the FFv1 codec (an open-source lossless compressed codec) wrapped as either AVI or Matroska (MKV).
We are also experimenting with a number of digital preservation tools; one directory that has proved great for discovering such tools is the COPTR wiki (Community Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry), a really useful collated list of various digital preservation tools . One aspect of our digital preservation planning is the creation of checksums as early in the lifecycle of the digital file as possible. We are using a tool called Blackbush, which is a checksum tool6 which generates MD5 hash files which was developed for the British Library’s Sound Archive. To embed metadata into .wav files we are using the BWF MetaEdit tool, a free open-source tool developed by AV Preserve and the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative. When our archival master is a compressed format (such as an mp3 on a data or audio CD which has been deposited), we are using tools such as Adobe Bridge to embed metadata in the ID3 format (or Adobe Audition’s metadata tools as we transfer audio). The advantage of BWF MetaEdit for wav files is that it is a free open-source tool, which also has other functions such as batch editing (we can edit multiple wav files at once) and batch import and export functions, which will be useful for when we catalogue this material to item level.
Other tools that we have found useful include DROID (Digital Record Object Identification), developed by The National Archives, and, for other digital material we are using forensic imaging tools such as FTK Imager and ImDisk to mount virtual images of disk images.
4. How do you think the material will be used by future researchers? As a Stand Up Archive I imagine you get a lot of requests for material from broadcasters. How do you manage requests and expectations from different user communities?
The British Stand-Up Comedy Archive is still in its infancy; although we have had material since 2013, it has only been since the beginning of this year that we have been funded to digitise and preserve the material already deposited, start to catalogue it, make it accessible, and publicise what we have and what we are aiming to do.
But two of our core purposes are to ensure access (that these archives are universally discoverable and accessible), and to ensure that the archives are used, and used in a variety of ways (popular culture, academic research, teaching, journalism, general enjoyment). Our main user group at the moment is actually students studying stand-up and popular performance at the University of Kent (at BA and MA level) who have used AV material as part of their course, and we also have a number volunteering with the project, doing summaries of recorded interviews and stand-up performances.
Notes
[1] We have purchased an audio cassette deck (Denon DN-790R) and are using a MiniDisc deck on loan from colleagues within the University, and have also purchased an external audio capture card/A-D converter.
[2] https://psap.library.illinois.edu/format-id-guide/audiotape#dat and https://psap.library.illinois.edu/format-id-guide/videotape#umatic.
[3] https://siarchives.si.edu/sites/default/files/pdfs/digitalAudioTapesPreservation2010_0.pdf (page 5-8) and http://thegreatbear.co.uk/audio-tape/transferring-dats-to-digital-files/.
[4] The British Stand-Up Comedy Archive is part of the University of Kent’s Special Collections and Archives, but it currently has specific funding for one year (as a Beacon Project) to digitise and make accessible its current holdings; more about the Beacon projects can be found at http://www.kent.ac.uk/beacon/about.html.
[5] Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects, IASA-TC 04, 2.8.2
[6] A checksum is ‘an algorithmically-computed numeric value for a file or a set of files used to validate the state and content of the file for the purpose of detecting accidental errors that may have been introduced during its transmission or storage. The integrity of the data can be checked at any later time by recomputing the checksum and comparing it with the stored one. If the checksums match, the data was almost certainly not altered’. National Digital Stewardship Alliance Glossary, http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ndsa/ndsa-glossary.html.
As stated in a press release, ‘the funding will enable the British Library to digitise and make available 500,000 rare, unique and at-risk sound recordings from its own archive and other key collections around the country over 5 years (2017-2022).’
Funding will also help ‘develop a national preservation network via ten regional centres of archival excellence which will digitise, preserve and share the unique audio heritage found in their local area.’
The short text outlines ‘what it means to be a national library in a digital age and what the British Library’s role is as one of the UK’s great public assets.’
These are set out in ‘a framework of six purposes which explain, as simply and clearly as we can, the enduring ways in which the public funding we receive helps to deliver tangible public value – in custodianship, research, business, culture, learning and international partnership.’
Within the strategy digitising ‘the 42 different physical formats which hold our 6.5 million audio items’ is highlighted as ‘the next great preservation challenge’ for the British Library.
As ever, we will keep you up to date with updates from the British Library’s Save Our Sounds project as it evolves.
We were recently approached by author Phil Johnson to transfer a unique VHS recording.
As Bristol countercultural folklore goes, the video tape is a bit of a gem: it documents the Wild Bunch performing at Arnolfini in 1985.
For the uninitiated, the Wild Bunch were the genesis of what became internationally known as trip-hop, a.k.a. ‘the Bristol-sound.’
Members went on to form Massive Attack, while Tricky and producer Nellee Hooper continue to have successful careers in the music industry. And that’s just the short-hand version of events.
Want to know more? This documentary from 1996 is a good place to become acquainted.
Below he beautifully evokes the social and technical stories behind why the video was made. Many thanks Phil for putting this together.
***
In 1985 I was a lecturer in Film and Communications at Filton College with an added responsibility for running the Audio Visual Studio, a recording room and edit suite/office that had dropped from the sky as part of a new library and resources building. There was also kit of variable quality and vintage, some new, some inherited. I remember a Sony edit suite for big, chunky u-matic videos and another JVC one for VHS tapes, with a beige plasticky mixer that went in the middle by the edit controller. This also allowed you to do grandiose wipes from one camera to another, although we rarely used the camera set-up in the studio because you really needed to know what you wanted to do in advance, and no one ever did. What students liked using were the portable cameras and recorders, JVC VHS jobs that together with the fancy carry cases and padded camera boxes, plus regulation heavy pivoting tripod, weighed each prospective al fresco film-maker down with the baggage-equivalent of several large suitcases. I remember one aspiring Stanley Kubrick from Foundation Art&Design setting off to get the bus into town carrying everything himself, and returning sweatily later that day, close to collapse. He was wearing a heavy greatcoat, obviously.
We had a ‘professional’ u-matic portable recorder too, and that was seriously heavy, but we didn’t have the requisite three-tube camera to get the quality it was capable of, never entirely understanding the principle of garbage in-garbage out, with the inevitable result that almost everything anyone did was doomed to remain at least as shoddy as the original dodgy signal it depended upon. But hey, this was education: it was the process we were interested in, not the product.
It was a JVC portable VHS recorder I was using on the night of the Wild Bunch jam at the Arnolfini on Friday 19 July 1985, the case slung over my shoulder while I held a crap Hitachi single-tube camera with a misted-over viewfinder whose murky B&W picture meant you were never entirely sure whether it was on manual or auto focus. There was no tripod, and no lighting; just me and a Foundation student, Jo Evans, helping out. The original camera tape, which I recently found after presuming it lost, is a Scotch 3M 60-minuter and the video document of the event, such as it is, lasts only until the single tape runs out, which is just about the time the Wild Bunch’s rappers, Claude and 3D, are getting started.
The image quality is terrible but when there’s some light in the room – the Arnolfini’s downstairs gallery – you can just about make out what’s happening. When it’s dark – and it generally is – the image is so thin it’s barely an image at all. As this is the camera tape – unimportant in itself, and usually only considered as the raw material for a later edit – the significance of what is shown is very provisional. What I meant to focus on, and what was only being picked up because it was easier to keep recording than it was to switch to ‘pause’, is impossible to say. But what the tape does show – when, of course, there’s enough information there to make out anything at all – is now the stuff of history: a Mitchell and Kenyon type document of the yet-to-emerge ‘Bristol Sound’, and a weirdly innocent time that existed before the camera phone. And there it all is: graffiti on the walls, funk, electro and rap on the muffled boominess of the mono soundtrack, with dancers breaking acrobatically on the floor as rockabilly quiffed boys, big-haired girls and lots and lots of very young kiddies look on. As to why I filmed the event in the first place: it was partly for my master’s dissertation (Black Music, the Arts and Education’ – classic lefty teacher getting down with the kids) and partly for the Arnolfini’s new video library.
If you go down and see it on Sunday July 19: enjoy.
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 Caspian Sea.
In the early 1980s Robert had unique access to Daghestan and other parts of the Soviet Caucasus in the twilight years of the USSR.
During visits Robert made recordings of Daghestan’s rich culture. This included music, documenting ethnic instruments such as the Chagana, as well as singing and dancing.
Although Robert believes that claims to authenticity must be treated with suspicion, he nonetheless told me that these recordings document the traditional folk culture that was practiced in the villages of Daghestan.
These tapes also document the 31 mutually unintelligible languages spoken in Daghestan such as Avar which is spoken by 900,000 people.
Listen to excerpt of a tape from the collection. The tape had experienced mould growth and had snapped. It therefore needed to be repaired prior to transfer. Robert explains: ‘The recording was made in Untsukul c.March 1990. You can hear Russian being spoken with a heavy accent, some Kumyk and some Avar. It was joking and talk about who was I and where from.’
Type IV Metal Cassettes
When Robert travelled to Daghestan he was keen to get the most professional recordings he could. For this reason he used type IV metal audio cassette tapes, a tape formula that had been introduced in the late 1970s to offer better quality recordings.
‘had been adopted by a lot of enthusiasts. They remained too expensive to be bought in bulk by the average consumer, but if you wanted to record something special – and particularly if you produced music yourself – you’d probably be highly attracted by the exceptional recording quality of a good metal cassette.’
The science behind the type IV cassette, according to the Museum of Obsolete Media, was to use ‘pure metal particles instead of metal oxides. This created a hard-wearing tape with superior frequency response and greater dynamic range.’
Since completing the recordings in the mid 1980s, as with so many of the tapes we receive at Greatbear, they have been tucked away in a drawer and out of circulation.
Another problem some tapes exhibited was the degradation of the foam pressure pad. This had ‘stuck’ onto the tape and stopped it it from playing. In one case the tape had snapped as a result from a previous attempt at playback.
Fortunately this issue did not effect our ability to do the transfer. We use Nakamichi tape decks to do optimal audio cassette transfers. The transport design within Nakamichi machines doesn’t use the tape pressure pad to play back the tapes. This is because, Wikipedia tells us,
‘Nakamichi found that this pad provided uneven and fairly inaccurate pressure and was therefore inadequate for reliable tape/head contact. Furthermore, Nakamichi found that the pressure pad was a source of audible noise, particularly scrape flutter (the tape bouncing across the head, a result of uneven pressure), and also contributed to premature head wear. Nakamichi’s dual-capstan tape decks provide such accurate and precise tape tension that, unlike other decks, the cassette’s pressure pad is not needed at all.’
The insides of a Nakamichi machine that has no need of a pressure pad to play back tapes.
Re-publication plans
Recent interest from musicologist Stefan Williamson-Fa, the driving force behind getting the tapes transferred to digital files with Great Bear, will enable these unique recordings to be heard by new audiences.
These include what Robert believes to be the only recording of an Andi Zikr ritual. Banned by the Tsar and later the Soviets, the Zikr ritual proved to be a resilient part of Daghestan’s Sufi culture. Zikr involves a group rotating in a circle, stamping the ground and grunting in order to create a mystical and ecstatic experience.
Stefan and Robert have plans to make the transferred digital files available online.
Robert reflected that when he was collecting the tapes in the 1980s his imagined audience for the recordings was pretty small. With the possibility of online publication this audience has substantially increased.
Furthermore, through people uploading material to sites such as YouTube the amount of Daghestan’s culture that can be accessed on the internet continues to grow. Robert’s links with the academic community in Daghestan also means the recordings will gain exposure there as well.
It is no doubt that those interested in the cultural history of Daghestan will await the publication of these recordings with much excitement. When the website is available we will of course let you know!
***Many thanks to Robert Chenciner for talking to us about his collection, and to Stefan for putting us in touch***
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 recordings within a different technical and historical context.
Walter Benjamin described such acts as the ‘afterlife’ of translation: ‘a translation issues from the original not so much for its life as from its afterlife […] translation marks their stage of continued life.’ [1]
Part of the vanguard movement of radical arts organisations that emerged in the late 1960s, Action Space described themselves as ‘necessarily experimental, devious, ambiguous, and always changing in order to find a new situation. In the short term the objectives are to continually question and demonstrate through the actions of all kinds new relationships between artists and public, teachers and taught, drop-outs and society, performers and audiences, and to question current attitudes of the possibility of creativity for everyone.’ [2]
Such creative shape-shifting, which took its impulsive artistic action in a range of public spaces can so often be the enemy of documentation.
