digitisation

Jack Hollingshead’s lost Apple recordings on reel-to-reel tape

Digital technologies have helped to salvage all manner of ‘lost’ or ‘forgotten’ recordings. Whole record labels, from the recently featured Bristol Archive Records to institutional collections like Smithsonian Folkways, are based on the principle of making ‘hard to access’ recordings available in digital form.

A box crammed with dusty reel-to-reel tapes of different sizes

Occasionally we get such rare recordings in the Greatbear studio, and we are happy to turn the signal from analogue to digital so the music can be heard by new audiences. Last week we were sent a particularly interesting collection of tapes: a box of nearly 40 3”-10.5” reel to reel tapes from the songwriter and artist Jack Hollingshead, who sadly passed away in March 2013. The tapes are in good condition, although the spools are pretty dirty, most probably from being stored under the bed or at the back of a cupboard, as these things often are! Jack’s tape came to our attention after a phone call from the writer Stefan Granados, who wanted to arrange for a few songs to be digitised for a research project he is doing focused around the Beatles’ Apple Records company.

The Beatles set up Apple Records in 1968 as an outlet for their own and emerging artists’ recordings. Well known performers who were signed to Apple included Mary Hopkin, Ravi Shankar, James Taylor and many others. But there were also a number of artists who recorded sessions with Apple, but for one reason or another, their music was never released on the label. This is what happened to Jack’s music. Jack’s Apple sessions are psychedelic pop-folk songs with striking melodies, song cousins of drowsy Beatles hits like ‘Across the Universe’. He recorded seven songs in total, which we received on magnetic tape and acetate disc, the test cut of the recording that would have been printed on vinyl. We digitised from the magnetic tape because the disc was in fairly poor condition and we didn’t know how many times the disc had been played.

https://cdn.thegreatbear.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/jack-hollingshead-mono-track-1.mp3?_=1

Listen to ‘Vote for ME’ by Jack Hollingshead

 

It wasn’t the first time that Jack’s work had aroused record company interest. When he was 16 he signed a contract with Aberbach publishers. Like his experience with Apple a few years later, nothing came of the sessions, and because the companies owned the recordings, he was not able to release them independently.

Jack soon became very frustrated by the record industry in the late 1960s and decided he would do it himself. This was ten years before home recording became widely accessible, so it was not easy, either financially or technically.

In the 1970s a series of serious accidents, and a spell in prison, proved to be disruptive for his musical career. Jack’s prison sentence, received for growing marijuana he was using for medical pain relief purposes, was however fairly positive. It gave him time to focus on playing guitar and he wrote his best songs while incarcerated.

The back of a test acetate is grooveless

He continued to write and record music throughout his life, and there is a significant amount of material that Trina Grygiel, who is responsible for managing Jack’s estate, is determined to organise and release in his memory.

Jack was also prodigiously talented artist in other mediums, and turned his hand to puppet making, wax painting, gardening and property restoration. His obituary described him as a ‘perfectionist, in all his artistic, creative and practical endeavours he would settle for nothing less.’

Posted by debra in audio tape, 0 comments

Transfer Digital Betacam (DigiBeta) to Quicktime or AVI now, one day they will be obsolete

Even relatively recent born-digital formats like Digital Betacam (or DigiBeta, as it’s often referred to) should be viewed as a potentially obsolete format. This Standard Definition (SD) format while very popular for many years is not the preferred delivery format now the industry has embraced High Definition (HD).

When serviced these machines are very reliable and would be worked hard in a production environment. Designed to be serviced with little expense spared these were some of Sony’s most expensive decks and even if second hand values of machines have dropped recently, new spares have not. As with most video formats though as they become less popular the spares availability will become a problem as parts inventory dry up. One day and it may not be that far away a popular format like DigiBeta will become a threatened, obsolete format.

Digital Betacam recorders  were introduced in 1993, superseding the Betacam and Betacam SP, while costing significantly less, and being dramatically smaller than (!), the D-1.

We are particularly pleased with this machine because there are relatively low hours on its original head drum (1000 hours). The average headlife for this format is up to three times that or more, depending on the environment it was used in.

If the machine was used in a heavy production environment, for example, it would be constantly drawing in air to cool the electronics and, potentially, large amounts of dust and debris with it. This is one of the factors affecting head life.

Part of the service kit installed on the DigiBeta is designed to counter such damage because it allows you to replace the filters around the head drum area should they become clogged.

The big problem, as with so many of these machines, is acquiring relevant parts to ensure they can be serviced when they break down. Spare parts for DigiBeta machines can be expensive, costing several thousand pounds for a replacement head drum.

This machine has needed some work recently to keep it running smoothly. The loading gear had split which meant it couldn’t load tapes and gave reel motor errors. These were fixed easily by replacing the broken parts. After these repairs were completed the picture was still however displaying errors. This was because the bearing on the pinch roller was worn resulting in too much movement in the tape path. With the problem diagnosed a new pinch roller was installed and our new machine is working beautifully!