Yet Ken Turner, who founded Action Space alongside Mary Turner and Alan Nisbet, told me that ‘Super Eight film and transparency slides were our main documentation tools, so we were aware of recording events and their importance.’
Action Space were part of this wave of audiovisual adoption (minor of course by today’s standards!)
After ‘accidentally’ inheriting a Portapak recorder from the Marquis of Bath, Ken explained, Action Space ‘took the Portapak in our stride into events and dramas of the community festivals and neighbourhood gatherings, and adventure playgrounds. We did not have an editing deck; as far as I can remember played back footage through a TV, but even then it had white noise, if that’s the term, probably it was dirty recording heads. We were not to know.’
Preservation issues
Yes those dirty recording heads make things more difficult when it comes to re-formatting the material.
While some of the recordings replay almost perfectly, some have odd tracking problems and emit noise, which are evidence of a faulty recorder and/or dirty tape path or heads. Because such imperfections were embedded at the time of recording, there is little that can be done to ‘clean up’ the signal.
Other problems with the Action Space collection arise from the chemical composition of the tapes. The recordings are mainly on Sony branded V30H and high density V60H tape which always suffer from binder hydrolysis. The tapes therefore needed ‘baking’ treatment prior to transfer usually (we have found) in a more controlled and longer way from Ampex branded tapes.
And that old foe of magnetic tape strikes again: mould. Due to being stored in an inappropriate environment over a prolonged period, many of the tapes have mould growth that has damaged the binder.
Despite these imperfections, or even because of them, Ken appreciates the unique value of these recordings: ‘the footage I have now of the community use reminds me of the rawness of the events, the people and the atmosphere of noise and constant movement. I am extremely glad to have these tapes transposed into digital footage as they vividly remind me of earlier times. I think this is essential to understanding the history and past experiences that might otherwise escape the memories of events.’
Historical translation
While the footage of Action Space is in itself a valuable historical document, the recordings will be subject a further act of translation, courtesy of Ken’s film maker son, Huw Wahl.
Fresh from the success of his film about anarchist art critic and poet Herbert Read, Huw is using the digitised tapes as inspiration for a new work.
This new film will reflect on the legacies of Action Space, examing how the group’s interventions can speak to our current historical context.
Huw told me he wants to re-animate Action Space’s ethos of free play, education and art in order ‘to question what actions could shape a democratic and creative society. In terms of the rhetoric of creativity we hear now from the arts council and artistic institutions, it’s important to look at where that developed from. Once we see how radical those beginnings really were, maybe we will see more clearly where we are heading if we continue to look at creativity as a commodity, rather than a potent force for a different kind of society.’
Inflatable action
Part of such re-animation will entail re-visiting Action Space’s work with large inflatable structures, or what Ken prefers to call ‘air or pneumatic structures.’
Huw intends to make a new inflatable structure that will act as the container for a range of artistic, academic, musical and nostalgic responses to Action Space’s history. The finished film will then be screened inside the inflatable, creating what promises to be an unruly and unpredictable spectacle.
Ken spoke fondly about the video footage which recorded ‘the urgency of “performance” of the people who are responding to the inflatables. Today inflatable making and use is more controlled, in the 60s control was only minimally observed, to prevent injuries. But in all our activities over 10 years of air structure events, we had only one fractured limb.’
Greatbear cameo!
Another great thing about the film is that the Greatbear Studio will have an important cameo role.
Huw came to visit us to shoot footage of the transfers. He explains his reasons:
‘I’d like viewers to see the set up for the capturing of the footage used in the film. Personally it’s very different seeing the reel played on a deck rather than scanning through a quicktime file. You pay a different kind of attention to it. I don’t want to be too nostalgic about a format I have never shot with, yet there seems to be an amateur quality inherent to the portapak which I assume is because the reels could be re-recorded over. Seeing material shot by children is something the super 8mm footage just doesn’t have, it would have been too expensive. Whereas watching children grabbing a portapack camera and running about with it is pretty exciting. Seeing the reels and machines for playing it all brings me closer to the experience of using the actual portapak cameras. Hopefully this will inform the filming and editing process of this film.’
We wish Huw the very best for his work on this project and look forward to seeing the results!
***Big thanks to Ken Turner and Huw Wahl for answering questions for this article.***
Notes
[1] Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator,’ Selected Writings: 1913-1926, Volume 1, Harvard University Press, 2006, 253-264, 254.
Greatbear were recently approached by the Courtyard Music Group to help them complete the 100% analogue re-issue of their 1974 acid-folk album Just Our Way of Saying Hello.
Among Britfolk enthusiasts, news of the Courtyard Music Group’s plans to re-issue their album has been greeted with excitement and anticipation.
Just Our Way of Saying Hello was created when ‘an idealistic young teacher cut a lo-fi folk-rock record with a bunch of teenagers in the Utopian rural setting of Kilquhanity School in the Scottish borders.’
100 copies of the album were made in a private pressing, originally intended for family and friends.
Yet this was not the end of the story, as the record went on to become ‘one of the most obscure albums in Britfolk history is now an ultra-rare collector’s item, with copies trading online for over £1000.’
After a hugely successful pledge music campaign, the band are pushing ahead with their re-issue project that will produce a limited pressing of the mono vinyl, a remastered audio CD with outtakes and a 48 page booklet with interviews, photos and drawings. These will all be available in the summer of 2015.
Great Bear’s role in the project was twofold: first to restore the physical condition of tapes in order to achieve the best quality transfer. Second to produce analogue copies of the original master tapes. These second generation masters, originally recorded at a speed of 7½ inches per second, were transferred at the speed of 15 ips in our studio.
These copies were then sent to Timmion Records in Finland to complete the final, analogue only cutting of the re-issue. Even amid the much discussed ‘vinyl revival‘ there are currently no UK-based studios that do pure analogue reproductions. The risk of losing precious cargo in transit to Finland was too great, hence our involvement at the copying stage.
The original master tapes
Analogue only
Why was it so important to members of the Courtyard Music Group to have an analogue only release? Digital techniques began creeping into the production of audio recordings from the late 1970s onwards, to the situation today where most studios and music makers work in an exclusively digital environment.
Can anyone really tell the difference between an analogue and digital recording, or even a recording that has been subject to a tiny bit of ‘digital interference’?
Frank Swales, member of the Courtyard Music Group, explains how remaining true to analogue was primarily a preference for authenticity.
‘I think in this case it’s really about the JOURNEY that this particular product has had, and the measures taken to keep it as close to the original product as possible. So, I’m not sure anyone can, in a listening context, perceive any real difference between digital and analogue, given that all of us humans are pretty much restricted to the frequency range of 20Hz to 20kHz, if we’re lucky!’
While Richard Jones, also a member of Courtyard Music Group, revealed: ‘Our 1974 recording was made using a selection of microphones, some ribbon, a valve powered four channel mixer and an ancient Ferrograph tape recorder. I cannot claim these decisions about the analogue reissue are soundly based on principles of Acoustics/physics. They are decisions to produce an authentic product. That is, attempting to eliminate the introduction of “colours” into the sound which were not there in 1974.’
The ability to create exact copies is perilously difficult to achieve in an analogue context. Even in the most controlled circumstances analogue transfers are always different from their ‘original.’ The tape might distort at high frequencies for example, or subtle noise will be created as the tape moves through the transport mechanism.
Yet the desire for analogue authenticity is not the same as wanting a replica. It is about preserving historically specific sound production process whose audible traces are becoming far less discernible.
After all, if authenticity was correlated with exact replication, the Courtyard Music Group would not have asked us to make the copies at a higher recording speed than the originals. Yet, Frank explains, ‘the difference in sound quality – the tracks especially having been recorded onto tape travelling at 15ips – will likely be negligible, but it must be said that this was a decision not lightly taken.’
By preserving the historical authenticity of analogue reproduction, the Courtyard Music Group re-issue project converges with the archival concern to maintain the provenance of archival objects. This refers to when the ‘significance of archival materials is heavily dependent on the context of their creation, and that the arrangement and description of these materials should be directly related to their original purpose and function.’
For a range of audiovisual objects made in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, such fidelity to the recording and its context will be increasingly difficult to realise.
As appropriate playback machines and recordable media become increasingly difficult to source, an acceptance of hybridity over purity may well be necessary if a whole range of recordings are to be heard at all.
We are not yet at that stage, thankfully, and Greatbear are delighted to have played a part in helping spread the analogue purity just that little bit further.
***Thanks to Courtyard Music Group members for answering questions for this article.***
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 Lives and Videotapes, the beautiful collection of artist’s oral histories collected as part of the Videokunstarkivet project, the history of Norwegian video art is framed as ‘inconsistent’.
This is because, Mike Sperlinger eloquently writes, ‘in such a history, you have navigate by the gaps and contradictions and make these silences themselves eloquent. Videotapes themselves are like lives in that regard, the product of gaps and dropout—the shedding not only of their material substance, but of the cultural categories which originally sustained them’ (8).
The question of shedding, and how best to preserve the integrity of audiovisual archive object is of course a vexed one that we have discussed at length on this blog.
It is certainly an issue for the last collection of tapes that we received from Videokunstarkivet—a number of very mouldyU-matic tapes.
According to the Preservation Self-Assessment Program website, ‘due to media and hardware obsolescence’ U-matic ‘should be considered at high preservation risk.’
At Greatbear we have stockpiled quite a few different U-matic machines which reacted differently to the Videokunstarkivet tapes.
As you can see from the photo, they were in a pretty bad way.
Note the white, dusty-flaky quality of the mould in the images. This is what tape mould looks like after it has been rendered inactive, or ‘driven into dormancy.’ If mould is active it will be wet, smudging if it is touched. In this state it poses the greatest risk of infection, and items need to be immediately isolated from other items in the collection.
Once the mould has become dormant it is fairly easy to get the mould off the tape using brushes, vacuums with HEPA filters and cleaning solutions. We also used a machine specifically for the cleaning process, which was cleaned thoroughly afterwards to kill off any lingering mould.
This extract demonstrates how the VO9800 replayed the whole tape yet the quality wasn’t perfect. The tell-tale signs of mould infestation are present in the transferred signal.
Visual imperfections, which begin as tracking lines and escalate into a fuzzy black out of the image, is evidence of how mould has extended across the surface of the tape, preventing a clear reading of the recorded information.
Despite this range of problems, the V09800 replayed the whole tape in one go with no head clogs.
In its day, the BVU950 was a much higher specced U-matic machine than the VO9800. As the video extract demonstrates, it replayed some of the tape without the artefacts produced by the V09800 transfer, probably due to the deeper head tip penetration.
Yet this deeper head penetration also meant extreme tape head clogs on the sections that were affected badly by mould—even after extensive cleaning.
This, in turn, took a significant amount of time to remove the shedded material from the machine before the transfer could continue.
Mould problems
The play back of the tapes certainly underscores how deeply damaging damp conditions are for magnetic tape collections, particularly when they lead to endemic mould growth.
As Mike Sperlinger writes above, the shedding and drop outs are important artefacts in themselves. They mark the life-history of magnetic tapes, objects which so-often exist at the apex of neglect and recovery.
The question we may ask is: which transfer is better and more authentic? Yet this question is maddeningly difficult to answer in an analogue world defined by the continuous variation of the played back signal. And this variation is certainly amplified within the context of archival transfers when damage to tape has become accelerated, if not beyond repair.
At Greatbear we are in the good position of having a number of machines which enables us to test and experiment different approaches.
One thing is clear: for challenging collections, such as these items from the Videokunstarkivet, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to achieve the optimal transfer.
While this is by no means a final figure (and does not include the holdings of record companies and DATheads), it does suggest there is a significant amount of audio recorded on this obsolete format which, under certain conditions, is subject to catastrophic signal loss.
The conditions we are referring to is that old foe of magnetic tape: mould.
In contrast with existing research about threats to DAT, which emphasise how the format is threatened by ‘known playback problems that are typically related to mechanical alignment’, the biggest challenges we consistently face with DATs is connected to mould.
It is certainly acknowledged that ‘environmental conditions, especially heat, dust, and humidity, may also affect cassettes.’
Nevertheless, the specific ways mould growth compromise the very possibility of successfully playing back a DAT tape have not yet been fully explored. This in turn shapes the kinds of preservation advice offered about the format.
What follows is an attempt to outline the problem of mould growth on DATs which, even in minimal form, can pretty much guarantee the loss of several seconds of recording.
Tape width issues
The first problem with DATs is that they are 4mm wide, and very thin in comparison to other forms of magnetic tape.
The size of the tape is compounded by the helical method used in the format, which records the signal as a diagonal stripe across the tape. Because tracks are written onto the tape at an angle, if the tape splits it is not a neat split that can be easily spliced together.
The only way to deal with splits is to wind the tape back on to the tape transport or use leader tape to stick the tape back together at the breaking point.
Either way, you are guaranteed to lose a section of the tape because the helical scan has imprinted the recorded signal at a sharp, diagonal angle. If a DAT tape splits, in other words, it cuts through the diagonal signal, and because it is digital rather than analogue audio, this results in irreversible signal loss.
And why does the tape split? Because of the mould!
If you play back a DAT displaying signs of dormant mould-growth it is pretty much guaranteed to split in a horrible way. The tape therefore needs to be disassembled and wound by hand. This means you can spend a lot of time restoring DATs to a playable condition.
Rewinding by hand is however not 100% fool-proof, and this really highlights the challenges of working with mouldy DAT tape.
Often mould on DATs is visible on the edge of the tape pack because the tape has been so tightly wound it doesn’t spread to the full tape surface.
In most cases with magnetic tape, mould on the edge is good news because it means it has not spread and infected the whole of the tape. Not so with DAT.
Even with tiny bits of mould on the edge of the tape there is enough to stick it to the next bit of tape as it is rewound.
When greater tension is applied in an attempt to release the mould, due to stickiness, the tape rips.
A possible and plausible explanation for DAT tape ripping is that due to the width and thinness of the tape the mould is structurally stronger than the tape itself, making it easier for the mould growth to stick together.
When tape is thicker, for example with a 1/4 ” open reel tape, it is easier to brush off the dormant mould which is why we don’t see the ripping problem with all kinds of tape.
Our experience confirms that brushing off dormant mould is not always possible with DATs which, despite best efforts, can literally peel apart because of sticky mould.
What, then, is to be done to ensure that the 3353 (and counting) DAT tapes in existence remain in a playable condition?
One tangible form of action is to check that your DATs are stored at the appropriate temperature (40–54°F [4.5–12°C]) so that no mould growth develops on the tape pack.
The other thing to do is simple: get your DAT recordings reformatted as soon as possible.
While we want to highlight the often overlooked issue of mould growth on DATs, the problems with machine obsolescence, a lack of tape head hours and mechanical alignment problems remain very real threats to successful transfer of this format.
Our aim at the Greatbear is to continue our research in the area of DAT mould growth and publish it as we learn more.
As ever, we’d love to hear about your experiences of transferring mouldy DATs, so please leave a comment below if you have a story to share.
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 digitized and born-digital video. The reasons for this are complex, and we shall outline why below.
Lack of standards (or are there too many formats?)
Carl Fleischhauer writes, reflecting on the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) research exploring Digital File Formats for Videotape Reformatting (2014), ‘practices and technology for video reformatting are still emergent, and there are many schools of thought. Beyond the variation in practice, an archive’s choice may also depend on the types of video they wish to reformat.’ [2]
We have written in depth on this blog about the labour intensity of digital information management in relation to reformatting and migration processes (which are of course Greatbear’s bread and butter). We have also discussed how the lack of settled standards tends to make preservation decisions radically provisional.
In contrast, we have written about default standards that have emerged over time through common use and wide adoption, highlighting how parsimonious, non-interventionist approaches may be more practical in the long term.
The problem for those charged with preserving video (as opposed to digital audio or images) is that ‘video, however, is not only relatively more complex but also offers more opportunities for mixing and matching. The various uncompressed-video bitstream encodings, for example, may be wrapped in AVI, QuickTime, Matroska, and MXF.’ [3]
What then, is this ‘mixing and matching’ all about?
It refers to all the possible combinations of bitsteam encodings (‘codecs’) and ‘wrappers’ that are available as target formats for digital video files. Want to mix your JPEG2000 – Lossless with your MXF, or ffv1 with your AVI? Well, go ahead!
What then is the difference between a codec and wrapper?.
As the FADGI report states: ‘Wrappers are distinct from encodings and typically play a different role in a preservation context.’ [4]
The wrapper or ‘file envelope’ stores key information about the technical life or structural properties of the digital object. Such information is essential for long term preservation because it helps to identify, contextualize and outline the significant properties of the digital object.
Information stored in wrappers can include:
Content (number of video streams, length of frames),
Context (title of object, who created it, description of contents, re-formatting history),
Video rendering (Width, Height and Bit-depth, Colour Model within a given Colour Space, Pixel Aspect Ratio, Frame Rate and Compression Type, Compression Ratio and Codec),
Audio Rendering – Bit depth and Sample Rate, Bit Rate and compression codec, type of uncompressed sampling.
Codecs, on the other hand, define the parameters of the captured video signal. They are a ‘set of rules which defines how the data is encoded and packaged,’ [5] encompassing Width, Height and Bit-depth, Colour Model within a given Colour Space, Pixel Aspect Ratio and Frame Rate; the bit depth and sample rate and bit rate of the audio.
Although the wrapper is distinct from the encoded file, the encoded file cannot be read without its wrapper. The digital video file, then, comprises of wrapper and at least one codec, often two, to account for audio and images, as this illustration from AV Preserve makes clear.
Diagram taken from AV Preserve’s A Primer on Codecs for Moving Image and Sound Archives
Pick and mix complexity
Why then, are there so many possible combinations of wrappers and codecs for video files, and why has a settled standard not been agreed upon?
Fleischhauer at The Signal does an excellent job outlining the different preferences within practitioner communities, in particular relating to the adoption of ‘open’ and commercial/ proprietary formats.
Compellingly, he articulates a geopolitical divergence between these two camps, with those based in the US allegedly opting for commercial formats, and those in Europe opting for ‘open.’ This observation is all the more surprising because of the advice in FADGI’s Creating and Archiving Born Digital Video: ‘choose formats that are open and non-proprietary. Non-proprietary formats are less likely to change dramatically without user input, be pulled from the marketplace or have patent or licensing restrictions.’ [6]
One answer to the question: why so many different formats can be explained by different approaches to information management in this information-driven economy. The combination of competition and innovation results in a proliferation of open source and their proprietary doubles (or triplets, quadruples, etc) that are constantly evolving in response to market ‘demand’.
Impact of the Broadcast Industry
An important area to highlight driving change in this area is the role of the broadcast industry.
Format selections in this sector have a profound impact on the creation of digital video files that will later become digital archive objects.
In the world of video, Kummer et al explain in an article in the IASA journal, ‘a codec’s suitability for use in production often dictates the chosen archive format, especially for public broadcasting companies who, by their very nature, focus on the level of productivity of the archive.’ [7] Broadcast production companies create content that needs to be able to be retrieved, often in targeted segments, with ease and accuracy. They approach the creation of digital video objects differently to how an archivist would, who would be concerned with maintaining file integrity rather ensuring the source material’s productivity.
Furthermore, production contexts in the broadcast world have a very short life span: ‘a sustainable archiving decision will have to made again in ten years’ time, since the life cycle of a production system tends to be between 3 and 5 years, and the production formats prevalent at that time may well be different to those in use now.’ [8]
Take, for example, H.264/ AVC ‘by far the most ubiquitous video coding standard to date. It will remain so probably until 2015 when volume production and infrastructure changes enable a major shift to H.265/ HEVC […] H.264/ AVC has played a key role in enabling internet video, mobile services, OTT services, IPTV and HDTV. H.264/ AVC is a mandatory format for Blu-ray players and is used by most internet streaming sites including Vimeo, youtube and iTunes. It is also used in Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight and it has also been adopted for HDTV cable, satellite, and terrestrial broadcasting,’ writes David Bull in his book Communicating Pictures.
HEVC, which is ‘poised to make a major impact on the video industry […] offers to the potential for up to 50% compression efficiency improvement over AVC.’ Furthermore, HEVC has a ‘specific focus on bit rate reduction for increased video resolutions and on support for parallel processing as well as loss resilience and ease if integration with appropriate transport mechanisms.’ [9]
Increased compression
The development of codecs for use in the broadcast industry deploy increasingly sophisticated compression that reduce bit rate but retain image quality. As AV Preserve explain in their codec primer paper, ‘we can think of compression as a second encoding process, taking coded information and transferring or constraining it to a different, generally more efficient code.’ [10]
The explosion of mobile, video data in the current media moment is one of the main reasons why sophisticated compression codecs are being developed. This should not pose any particular problems for the audiovisual archivist per se—if a file is ‘born’ with high degrees of compression the authenticity of the file should not ideally, be compromised in subsequent migrations.
Nevertheless, the influence of the broadcast industry tells us a lot about the types of files that will be entering the archive in the next 10-20 years. On a perceptual level, we might note an endearing irony: the rise of super HD and ultra HD goes hand in hand with increased compression applied to the captured signal. While compression cannot, necessarily, be understood as a simple ‘taking away’ of data, its increased use in ubiquitous media environments underlines how the perception of high definition is engineered in very specific ways, and this engineering does not automatically correlate with capturing more, or better quality, data.
Like error correction that we have discussed elsewhere on the blog, it is often the anticipation of malfunction that is factored into the design of digital media objects. These, in turn, create the impression of smooth, continuous playback—despite the chaos operating under the surface. The greater clarity of the visual image, the more the signal has been squeezed and manipulated so that it can be transmitted with speed and accuracy. [11]
MXF
Staying with the broadcast world, we will finish this article by focussing on the MXF wrapper that was ‘specifically designed to aid interoperability and interchange between different vendor systems, especially within the media and entertainment production communities. [MXF] allows different variations of files to be created for specific production environments and can act as a wrapper for metadata & other types of associated data including complex timecode, closed captions and multiple audio tracks.’ [12]
The Presto Centre’s latest TechWatch report (December 2014) asserts ‘it is very rare to meet a workflow provider that isn’t committed to using MXF,’ making it ‘the exchange format of choice.’ [13]
We can see such adoption in action with the Digital Production Partnership’s AS-11 standard, which came into operation October 2014 to streamline digital file-based workflows in the UK broadcast industry.
While the FADGI reports highlights the instability of archival practices for video, the Presto Centre argue that practices are ‘currently in a state of evolution rather than revolution, and that changes are arriving step-by-step rather than with new technologies.’
They also highlight the key role of the broadcast industry as future archival ‘content producers,’ and the necessity of developing technical processes that can be complimentary for both sectors: ‘we need to look towards a world where archiving is more closely coupled to the content production process, rather than being a post-process, and this is something that is not yet being considered.’ [14]
The world of archiving and reformatting digital video is undoubtedly complex. As the quote used at the beginning of the article states, any decision can only ever be a compromise that takes into account organizational capacities and available resources.
What is positive is the amount of research openly available that can empower people with the basics, or help them to delve into the technical depths of codecs and wrappers if so desired. We hope this article will give you access to many of the interesting resources available and some key issues.
As ever, if you have a video digitization project you need to discuss, contact us—we are happy to help!
References:
[1] IASA Technical Committee (2014) Handling and Storage of Audio and Video Carriers, 6.
[2] Carl Fleischhauer, ‘Comparing Formats for Video Digitization.’http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2014/12/comparing-formats-for-video-digitization/.
[3] Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI), Digital File Formats for Videotape Reformatting Part 5. Narrative and Summary Tables. http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/guidelines/FADGI_VideoReFormatCompare_pt5_20141202.pdf, 4.
[4] FADGI, Digital File Formats for Videotape, 4.
[5] AV Preserve (2010) A Primer on Codecs for Moving Image and Sound Archives& 10 Recommendations for Codec Selection and Management, www.avpreserve.com/wp-content/…/04/AVPS_Codec_Primer.pdf, 1.
[6] FADGI (2014) Creating and Archiving Born Digital Video Part III. High Level Recommended Practices, http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/guidelines/FADGI_BDV_p3_20141202.pdf, 24.
[7] Jean-Christophe Kummer, Peter Kuhnle and Sebastian Gabler (2015) ‘Broadcast Archives: Between Productivity and Preservation’, IASA Journal, vol 44, 35.
[8] Kummer et al, ‘Broadcast Archives: Between Productivity and Preservation,’ 38.
[9] David Bull (2014) Communicating Pictures, Academic Press, 435-437.
[10] Av Preserve, A Primer on Codecs for Moving Image and Sound Archives, 2.