So send us your DigiBeta tapes!

Posted by debra in video tape, video technology, machines, equipment, 0 comments

UNESCO World Audiovisual Heritage Day – 27 October

In 2005 UNESCO (United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) decided to commemorate 27 October as World Audiovisual Heritage Day. The theme for 2013 was ‘Saving Our Heritage for the Next Generation’. Even though we are a day late, we wanted to write a post to mark the occasion.

UNESCO argue that audiovisual heritage is a unique vehicle for cultural memory because it can transcend ‘language and cultural boundaries’ and appeal ‘immediately to the eye and the ear.’

World Audiovisual Heritage Day aims to recognise both the value and vulnerability of audiovisual heritage. It aims to raise awareness that much important material will be lost unless ‘resources, skills, and structures’ are established and ‘international action’ taken.

Many important records of the 20th and 21st century are captured on film, yet digitally preserving this material generates specific problems, which we often discuss on this blog. Andrea Zarza Canova emphasises this point on the British Library’s blog:

‘World Day for Audiovisual Heritage is an important moment to celebrate and draw attention to the efforts currently being made in audiovisual preservation. But the story doesn’t end here as the digital environment raises its own preservation challenges concerning the ephemerality of websites and digital formats. Saving our heritage for the next generation involves engaging with the ongoing complexities of preservation in a rapidly changing environment.’

World Audiovisual Heritage Day is an  ideal opportunity to delve into UNESCO’s Memory of the World collection whose audiovisual register features rare footage including photo and film documentation of Palestinian refugees, footage of Fritz Lang’s motion picture Metropolis (1927), documentary heritage of Los olvidados (“The Young and the Damned”), made in 1950 by Spanish-Mexican director Luis Buñuel, documentary heritage of Aram Khachaturian the world renowned Armenian composer and many others. Of the 301 items in the Memory of the World collection, 57 are audiovisual or have significant audiovisual elements.

Digital preservation is central to our work at the Greatbear. We see ourselves as an integral part of the wider preservation process, offering a service for archive professionals who may not always have access to obsolete playback machines, or expert technical knowledge about how best to transfer analogue tape to digital formats. So if you need help with a digitisation project why not get in touch?

UNESCO would surely approve of our work because we help keep the audiovisual memory of the world alive.

 

Posted by debra in audio / video heritage, audio tape, video tape, 0 comments

Digital Preservation and Copyright

Most customers who send us tape to digitise own the copyright of their recording: it is material they have created themselves, be it music, spoken word or film.

Occasionally customers are not so sure if they own the full copyright to their recordings. This is because a single piece of work can have multiple copyright holders.

For example, films and songs can have many different contributors, such as the person who made the recording, the songwriter and performers. There are performing rights royalties which are paid to a songwriter, composer or publisher whenever their music is played or performed in any public space or place; mechanical rights royalties which are paid to the songwriter, composer or publisher when music is reproduced as a physical product or for broadcast or online, and performers rights royalties which are paid to the people performing on the record. It can seem like a bit of a minefield, and you do have to be really careful, particularly if want to re-publish the works in a commercial context.

A collection of tapes that include original recordings made by the customer

The simple truth is, if you do not have full permission of all copyright holders, you would break the law if you digitised a tape and re-published it commercially.

Copyright, Intellectual Property and Digital Preservation is a tricky area to negotiate. Currently ‘there is still no exception in UK law for preservation copying. For materials which are still in copyright, permissions should be sought from copyright holders prior to any copying being done. This area is under consideration though with museums, libraries and archives lobbying for change’ (Jisc Digital Media).

What this means basically is that archives, libraries and museums are effectively restricted in how much material they can legally preserve in digital form. Andrew Charlesworth explains in a very useful report for the Digital Preservation Coalition on ‘Intellectual Property Rights for Digital Preservation’ (2012)

‘In “Chapter III: Acts permitted in relation to copyright works”, the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 provides for a series of permissible activities that would otherwise be barred for breach of a rights holder’s exclusive rights. These include the “fair dealing provisions” which, for example, state that making transient copies is an integral and essential part of certain technological processes (s.28), and using all or part of a copyright work for non-commercial research or private study (s.29), criticism or review, or reporting current events (s.30), do not constitute infringements’ (11).

Clearly copyright law as it stands places immense restrictions in a digital environment where copying and sharing all kinds of things is pretty much the norm. What are the arguments then for changing copyright laws? In Imagine there is no copyright and cultural conglomerates too by Joost Smiers and Marieke Van Schinjdel, published by the Institute of Network CulturesTheory on Demand series, they argue that removing copyright from cultural products will ensure that ‘our past and present heritage of cultural expression, our public domain of artistic creativity and knowledge will no longer be privatised’ (6).

Making cultural heritage publicly available is an argument for transforming current copyright laws across the range of political positions. While Smiers and Van Schinjdel interpret privatisation embedded in copyright law as linked to commercial power, the implicit argument in the DPC report is that opening up current restrictions can only be good for business. In this particular domain we see