[11] For more reflections on compression, check out this fascinating talk from software theorist Alexander Galloway. The more practically bent can download and play with VISTRA, a video compression demonstrator developed at the University of Bristol ‘which provides an interactive overview of the some of the key principles of image and video compression.
[12] ‘FADGI, Digital File Formats for Videotape, 11.
[13] Presto Centre, AV Digitisation and Digital Preservation TechWatch Report #3, https://www.prestocentre.org/, 9.
[14] Presto Centre, AV Digitisation and Digital Preservation TechWatch Report #3, 10-11.
Marvel at the people who put together the U-Matic web resource, for example, which has been online since 1999, a comprehensive outline of the different models in the U-Matic ‘family.’ The site also hosts ‘chat pages’ relating to Betamax, Betacam, U-Matic and V2000, which are still very much active, with archives dating back to 1999. For video tape nerds willing to trawl the depths of these forums, nuggets of machine maintenance wisdom await you.
International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives
Sometimes you need to turn to rigorous, peer-reviewed research in order to learn from AV archive specialists.
‘Established in 1969 in Amsterdam to function as a medium for international co-operation between archives that preserve recorded sound and audiovisual documents’, IASA holds expertise relating to the many different and specialist issues attached to the care of AV archives.
Comprised of several committees dealing with issues such as standards and best practices; National Archive policies; Broadcast archives; Technical Issues; Research Archives; Training and Education, IASA reflects the diverse communities of practice involved in this professional field.
Most of the key IASA publications are accessible to members only, and therefore remain behind a paywall. It is definitely worth taking the plunge though, because there are comparably few specialist resources relating to AV archives written with an interdisciplinary—and international—audience in mind.
Examples of issues covered in member-only publications include Selection in Sound Archives, Decay of Polymers, Deterioration of Polymers and Ethical Principles for Sound and Audiovisual Archives.
The latest publication from the IASA Technical Committee, Handling and Storage of Audio and Video Carriers (2014) or TC05, provides detailed outlines of types of recording carriers, physical and chemical stability, environmental factors and ‘passive preservation,’ storage facilities and disaster planning.
The report comes with this important caveat:
‘TC 05 is not a catalogue of mere Dos and Don’ts. Optimal preservation measures are always a compromise between many, often conflicting parameters, superimposed by the individual situation of a collection in terms of climatic conditions, the available premises, personnel, and the financial situation. No meaningful advice can be given for all possible situations. TC 05 explains the principal problems and provides a basis for the archivist to take a responsible decision in accordance with a specific situation […] A general “Code of Practice” […] would hardly fit the diversity of structures, contents, tasks, environmental and financial circumstances of collections’ (6).
Member benefits
Being an IASA member gives Greatbear access to research and practitioner communities that enable us to understand, and respond to, the different needs of our customers.
Typically we work with a range of people such as individuals whose collections have complex preservation needs, large institutions, small-to-medium sized archives or those working in the broadcast industry.
Our main concern is reformatting the tapes you send us, and delivering high quality digital files that are appropriate for your plans to manage and re-use the data in the future.
If you have a collection that needs to be reformatted to digital files, do contact us to discuss how we can help.
Sometimes genuine rarities turn up at the Greatbear studio. Our recent acquisition of four reels of ‘missing, believed wiped’ test recordings of cult BBC TV show The Old Grey Whistle Test is one such example.
It is not only the content of these recordings that are interesting, but their form too, because they were made on 1” Type A videotape.
The 1″ Type A was ‘one of the first standardised reel-to-reel magnetic tape formats in the 1 inch (25 mm) width.’ In the US it had greatest success as an institutional and industrial format. It was not widely adopted in the broadcast world because it did not meet Federal Communications Commission (FCC) specifications for broadcast videotape formats—it was capable of 350 lines, while the NTSC standard was 525, PAL and SECAM were 625. (Note: upcoming conference ‘Standards, Disruptions and Values in Digital Culture and Communication‘ taking place November 2015).
According the VT Old Boys website, created by ex-BBC engineers in order to document the history of videotape used at the organisation, 2″ Quadruplex tape remained very much the norm for production until the end of the 1970s.
Yet the very existence of the Old Grey Whistle Test tapes suggests type A videotape was being used in some capacity in the broadcast world. Perhaps ADAPT, a project researching British television production technology from 1960-present, could help us solve this mystery?
From Type A, to Type B….
As these things go, type A was followed by Type B, with this model developed by the German company Bosch. Introduced in 1976, Type B was widely adopted in continental Europe, but not in UK and USA which gravitated toward the type C model, introduced by SONY/ Ampex, also in 1976. Type C then became the professional broadcast standard and was still being used well into the 1990s. It was able to record high quality composite video, and therefore had an advantage over component videos such as Betacam and MII that were ‘notoriously fussy and trouble-prone.‘ Type C also had fancy functions like still, shuttle, variable-speed playback and slow motion.
From a preservation assessment point of view, ‘one-inch open reel is especially susceptible to risks associated with age, hardware, and equipment obsolescence. It is also prone to risks common to other types of magnetic media, such as mould, binder deterioration, physical damage, and signal drop-outs.’
The Preservation Self-Assessment Programme advise that ‘this format is especially vulnerable, and, based on content assessment, it should be a priority for reformatting.’
AMPEX made over 30 SMPTE type A models, the majority of which are listed here. Yet the number of working machines we have access to today is few and far between.
In years to come it will be common for people to say ‘it takes four 1” Type A tape recorders to make a working one’, but remember where you heard the truism first.
Harvesting several of these hulking, table-top machines for spares and working parts is exactly how we are finding a way to transfer these rare tapes—further evidence that we need to take the threat of equipment obsolescence very seriously.
At the beginning of 2015, the British Library launched the landmark Save Our Sounds project.
The press release explained:
‘The nation’s sound collections are under threat, both from physical degradation and as the means of playing them disappear from production. Archival consensus internationally is that we have approximately 15 years in which to save our sound collections by digitising them before they become unreadable and are effectively lost.’
Yes you have read that correctly dear reader: by 2030 it is likely that we simply will not be able to play many, if not all of the tape formats we currently support at Greatbear. A combination of machine obsolescence, tape deterioration and, crucially, the widespread loss of skills necessary to repair, service and maintain playback machines are responsible for this astounding situation. They will make it ‘costly, difficult and, in many cases, impossible’ to preserve our recorded audio heritage beyond the proposed cut-off date.
Yet whatever way you look at it, there is need to take action to migrate any collections currently stored on obsolete media, particular if you are part of a small organisation with limited resources. The reality is it will become more expensive to transfer material as we move closer to 2030. The British Library project relates particularly to audio heritage, but the same principles apply to audiovisual collections too.
Yes that rumbling you can hear is the sound of archivists the world over engaged in flurry of selection and appraisal activities….
Extinction
One of the most interesting things about discussions of obsolete media is that the question of operability is often framed as a matter of life or death.
Formats are graded according to their ‘endangered statuses’ in more or less explicit terms, as demonstrated on this Video Preservation website which offers the following ‘obsolescence ratings’:
‘Extinct: Only one or two playback machines may exist at specialist laboratories. The tape itself is more than 20 years old.
Critically endangered: There is a small population of ageing playback machinery, with no or little engineering or manufacturing support. Anecdotal evidence indicates that there are fewer working machine-hours than total population of tapes. Tapes may range in age from 40 years to 10 years.
Endangered: The machine population may be robust, but the manufacture of the machinery has stopped. Manufacturing support for the machines and the tapes becomes unavailable. The tapes are often less expensive, and more vulnerable to deterioration.
Threatened: The playback machines are available; however, either the tape format itself is unstable or has less integrity than other available formats, or it is known that a more popular or updated format will be replacing this one in a short period of time.
Vulnerable: This is a current but highly proprietary format.
Lower risk: This format will be in use over the next five years (1998-2002).’
The ratings on the video preservation website were made over ten years ago. A more comprehensive and regularly updated resource to consult is the Preservation Self-Assessment Program (PSAP), ‘a free online tool that helps collection managers prioritize efforts to improve conditions of collections. Through guided evaluation of materials, storage/exhibit environments, and institutional policies, the PSAP produces reports on the factors that impact the health of cultural heritage materials, and defines the points from which to begin care.’ As well as audiovisual media, the resource covers photo and image material, paper and book preservation. It also has advice about disaster planning, metadata, access and a comprehensive bibliography.
The good news is that fantastic resources do exist to help archivists make informed decisions about reformatting collections.
A Digital Compact Cassette
The bad news, of course, is that the problem faced by audiovisual archivists is a time-limited one, exacerbated no doubt by the fact that digital preservation practices on the ‘output end’ are far from stable. Finding machines to playback your Digital Compact Cassette collection, in other words, will only be a small part of the preservation puzzle. A life of file migrations in yet to be designed wrappers and content-management systems awaits all kinds of reformatted audiovisual media in their life-to-come as a digital archival object.
Depending on the ‘content value’ of any collection stored on obsolete media, vexed decisions will need to be made about what to keep and what to throw away at this clinical moment in the history of recorded sound.
Sounding the fifteen-year warning
At such a juncture, when the fifteen year warning has been sounded, perhaps we can pause for a second to reflect on the potential extinction of large swathes of audio visual memory.
If we accept that any kind of recording both contains memory (of a particular historical event, or performance) and helps us to remember as an aide-mémoire, what are the consequences when memory storage devices which are, according to UNESCO, ‘the primary records of the 20th and 21st centuries’, can no longer be played back?
These questions are of course profound, and emerge in response to what are consequential historical circumstances. They are questions that we will continue to ponder on the blog as we reflect on our own work transferring obsolete media, and maintaining the machines that play them back. There are no easy answers!
Perhaps we will come to understand the 00s as a point of audiovisual transition, when mechanical operators still functioned and tape was still in fairly good shape. When it was an easy, almost throw away decision to make a digital copy, rather than an immense preservation conundrum. So where once there was a glut of archival data—and the potential to produce it—is now the threat of abrupt and irreversible dropout.
Today it poses significant preservation problems, and is described by the Video Format Identification Guide as ‘endangered’: ‘the machine population may be robust, but the manufacture of the machinery has stopped. Manufacturing support for the machines and the tapes becomes unavailable. The tapes are often less expensive, and more vulnerable to deterioration.’
Our magnetic tape transfer aficionado and company director Adrian Finn explains that the format ‘feels and looks so far removed from most other video formats and for me restoring and replaying these still has a little “magic” when the images appear!’
What is one person’s preservation nightmare can of course become part of the artist’s supreme vision.
In an article on the BBC website Temple reflected on the recordings: ‘we affectionately called the format “Glorious Bogroll Vision” but really it was murksville. Today monochrome footage would be perfectly graded with high-contrast effects. But the 1970s format has a dropout-ridden, glitchy feel which I enjoy now.’
Note the visible drop out in the image
The glitches of 1/2″ video were perfect for Temple’s film, which aimed to capture the apocalyptic feeling of Britain on the eve of 1977. Indeed, Temple reveals that ‘we cut in a couple of extra glitches we liked them so much.‘
Does the cutting in of additional imperfection signal a kind-of fetishisation of the analogue video, a form of wanton nostalgia that enables only a self-referential wallowing on a time when things were gloriously a lot worse than they are now?
Perhaps the corrupted image interrupts the enhanced definition and clarity of contemporary digital video.
Indeed, Temple’s film demonstrates how visual perception is always produced by the transmission devices that playback moving images, sound and images, whether that be the 1/2″ video tape or the super HD television.
It is reminder, in other words, that there are always other ways of seeing, and underlines how punk, as a mode of aesthetic address in this case, maintains its capacity to intervene into the business-as-usual ordering of reality.
What to do with your 1/2″ video tapes?
While Temple’s film was made to look worse than it could have been, EIAJ 1/2″ video tapes are most definitely a vulnerable format and action therefore needs to be taken if they are to be preserved effectively.
In a week where the British Library launched their Save Our Sounds campaign, which stated that ‘archival consensus internationally is that we have approximately 15 years in which to save our sound collections by digitising them before they become unreadable and are effectively lost,’ the same timeframes should be applied to magnetic tape-based video collections.
So if your 1/2″ tapes are rotting in your shed as Temple’s Clash footage was, you know that you need to get in there, fish them out, and send them to us pronto!
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 the Sweet Patootee archive, which is a fascinating collection of video-taped oral histories of 1 World War veterans from the Caribbean.
The main issue we want to explore below is the role error correction coding performs both in the composition of the digital video signal and during the preservation playback. We want to highlight this issue because it is often assumed that DVCAM, which first appeared on the market in 1996, is a fairly robust format.
The work we have done to transfer tapes to digital files indicates that error correction coding is working overdrive to ensure we can see and hear these recordings. The implication is that DVCAM collections, and wider DV-based archives, should really be a preservation priority for institutions, organisations and individuals.
Before we examine this in detail, let’s learn a bit about the technical aspects of error correction coding.
Error error error
Error correction coding is a staple part of audio and audio-visual digital media. It is of great important in the digital world of today where the higher volume of transmitted signals require greater degrees of compression, and therefore sophisticated error correction schemes, as this article argues.
Error correction works through a process of prediction and calculation known as interpolation or concealment. It takes an estimation of the original recorded signal in order to re-construct parts of the data that have been corrupted. Corruption can occur due either to wear and tear, or insufficiencies in the original recorded signal.
‘With any error protection system, if too many erroneous bits occur in the same sample, there is a risk of the error detection system failing, and in practice, most media failures (such as dropouts on tape or dirt on a CD), will result in a large chunk of data being lost, not just the odd data bit here and there. So a technique called interleaving is used to scatter data around the medium in such a way that if a large section is lost or damaged, when the data is reordered many smaller, manageable data losses are formed, which the detection and correction systems can hopefully deal with.’
Digital technology’s error correction is one of the key things that differentiate it from their analogue counterparts. As the IASA‘s Guidelines on the Production and Preservation of Digital Audio Objects (2009) explains:
‘Unlike copying analogue sound recordings, which results in inevitable loss of quality due to generational loss, different copying processes for digital recordings can have results ranging from degraded copies due to re-sampling or standards conversion, to identical “clones” which can be considered even better (due to error correction) than the original.’ (65)
To think that digital copies can, at times, exceed the quality of the original digital recording is both an astonishing and paradoxical proposition. After all we are talking about a recording that improves at the perceptual level, despite being compositionally damaged. It is important to remember that error correction coding cannot work miracles, and there are limits to what it can do.
Dietrich Schüller and Albrecht Häfner argue in the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives’s (IASA) Handling and Storage of Audio and Video Carriers (2014) that ‘a perfect, almost error free recording leaves more correction capacity to compensate for handling and ageing effects and, therefore, enhances the life expectancy.’ If a recording is made however ‘with a high error rate, then there is little capacity left to compensate for further errors’ (28-29).
The bizarre thing about error-correction coding then is the appearance of clarity it can create. And if there are no other recordings to compare with the transferred file, it is really hard to know what the recorded signal is supposed to look and sound like were its errors not being corrected.
When we watch the successfully migrated, error corrected file post-transfer, it matters little whether the original was damaged. If a clear signal is transmitted with high levels of error correction, the errors will not be transferred, only the clear image and sound.
Contrast this with a damaged analogue tape it would be clearly discernible on playback. The plus point of analogue tape is they do degrade gracefully: it is possible to play back an analogue tape recording with real physical deterioration and still get surprisingly good results.
Digital challenges
The big challenge working with any digital recordings on magnetic tape is to know when a tape is in poor condition prior to playback. Often tape will look fine and, because of error correction, will sound fine too until it stops working entirely.
How then did we know that the Sweet Patootee tapes were experiencing difficulties?
Professional DV machines such as our DVC PRO have a warning function that flashes when the error-correction coding is working at heightened levels. With our first attempt to play back the tapes we noticed that regular sections on most of the tapes could not be fixed by error correction.
The ingest software we use is designed to automatically retry sections of the tape with higher levels of data corruption until a signal can be retrieved. Imagine a process where a tape automatically goes through a playing-rewinding loop until the signal can be read. We were able to play back the tapes eventually, but the high level of error correction was concerning.
As this diagram makes clear, around 25% of the recorded signal in DVCAM is composed of subcode data, error detection and error correction.
DVCAM & Mis-alignment
It is not just the over-active error correction on DVCAMs that should send the alarm bells ringing.
Alan Griffiths from Bristol Broadcast Engineering, a trained SONY engineer with over 40 years experience working in the television industry, told us that early DVCAM machines pose particular preservation challenges. The main problem here is that the ‘mechanisms are completely different’ for earlier DVCAM machines which means that there is ‘no guarantee’ they will play back effectively on later models.
Recordings made on early DVCAM machines exhibit back tensions problems and tracking issues. This increases the likelihood of DV dropout on playback because a loss of information was recorded onto the original tape. The IASA confirm that ‘misalignment of recording equipment leads to recording imperfections, which can take manifold form. While many of them are not or hardly correctable, some of them can objectively be detected and compensated for.’
One possible solution to this problem, as with DAT tapes, is to ‘misalign’ the replay digital video tape recorder to match the misaligned recordings. However ‘adjustment of magnetic digital replay equipment to match misaligned recordings requires high levels of engineering expertise and equipment’ (2009; 72), and must therefore not be ‘tried at home,’ so to speak.
Our experience with the Sweet Patootee tapes indicates that DVCAM tapes are a more fragile format than is commonly thought, particularly if your DVCAM collection was recorded on early machines. If you have a large collection of DVCAM tapes we strongly recommend that you begin to assess the contents and make plans to transfer them to digital files. As always, do get in touch if you need any advice to develop your plans for migration and preservation.
We have recently transferred a number of recordings of the poet, Anthony Rye, reading his work. The tapes were sent by his Grandson Gabriel who was kind enough to tell us a bit more about Anthony’s life and work.
The Rye family has been here since the end of the 19th century and Anthony came to live here in the 1940s with his wife, in the house I now live in.
Among his books of poems are The Inn of the Birds (1947),Poems from Selborne (1961) and To A Modern Hero (1957). He was an illustrator and trained as an engraver and illustrated The Inn of the Birds himself, of which he said the poems “…were written to make people more alive to the spirit of bird-life and to the nature of birds generally. It was hoped to communicate something of the intense pleasure in birds felt by the author, and at the same time, by emphasizing their strange remote quality without destroying the sense of their being our fellow creatures…”
His poem ‘The Shadow on the Lyth’ from Poems from Selborne, invokes a dark moment in Selborne’s history when it was proposed by the council to put a much needed sewage works at the bottom of Church Meadow, thus ruining one of the most beautiful settings in Hampshire – one beloved of natural historian Gilbert White. Anthony Rye fought this and after a long struggle managed to have the works re-sited out of sight.’
Gilbert White’s life and work was a significant influence on Rye’s work and in 1970 he published the book Gilbert White and his Selborne.
Although the BBC has previously broadcast Rye’s poems, Gabriel tell us that these particular recordings have not been. Until now the recordings have been stored in Arthur’s house; migrating them to digital files is an exciting opportunity for family members, but also hopefully wider audiences, to access Rye’s work.
Listen to Anthony Rye reading his poems, with thanks to Gabriel for granting permission
Recording technologies in history
Arthur Jolland, a nature photographer and friend of the poet made the recordings on a SONY 800B, a portable reel-to-reel tape machine described by SONY as ‘compact, convenient and capable, a natural for both business and pleasure.’
Sahr Conway-Lanz explains that ‘room noise may constitute roughly one quarter of the total hours of recorded sound’ because tape machines recorded at the super slow speed of 15/16 of an inch per second ‘in order to maximize the recording time on each tape’ (547-549).
Decreasing the speed of a tape recording causes a uniform reduction in the linearity of response, resulting in more hiss and dropouts. If you listen to the recordings made by Nixon, it is pretty hard to discern what is being said without reference to the transcripts.
The transfer process
There were no big issues with the condition of the Anthony Rye tapes other than a small amount of loose binder shedding. This was easily solved by dry cleaning with pellon fabric prior to digitization.
Although in some cases playing back tapes on exactly the same machine as it was recorded on is desirable (particularly so with DAT transfers), we migrated the recordings using our SONY APR 5003.
Using a technically superior model, one of the few large format professional reel-to-reel machines SONY manufactured, mitigates the extent to which errors are added to the recording as part of the transfer process. Furthermore, the greater flexibility and control offered with the 5003 makes it easier to accurately replay tapes recorded on machines that had lower specifications.
Another slight adjustment was attaching longer leader tape to the front and end of the tape. This is because the Sony APR 5003 has a much longer tape path than the 800B, and if this isn’t done material can be lost from the beginning and end of the recording.
***
The journeys we have been on above – from the natural history of a Hampshire village seen through the eyes of largely unknown poet to the Watergate scandal – is another example of the diverse technical, cultural and historical worlds that are opened up by the ‘mysterious little reddish-brown ribbon‘ and its playback mechanisms.
Since 2005, UNESCO have used the landmark to highlight the importance of audiovisual archives to ‘our common heritage’ which contain ‘the primary records of the 20th and 21st centuries.’ Increasingly, however, the day is used to highlight how audio and moving image archives are particularly threatened with by ‘neglect, natural decay to technological obsolescence, as well as deliberate destruction’.
Indeed, the theme for 2014 is ‘Archives at Risk: Much More to Do.’ The Swiss National Sound Archives have made this rather dramatic short film to promote awareness of the imminent threat to audiovisual formats, which is echoed by UNESCO’s insistence that ‘all of the world’s audiovisual heritage is endangered.’
As it is World Audiovisual Heritage Day, we thought it would be a good idea to take a look at some of the recent research and policy that has been collected and published relating to digitisation and digital preservation.
While the UNESCO anniversary is useful for raising awareness of the fragility of audiovisual mediums, what is the situation for organisations and institutions grappling with these challenges in practice?
The survey asked a range of organisations, institutions and collections to rank issues that are critical for the preservation of video collections. Respondents ‘identified the top three stumbling blocks in preserving video as:
Getting funding and other resources to start preserving video (18%)
Supporting appropriate digital storage to accommodate large and complex video files (14%)
Locating trustworthy technical guidance on video file formats including standards and best practices (11%)’
Interestingly in relation to the work we do at Great Bear, which often reveal the fragilities of digital recordings made on magnetic tape, ‘respondents report that analog/physical media is the most challenging type of video (73%) followed by born digital (42%) and digital on physical media (34%).’
It may well be that there is simply more video on analogue/ physical media than other mediums which can account for the higher response, and that archives are yet to grapple with the archival problem of digital video stored on physical mediums such as DVD and in particular, consumer grade DVD-Rs. Full details will be published on The Signal, the Library of Congress’ Digital Preservation blog, in due course.
Recent research – Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC)
Another piece of preliminary research published recently was the user consultation for the 2nd edition of the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Digital Preservation Handbook. The first edition of the Handbook was published in 2000 but was regularly updated throughout the 00s. The consultation precedes what will be a fairly substantial overhaul of the resource.
Many respondents to the consultation welcomed that a new edition would be published, stating that much content is now ‘somewhat outdated’ given the rapid change that characterises digital preservation as a technological and professional field.
Survey respondents ranked storage and preservation (1), standards and best practices (2) and metadata and documentation (3) as the biggest challenges involved in digital preservation, and therefore converge with the NDSA findings. It must be stressed, however, that there wasn’t a massive difference across all the categories that included issues such as compression and encryption, access and creating digital materials.
Some of the responses ranged from the pragmatic…
‘digital preservation training etc tend to focus on technical solutions, tools and standards. The wider issues need to be stressed – the business case, the risks, significant properties’ (16)
‘increasingly archives are being approached by community archive groups looking for ways in which to create a digital archive. Some guidance on how archive services can respond effectively and the issues and challenges that must be considered in doing so would be very welcome’ (16)
…to the dramatic…
‘The Cloud is a lethal method of storing anything other than in Lo Res for Access, and the legality of Government access to items stored on The Cloud should make Curators very scared of it. Most digital curators have very little comprehension of the effect of solar flares on digital collections if they were hit by one. In the same way that presently part of the new method of “warfare” is economic hacking and attacks on financial institutions, the risks of cyber attacks on a country’s cultural heritage should be something of massive concern, as little could demoralise a population more rapidly. Large archives seem aware of this, but not many smaller ones that lack the skill to protect themselves’ (17)
…Others stressed legal issues related to rights management…
‘recording the rights to use digital content and ownership of digital content throughout its history/ life is critical. Because of the efforts to share bits of data and the ease of doing so (linked data, Europeana, commercial deals, the poaching of lines of code to be used in various tools/ services/ products etc.) this is increasingly important.’ (17)
It will be fascinating to see how the consultation are further contextualised and placed next to examples of best practice, case studies and innovative technological approaches within the fully revised 2nd edition of the Handbook.
European Parliament Policy on Film Heritage
Our final example relates to the European Parliament and Council Recommendation on Film Heritage. The Recommendation was first decreed in 2005. It invited Member States to offer progress reports every two years about the protection of and access to European film heritage. The 4th implementation report was published on 2 October 2014 and can be read in full here.
The language of the recommendation very much echoes the rationale laid out by UNESCO for establishing World Audiovisual Heritage Day, discussed above:
‘Cinematography is an art form contained on a fragile medium, which therefore requires positive action from the public authorities to ensure its preservation. Cinematographic works are an essential component of our cultural heritage and therefore merit full protection.’
Although the recommendation relates to preservation of cinematic works specifically, the implementation report offers wide ranging insight into the uneven ways ‘the digital revolution’ has affected different countries, at the level of film production/ consumption, archiving and preservation.
The report gravely states that ‘European film heritage risks missing the digital train,‘ a phrase that welcomes a bit more explanation. One way to understand is that it describes how countries, but also Europe as a geo-political space, is currently failing to capitalise on what digital technologies can offer culturally, but also economically.
The report reveals that the theoretical promise of interoperable digital technologies-smooth trading, transmission and distribution across economic, technical and cultural borders-was hindered in practice due to costly and complex copyright laws that make the cross border availability of film heritage, re-use (or ‘mash-up’) and online access difficult to implement. This means that EU member states are not able to monetise their assets or share their cultural worth. Furthermore, this is further emphasised by the fact that ‘85% of Europe’s film heritage is estimated to be out-of-commerce, and therefore, invisible for the European citizen’ (37).
In an age of biting austerity, the report makes very clear that there simply aren’t enough funds to implement robust digitization and digital preservation plans: ‘Financial and human resources devoted to film heritage have generally remained at the same level or have been reduced. The economic situation has indeed pushed Member States to change their priorities’ (38).
There is also the issue of preserving analogue expertise: ‘many private analogue laboratories have closed down following the definitive switch of the industry to digital. This raises the question on how to maintain technology and know-how related to analogue film’ (13).
The report gestures toward what is likely to be a splitting archival-headache-to-come for custodians of born digital films: ‘resources devoted to film heritage […] continue to represent a very small fraction of resources allocated to funding of new film productions by all Member States’ (38). Or, to put it in numerical terms, for every €97 invested by the public sector in the creation of new films, only €3 go to the preservation and digitisation of these films. Some countries, namely Greece and Ireland, are yet to make plans to collect contemporary digital cinema (see opposite infographic).
Keeping up to date
It is extremely useful to have access to the research featured in this article. Consulting these different resources helps us to understand the nuts and bolts of technical practices, but also how different parts of the world are unevenly responding to digitisation. If the clock is ticking to preserve audiovisual heritage in the abrupt manner presented in the Swiss National Archives Film, the EU research in particular indicates that it may well be too late already to preserve a significant proportion of audiovisual archives that we can currently listen to and watch.
All that is left to say is: enjoy the Day for World Audiovisual Heritage! Treasure whatever endangered media species flash past your eyes and ears. Be sure to consider any practical steps you can take to ensure the films and audio recordings that are important to you remain operable for many years to come.
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.
Indeed, at a meeting of audio archivists held in 1995, there was a consensus even then that DAT was not, and would never be, a reliable archival medium. One participant stated: ‘we have tapes from 1949 that sound wonderful,’ and ‘we have tapes from 1989 that are shot to hell.’ And that was nearly twenty years ago! What chances do the tapes have now?
A little DAT history
Before we explore that, let’s have a little DAT history.
SONY introduced Digital Audio Tapes (DATs) in 1987. At roughly half the size of an analogue cassette tape, DAT has the ability to record at higher, equal or lower sampling rates than a CD (48, 44.1 or 32 kHz sampling rate respectively) at 16 bit quantization.
Although popular in Japan, DATs were never widely adopted by the majority of consumer market because they were more expensive than their analogue counterparts. They were however embraced in professional recording contexts, and in particular for recording live sound.
It was recording industry paranoia, particularly in the US, that really sealed the fate of the format. With its threatening promise of perfect replication, DAT tapes were subject to an unsuccessful lobbying campaign by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). RIAA saw DATs as the ultimate attack on copyright law and pressed to introduce the Digital Audio Recorder Copycode Act of 1987.
This law recommended that each DAT machine had a ‘copycode’ chip installed that could detect whether prerecorded copyrighted music was being replicated. The method employed a notch filter that would subtly distort the quality of the copied recording, thus sabotaging acts of piracy tacitly enabled by the DAT medium. The law was however not passed, and compromises were made, although the US Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 imposed taxes on DAT machines and blank media.
How did they do ‘dat?
Like video tape recorders, DAT tapes use a rotating head and helical scan method to record data. The helical scan can, however, pose real problems for the preservation transfers of DAT tapes because it makes it difficult to splice the tape together if it becomes sticky and snaps during the tape wind. With analogue audiotape, which records information longitudinally, it is far more possible to splice the tape together and continue the transfer without risking irrevocable information loss.
Another problem posed by the helical scan method is that such tapes are more vulnerable to tape pack and backing deformation, as the CLIR guide explain:
‘Tracks are recorded diagonally on a helical scan tape at small scan angles. When the dimensions of the backing change disproportionately, the track angle will change for a helical scan recording. The scan angle for the record/playback head is fixed. If the angle that the recorded tracks make to the edge of the tape do not correspond with the scan angle of the head, mistracking and information loss can occur.’
When error correction can’t correct anymore
Most people will be familiar with the sound of digital audio dropouts even if they don’t know the science behind them. You will know them most probably as those horrible clicking noises produced when the error correction technology on CDs stops working. The clicks indicate that the ‘threshold of intelligibility’ for digital data has been breached and, as theorist Jonathan Sterne reminds us, ‘once their decay becomes palpable, the file is rendered entirely unreadable.’
Our SONY PCM 7030 professional DAT machine, pictured opposite, has a ‘playback condition’ light that flashes if an error is present. On sections of the tape where quality is really bad the ‘mute’ light can flash to indicate that the error correction technology can’t fix the problem. In such cases drop outs are very audible. Most DAT machines did not have such a facility however, and you only knew there was a problem when you heard the glitchy-clickety-crackle during playback when, of course, it was too late do anything about it.
The bad news for people with large, yet to be migrated DAT archives is that the format is ‘particularly susceptible to dropout. Digital audio dropout is caused by a non-uniform magnetic surface, or a malfunctioning tape deck. However, because the magnetically recorded information is in binary code, it results in a momentary loss of data and can produce a loud transient click or worse, muted audio, if the error correction scheme in the playback equipment cannot correct the error,’ the wonderfully informative A/V Artifact Atlas explains.
Given the high density nature of digital recordings on narrow magnetic tape, even the smallest speck of dust can cause digital audio dropouts. Such errors can be very difficult to eliminate. Cleaning playback heads and re-transferring is an option, but if the dropout was recorded at the source or the surface of tape is damaged, then the only way to treat irregularities is through applying audio restoration technologies, which may present a problem if you are concerned with maintaining the authenticity of the original recording.
Listen to this example of what a faulty DAT sounds like
Play back problems and mouldy DATs
Mould growth on the surface of DAT tape
A big problem with DAT transfers is actually being able to play back the tapes, or what is known in the business as ‘DAT compatibility.’ In an ideal world, to get the most perfect transfer you would play back a tape on the same machine that it was originally recorded on. The chances of doing this are of course pretty slim. While you can play your average audio cassette tape on pretty much any tape machine, the same cannot be said for DAT tapes. Often recordings were made on misaligned machines. The only solution for playback is, Richard Hess suggests, to mis-adjust a working machine to match the alignment of the recording on the tape.
As with any archival collection, if it is not stored in appropriate conditions then mould growth can develop. As mentioned above, DAT tapes are roughly half the size of the common audiocassette and the tape is thin and narrow. This makes them difficult to clean because they are mechanically fragile. Adapting a machine specifically for the purposes of cleaning, as we have done with our Studer machine, would be the most ideal solution. There is, however, not a massive amount of research and information about restoring mouldy DATs available online even though we are seeing more and more DAT tapes exhibiting this problem.
As with much of the work we do, the recommendation is to migrate your collections to digital files as soon as possible. But often it is a matter of priorities and budgets. From a technical point of view, DATs are a particularly vulnerable format. Machine obsolescence means that compared to their analogue counterparts, professional DAT machines will be increasingly hard to service in the long term. As detailed above, glitchy dropouts are almost inevitable given the sensitivity and all or nothing quality of digital data recorded on magnetic tape.
It seems fair to say that despite being meant to supersede analogue formats, DATs are far more likely to drop out of recorded sound history in a clinical and abrupt manner.
They therefore should be a high priority when decisions are made about which formats in your collection should be migrated to digital files immediately, over and above those that can wait just a little bit longer.
We have recently transferred a previously unpublished 3” ¼ inch tape recording of British 20th century composer Phyllis Tate’s Nocturn forFour Voices. The tape is a 2-track stereo recording made at 7.5 inches per second (in/s) at the Purcell Room in London’s Southbank Centre in 1975, and was broadcast on 16 September 1976.
Generally speaking, the faster the speed the better the reproduction quality when making the digital transfer. This is because higher tape speeds spread the recorded signal longitudinally over more tape area, therefore reducing the effects of dropouts and tape noise. The number of tracks recorded on the tape also has an impact on how good it sounds today. Simply put, the more information stored on the tape due to recording speed or track width, the better the transfer will sound.
The tape of Nocturn for Four Voices was however suffering from binder hydrolysis and therefore needed to be baked prior to play back. EMI tape doesn’t normally do this but as the tape was EMI professional it may well have used Ampex stock and / or have been back coated, thus making the binder more susceptible to such problems.
Remembering Phyllis Tate
Nocturn for Four Voices is an example of how Tate ‘composed for unusual combinations of instruments and voice.’ The composition includes ‘Bass Clarinet, Celeste, String Quartet and Double Bass’, music scholar Jane Ballantyne explains.
The tape was brought into us by Tate’s daughter, Celia Frank, who is currently putting the finishing touches to a web archive that, she hopes, will help contemporary audiences (re)discover her mother’s work.
Like many women musicians and artists, Phyllis Tate, who trained at the Royal Academy of Music, remains fairly obscure to the popular cultural ear.
This is not to say, of course, that her work did not receive critical acclaim from her contemporaries or posthumously. Indeed, it is fair to say that she had a very successful composing career. Both the BBC and the Royal Academy of Music, among others, commissioned compositions from Tate, and her work is available to hire or buy from esteemed music publishers Oxford University Press (OUP).
Edmund Whitehouse, who wrote a short biography of the composer, described her as ‘one of the outstanding British composers of her generation, she was truly her own person whose independent creative qualities produced a wide range of music which defy categorisation.’
Her music often comprised of contrasting emotional registers, lyrical sections and unexpected changes of direction. As a writer of operattas and choral music, with a penchant for setting poetry to music, her work is described by the OUP as the product of ‘an unusual imagination and an original approach to conventional musical forms or subjects, but never to the extent of being described as “avant-garde”.’
Tate’s music was very much a hit with iconic suffrage composer Ethel Smyth who, upon hearing Tate’s compositions, reputedly declared: ‘at last, I have heard a real woman composer.’ Such praise was downplayed by Tate, who tended to point to Smyth’s increased loss of hearing in later life as the cause of her enjoyment: ‘My Cello Concerto was performed soon afterwards at Bournemouth with Dame Ethel sitting in the front row banging her umbrella to what she thought was the rhythm of the music.’
While the dismissal of Smyth’s appreciation is tender and good humoured, the fact that Tate destroyed significant proportions of her work does suggest that at times she could have doubted her own abilities as a composer. Towards the end of her life she revealed: ‘I must admit to having a sneaking hope that some of my creations may prove to be better than they appear. One can only surmise and it’s not for the composer to judge. All I can vouch is this: writing music can be hell; torture in the extreme; but there’s one thing worse; and that is not writing it.’ As a woman composing in an overwhelmingly male environment, such hesitancies are perhaps an understandable expression of what literary scholars Gilbert and Gubar called ‘the anxiety of authorship.’
Tate’s work is a varied and untapped resource for those interested in twentieth century composition and the wider history of women composers. We wish Celia the best of luck in getting the website up and running, and hope that many more people will be introduced to her mother’s work as a consequence.
Thanks to Jane Ballantyne and Celia Frank for their help in writing this article.
At the recent Supernormal experimental arts and music festival held at Braziers Park, Oxfordshire, a number of artists were using analogue technologies to explore concepts that dovetail nicely with the work we do at Greatbear collecting, servicing and repairing obsolete tape machines.
Hacker Farm, for example, keep ‘obsolete tech and discarded, post-consumerist debris’ alive using ‘salvaged and the hand-soldered’ DIY electronics. Their performance was a kind-of technological haunting, the sound made when older machines are turned on and re-purposed in different eras. Eerie, decayed, pointless and mournful, the conceptual impetus behind Hacker Farm raises many questions that emerge from the rather simple desire to keep old technologies working. Such actions soon become strange and aesthetically challenging in the contemporary technological context, which actively reproduces obsolescence in the endless search for the new, fostering continuous wastefulness at the centre of industrial production.
Music by the Metre
Another performance at the festival which engaged with analogue technologies was Graham Dunning’s Music by the Metre. The piece pays homage to SituationistPinot-Gallizio‘s method of ‘Industrial Painting’ (1957-1959), in which the Italian artist created a 145 metre hand and spray painted canvas that was subsequently cut up and sold by the metre. The action, which attempted to destroy the perception of the sacrilegious art-object and transform it into something which could be mass-quantified and sold, aimed to challenge ‘the mental disease of banalisation’ inherent to what Guy Debord termed ‘the society of the spectacle.’
In Dunning’s contemporary piece he used spools of open reel tape to record a series of automated machines comprised of looping record players, synth drone, live environmental sound and tape loops. This tape is then cut by the artist in metre long segments, placed in see-through plastic bags and ‘sold’ on his temporary market stall used to record and present the work.
Dunning’s work exists in interesting tension with the ideas of Pinot-Gallizio, largely because of the different technological and aesthetic contexts the artists are responding to.
Pinot-Gallizio’s industrial painting aimed to challenge the role of art within a consumer society by accelerating its commodity status (mass-produced, uniform, quantified, art as redundant, art as part of the wall paper). Within Dunning’s piece, such a process of acceleration is not so readily available, particularly given the deep obsolescence of consumer-grade open reel tape in 2014, and, furthermore, its looming archival obsolescence (often cited at ’10-20 years‘ by archivists).
Within the contemporary context, open reel analogue tapes have become ornate and aestheticised in themselves because they have lost their function as an everyday, recordable mass blank media. When media lose their operating context they are transformed into objects of fascination and desire, as Claire Bishop pithily states in her Art Forum essay, ‘The Digital Divide’: ‘Today, no exhibition is complete without some form of bulky, obsolete technology—the gently clucking carousel of the slide-projector, or the whirring of an 8mm or 16mm film reel […] the sumptuous texture of indexical media is unquestionably seductive, but its desirability also arises from the impression that it is scarce, rare and precious.’
In reality, the impression of open reel to reel analogue tape’s rarity is however well justified, as manufacturers and distributors of magnetic tape are increasingly hard to find. Might there be something more complex and contradictory be going on in Dunning’s homage to Pinot-Gallizio? Could we understand it as a neat inversion of the mass-metred-object, doubly cut adrift from its historical (1950s-1970s) and technological operating context (the open reel tape recorder), the bag of tape is decelerated, existing as nothing other than art object. Stuffed messily in a plastic bag and displayed ready to be sold (if only by donation), the tape is both ugly and useless given its original and intended use. It is here Dunning’s and Pinot-Gallizio’s work converge, situated at different historical and temporal poles from which critique of the consumer society can be mounted: accelerated plenitude and decelerated exhaustion.
Analogue attachments
As a company that works with obsolete magnetic tape-based media, Greatbear has a vested interest in ensuring tapes and playback machines remain operational. Although our studio, with its stacks of long-forgotten machines, may look like a curious art installation to some, the tapes we migrate to digital files are not quite art objects…yet. Like Hacker Farm, we help to keep old media alive through careful processes of maintenance and repair.
From looking at how contemporary sound artists are engaging with analogue technologies, it is clear that the medium remains very much part of the message, as Marshall McLuhan would say, and that meaning becomes amplified, contorted or transformed depending on historical context, and media norms present within it.
Written in an engaging style, the report is well worth a read. If you don't have time, however, here are some choice selections from the report which relate to the work we do at Greatbear, and some of the wider topics that have been discussed on the blog.
'there are no unexpected changes in file sizes or formats on the horizon, but it is fair to say that the inexorable increase in file size will continue unabated […] Higher image resolutions, bits per pixel and higher frame rates are becoming a fact of life, driving the need for file storage capacity, transfer bandwidth and processing speeds, but the necessary technology developments continue to track some form of Moore’s law, and there is no reason to believe that the technical needs will exceed technical capability, although inevitably there will be continuing technology updates needed by archives in order for them to manage new material.'
Having pointed out the inevitability of file expansion, however, others parts of the report clearly express the very real everyday challenges that ever increasing file sizes are posing to the transmission of digital information between across different locations:
'transport of content was raised by one experienced archive workflow provider. They maintained that, especially with very high bit-rate content (such as 4k) it still takes too long to transfer files into storage over the network, and in reality there are some high-capacity content owners and producers shipping stacks of disks around the country in Transit vans, on the grounds that, in the right circumstances this can still be the highest bandwidth transfer mechanism, even though the Digital Production Partnership (DPP) are pressing for digital-only file transfer.'
While those hoards of transit vans zipping up and down the motorway between different media providers is probably the exception rather than the rule, we should note that a similar point was raised by Per Platou when he talked about the construction of the Videokuntstarkivet - the Norwegian video art archive. Due to the size of video files in particular, Per found that publishing them online really pushed server capabilities to the absolute maximum. This illustrates that there remains a discrepancy between the rate at which broadcast technologies develop and the economic, technological and ecological resources available to send and receive them.
Another interesting point about the move from physical to file-based media is the increased need for Quality-Control (QC) software tools that will be employed to 'ensure that our digital assets are free from artefacts or errors introduced by encoders or failures of the playback equipment.' Indeed, given that glitches born from slow or interrupted transfers may well be inevitable because of limited server capabilities, software developed by Bristol-based company Vidcheck will be very useful because it 'allows for real-time repair of Luma, Chroma, Gamma and audio loudness issues that may be present in files. This is a great feature given that many of the traditional products on the market will detect problems but will not automatically repair them.'
Other main points worth mentioning from the report is the increasing move to open-source, software only solutions for managing digital collections and the rather optimistic tone directed toward 'archives with specific needs who want to find a bespoke provider who can help design, supply and support a viable workflow option – so long as they avoid the large, proprietary ‘out-of-the-box’ solutions.'
The Library of Congress’s digital preservation blog The Signal is a regular reading stop for us, largely because it contains articles and interviews that impressively meld theory and practice, even if it does not exclusively cover issues relating to magnetic tape.
What is particularly interesting, and indeed is a feature of the keynotes for the Digital Preservation 2014 conference, is how the relationship between academic theory—especially relating to aesthetics and art—is an integral part of the conversation of how best to meet the challenge of digital preservation in the US. Keynote addresses from academics like Matthew Kirschenbaum (author of Mechanisms) and Shannon Mattern, sit alongside presentations from large memory institutions and those seeking ways to devise community approaches to digital stewardship.
The relationship between digital preservation and aesthetics is also a key concern of Richard Rhinehart and Jon Ippolito’s new book Re-Collection: Art, New Media and Social Memory, which has just been published by MIT Press.
This book, if at times deploying rather melodramatic language about the ‘extinction!’ and ‘death!’ of digital culture, gently introduces the reader to the wider field of digital preservation and its many challenges. Re-Collection deals mainly with born-digital archives, but many of the ideas are pertinent for thinking about how to manage digitised collections as well.
In particular, the recommendation by the authors that the digital archival object remains variable was particularly striking: ‘the variable media approach encourages creators to define a work in medium- independent terms so that it can be translated into a new medium once its original format is obsolete’ (11). Emphasising the variability of the digital media object as a preservation strategy challenges the established wisdom of museums and other memory institutions, Rhinehart and Ippolito argue. The default position to preserve the art work in its ‘original’ form effectively freezes a once dynamic entity in time and space, potentially rendering the object inoperable because it denies works of art the potential to change when re-performed or re-interpreted. Their message is clear: be variable, adapt or die!
As migrators of tape-based collections, media variability is integral to what we do. Here we tacitly accept the inauthenticity of the digitised archival object, an artefact which has been allowed to change in order to ensure accessibility and cultural survival.
US/ European differences ?
While aesthetic and theoretical thinking is influencing how digital information management is practiced in the US, it seems as if the European approach is almost exclusively framed in economic and computational terms.
Consider, for example, the recent EU press release about the vision to develop Europe’s ‘knowledge economy‘. The plans to map and implement data standards, create cross-border coordination and an open data incubator are, it would seem, far more likely to ensure interoperable and standardised data sharing systems than any of the directives to preserve cultural heritage in the past fifteen years, a time period characterised by markedly unstable approaches, disruptive innovations and a conspicuous lack of standards (see also the E-Ark project).
‘Digital cultural heritage is dependent on some of the same systems, standards and tools used by the entire digital preservation community. Practitioners in the humanities, arts, and information and social sciences, however, are increasingly beginning to question common assumptions, wondering how the development of cultural heritage-specific standards and best practices would differ from those used in conjunction with other disciplines […] Most would agree that preserving the bits alone is not enough, and that a concerted, continual effort is necessary to steward these materials over the long term.’
Of course approaches to digital preservation and data management in the US are largely overdetermined by economic directives, and European policies do still speak to the needs of cultural heritage institutions and other public organisations.
What is interesting, however, is the minimal transnational cross pollination at events such as DigiPres, despite the globally networked condition we all share. This suggests there are subtle divergences between approaches to digital information management now, and how it will be managed in coming years across these (very large) geopolitical locations. Aesthetics or no aesthetics, the market remains imperative. Despite the turn toward open archives and re-usable data, competition is at the heart of the system and is likely to win out above all else.
If you're relatively new to the world of digital and AV preservation, all the different approaches can seem overwhelming. Happily, there are many open access resources available that can help you learn more about existing best practices. Below is our selection of free resources to explore. Contact us at Greatbear if your project/ resource is missing!
The A/V Artifact Atlas is a community-generated resource for people working in digital preservation and aims to identify problems that occur when migrating tape-based media. The Atlas is made in a wiki-format and welcomes contributions from people with expertise in this area - 'the goal is to collectively build a comprehensive resource that identifies and documents AV artifacts.' The Atlas was created by people connected to the Bay Area Video Coalition, a media organisation that aims to inspire 'social change by empowering media makers to develop and share diverse stories through art, education and technology.'
You can download theARSC Guide to Audio Preservation here, a practical introduction to caring for and preserving audio collections. It is aimed at individuals and institutions that have recorded sound collections but lack the expertise in one or more areas to preserve them.
Ray Edmondson'sAudio Visual Archiving: Philosophy and Principles (fully revised 3rd edition, 2016) is commissioned by UNESCO and explores audio visual archiving from the perspective of memory institutions and heritage organisations.
The National Technology Alliance's Magnetic Tape Storage and Handling: A Guide for Libraries and Archives by Dr. John W.C. Van Bogart (1995) is an excellent resource, written in non-technical language and explores the kinds of things that can go wrong with magnetic tape (and how to avoid them!)
Radical Software is the wonderful searchable database of all issues of independent video journal Radical Software, published in New York in the early 1970s. Articles and info on "...all aspects of independent video and video art back in the Portapak era." The site is a joint project of the Daniel Langlois Foundation of Montreal with Davidson Gigliotti and Ira Schneider.
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia have produced an in-depth online Preservation Guide. It includes a film preservation handbook, an audiovisual glossary, advice on caring for your collection and disaster management.
The British Library's Playback and Recording Equipment directory is well worth looking through. Organised chronologically (from 1877 - 1990s), by type and by model, it includes photos, detailed descriptions and you can even view the full metadata for the item. So if you ever wanted to look at a Columbia Gramophone from 1901 or a SONY O-matic tape recorder from 1964, here is your chance!
Vintage Technics - Russian site of a personal collection of extremely rare tape recorders, radios, televisions and detective recording devices.
The Museum of Obsolete Media, affiliated with the Media Archaeology Lab is an online directory of, yes you've guessed it, obsolete media. It includes information about audio, video, data and file formats. The curator of the site points to the site Lost Formats as a strong inspiration for his work.
Project C-90: An ultimate audio tape guide with an impressive collection of different brands of compact, micro and mini-cassettes.
The Tape Tardis offers a useful inventory of audio cassettes organised into tape type (e.g., normal bias, chrome, ferro-chrome and metal) and brands.
The Preservation Self-Assessment Program (PSAP) is a free online tool that helps collection managers prioritise efforts to improve conditions of collections. It is specifically designed to help organisations who have no prior training in digital preservation.
Some very useful and interesting articles on the Damsmart Blog page around audio and video tape preservation.
Richard Hess is a US-based audio restoration expert. He is very knowledgeable and well-respected in the field, and you can find all kinds of esoteric tape wisdom on his site.
LabGuy's World is the site of an avid collector of video hardware and related documentation, hosting a wealth of information on 'the history of video tape recorders before Betamax and VHS' including brochures, manuals and technical data.
We love magnetic tape and the machines that play it. Greatbear belongs to an international audio-visual media conservation community, and tape blog is our own online notebook for sharing knowledge. Comments welcome!
Ashley Blewer's 2021 Digital Preservation Coalition Technology Watch Report, Pragmatic Audiovisual Preservation, aims to provide easily digestible – and pragmatic - guidance for practitioners with a basic knowledge of digital preservation concepts and archival practices, but without expertise in audiovisual materials.
AV Preserve are a US-based consultation company who work in partnership with organisations to implement digital information preservation and dissemination plans. The Papers & Publications and Presentations, sections of theie site include research about diverse areas such as assessing cloud storage, digital preservation software, metadata, making an institutional case for digital preservation, managing personal archives, primers on moving image codecs, disaster recovery and many more. AV Preserve have developed a number of open source collection management tools such as the AVCC Inventory and Collection Management Tool (2015) and the Cost of Inaction calculator. Their website also has a regularly updated blog.
Preservation Guide Wiki - Set up initially by Richard Wright, BBC as early as 2006, the wiki provides advice on getting started in audiovisual digital preservation, developing a strategy at institutional and project based levels. Also of interest is Richard's Preserving Moving Images and Sound (2nd Edition, 2020).
The AVA_NET Library is a n.etwork organisation focussing on gathering and sharing knowledge around audio visual archiving, and excellent knowledge base. Some of the former PrestoCentre's content is archived here.
The European Archival Records and Knowledge Preservation (E-Ark) project promises to collect important research about the sustainability of digital archives across Europe. The website is currently being developed so don't expect much from it, but it is good to know this research is happening.
Northeast Document Conservation Centre (USA) - Digital Preservation Reading List, a detailed annotated bibliography has been compiled to acquaint readers withy the challenges associated with developing a digital preservation plan and repository, and successful strategies for overcoming those challenges.
PREFORMA project aims to address the challenge of implementing good quality standardised file formats for preserving data content in the long term. The main objective is to give memory institutions full control of the process of the conformity tests of files to be ingested into archives. Advocates for FFV1 and Matroska standardisation for video.
The National Digital Stewardship Residency New York is a programme that aims to advance professional development in digital preservation. A great place to learn about the 'bleeding edge' of best practice in the area.
For open source digital preservation software check out The Open Planets Foundation (OPF), who address core digital preservation challenges by engaging with its members and the community to develop practical and sustainable tools and services to ensure long-term access to digital content. The website also includes the very interesting Atlas of Digital Damages
The EU-funded SCAPE project developed scalable services for planning and execution of institutional preservation strategies on an open source platform. Here are their final best practice guidelines and recommendations for Large-scale long-term repository migration; for Preservation of research data; for Bit preservation.
Archivematica is a free and open-source digital preservation system that is designed to maintain standards-based, long-term access to collections of digital objects.
Community Owned Digital Preservation Tool Registry - 'COPTR is also an initiative to collate the knowledge of the digital preservation community on preservation tools in one place. Instead of organisations competing against each other with their own registries, COPTR is bringing them together. In doing so it's objective is to provide the best resource for practitioners on digital preservation tools.' Also check out the tool grid generator designed to help practitioners identify and select tools that they need to solve digital preservation challenges.
Mediainfo is a very useful open source software tool that displays technical and tag data for video and audio files.
BWF MetaEdit permits the embedding, editing, and exporting of metadata in Broadcast WAVE Format (BWF) files. This tool can also enforce metadata guidelines developed by the Federal Agencies Audio-Visual Working Group, as well as recommendations and specifications from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Microsoft, and IBM.
MediaConch is an open source AV preservation project currently being developed by the MediaArea team are 'dedicated to the further development of the standardization of the Matroska and FFV1 formats to ensure their longevity as a recommended digital preservation file format'. Also check out the blog.
ffmprovisr - this app makes ffmpeg easier by helping users through the command generation process so that more people can reap the benefits of FFmpeg. Each button displays helpful information about how to perform a wide variety of tasks using FFmpeg.
In 2005 UNESCO declared 27 October to be World Audiovisual Heritage Day. The web pages are an insight into the way audiovisual heritage is perceived by large, international policy bodies.
Be sure to take advantage of the open access digital heritage articles published by Routledge. The articles are from the International Journal of Heritage Studies, Archives and Records, Journal of the Institute of Conservation, Archives and Manuscripts and others.
The Digital Curation Centre works to support Higher Education Institutions to interpret and manage research data. Again, this website is incredibly detailed, presenting case studies, 'how-to' guides, advice on digital curation standards, policy, curation lifecycle and much more.
Europeana is a multi-lingual online collection of millions of digitised items from European museums, libraries, archives and multi-media collections.
Miscellaneous Technology
The BBC's R & D Archive is an invaluable resource of white papers, research and policy relating to broadcast technology from the 1930s onwards. As the website states, 'whether it’s noise-cancelling microphones in the 1930s, the first transatlantic television transmission in the 1950s, Ceefax in the 1970s, digital radio in the 1990s and HD TV in the 2000s, or the challenge to "broadcasting" brought about by the internet and interactive media, BBC Research & Development has led the way with innovative technology and collaborative ways of working.'
IRENE technology, developed by the Northeast Document Conservation Center in the US, applies a digital imaging approach to audio preservation. IRENE currently works with fragile media such as Wax cylinders, Lacquer discs (a.k.a. “acetate” discs), Aluminum transcription discs, Shellac discs, Tin foils and other rare formats (e.g. Dictabelt, Voice-O-Graph, etc.).
Behind every tape (and every tape format) lie interesting stories, and the technological wizardry and international diplomacy that helped shape the roots of our digital audio visual world are worth looking into.
In 1976, when the green shoots of digital audio technology were emerging at industry level, the question of whether Video Tape Recorders (VTRs) could be digitised began to be explored in earnest by R & D departments based at SONY, Ampex and Bosch G.m.b.H. There was considerable scepticism among researchers about whether digital video tape technology could be developed at all because of the wide frequency required to transmit a digital image.
Several years of product development followed, shaped, in part, by competing regional preferences. As Jim Slater argues in Modern Television Systems (1991): 'much of the initial work towards digital standardisation was concerned with trying to find ways of coping with the three very different colour subcarrier frequencies used in NTSC, SECAM and PAL systems, and a lot of time and effort was spent on this' (114).
Establishing a standard sampling frequency did of course have real financial consequences, it could not be randomly plucked out the air: the higher the sampling frequency, the greater overall bit rate; the greater overall bit rate, the more need for storage space in digital equipment. In 1982, after several years of negotiations, a 13.5 MHz sampling frequency was agreed. European, North American, 'Japanese, the Russians, and various other broadcasting organisations supported the proposals, and the various parameters were adopted as a world standard, Recommendation 601 [a.k.a. 4:2:2 DTV] standard of the CCIR [Consultative Committee for International Radio, now International Telecommunication Union]' (Slater, 116).
The 4:4:2 DTV was an international standard that would form the basis of the (almost) exclusively digital media environment we live in today. It was 'developed in a remarkably short time, considering its pioneering scope, as the worldwide television community recognised the urgent need for a solid basis for the development of an all-digital television production system', write Stanley Baron and David Wood
Once agreed upon, product development could proceed. The first digital video tape, the D-1, was introduced on the market in 1986. It was an uncompressed component video which used enormous bandwidth for its time: 173 Mbit/sec (bit rate), with maximum recording time of 94 minutes.
BTS DCR 500 D-1 video recorder at Greatbear studio
As Slater writes: 'unfortunately these machines are very complex, difficult to manufacture, and therefore very expensive […] they also suffer from the disadvantage that being component machines, requiring luminance and colour-difference signals at input and output, they are difficult to install in a standard studio which has been built to deal with composite PAL signals. Indeed, to make full use of the D-1 format the whole studio distribution system must be replaced, at considerable expense' (125).
Being forced to effectively re-wire whole studios, and the considerable risk involved in doing this because of continual technological change, strikes a chord with the challenges UK broadcast companies face as they finally become 'tapeless' in October 2014 as part of the Digital Production Partnership's AS-11 policy.
Sequels and product development
As the story so often goes, D-1 would soon be followed by D-2. Those that did make the transition to D-1 were probably kicking themselves, and you can only speculate the amount of back injuries sustained getting the machines in the studio (from experience we can tell you they are huge and very heavy!)
It was fairly inevitable a sequel would be developed because even as the D-1 provided uncompromising image quality, it was most certainly an unwieldy format, apparent from its gigantic size and component wiring. In response a composite digital video, the D-2, was developed by Ampex and introduced in 1988.
In this 1988 promotional video, you can see the D-2 in action. Amazingly for our eyes and ears today the D-2 is presented as the ideal archival format. Amazing for its physical size (hardly inconspicuous on the storage shelf!) but also because it used composite video signal technology. Composite signals combine on one wire all the component parts which make up a video signal: chrominance (colour, or Red Green, Blue - RGB) and luminance (the brightness or black and white information, including grayscale).
While the composite video signal used lower bandwidth and was more compatible with existing analogue systems used in the broadcast industry of the time, its value as an archival format is questionable. A comparable process for the storage we use today would be to add compression to a file in order to save file space and create access copies. While this is useful in the short term it does risk compromising file authenticity and quality in the long term. The Ampex video is fun to watch however, and you get a real sense of how big the tapes were and the practical impact this would have had on the amount of time it took to produce TV programmes.
Enter the D-3
Following the D-2 is the D-3, which is the final video tape covered in this article (although there were of course the D5 and D9.)
The D-3 was introduced by Panasonic in 1991 in order to compete with Ampex's D-2. It has the same sampling rate as the D-2 with the main difference being the smaller shell size.
The D-3's biggest claim to fame was that it was the archival digital video tape of choice for the BBC, who migrated their analogue video tape collections to the format in the early 1990s. One can only speculate that the decision to take the archival plunge with the D-3 was a calculated risk: it appeared to be a stable-ish technology (it wasn't a first generation technology and the difference between D-2 and D-3 is negligible).
The extent of the D-3 archive is documented in a white paper published in 2008, D3 Preservation File Format, written by Philip de Nier and Phil Tudor: 'the BBC Archive has around 315,000 D-3 tapes in the archive, which hold around 362,000 programme items. The D-3 tape format has become obsolete and in 2007 the D-3 Preservation Project was started with the goal to transfer the material from the D-3 tapes onto file-based storage.'
It has then taken six years to migrate less than a third of the BBC's D-3 archive. Given that D-3 machines are now obsolete, it is more than questionable whether there are enough D-3 head hours left in existence to read all the information back clearly and to an archive standard. The archival headache is compounded by the fact that 'with a large proportion of the content held on LTO3 data tape [first introduced 2004, now on LTO-6], action will soon be required to migrate this to a new storage technology before these tapes become difficult to read.' With the much publicised collapse of the BBC's (DMI) digital media initiative in 2013, you'd have to very strong disposition to work in the BBC's audio visual archive department.
The roots of the audio visual digital world
The development of digital video tape, and the international standards which accompanied its evolution, is an interesting place to start understanding our current media environment. They are also a great place to begin examining the problems of digital archiving, particularly when file migration has become embedded within organisational data management policy, and data collections are growing exponentially.
While the D-1 may look like an alien-techno species from a distant land compared with the modest, immaterial file lists neatly stored on hard drives that we are accustomed to, they are related through the 4:2:2 sample rate which revolutionised high-end digital video production and continues to shape our mediated perceptions.
Preserving early digital video formats
More more information on transferring D-1, D-2, D3, D-5, D-5HD & D-9 / Digital S from tape to digital files, visit our digitising pages for:
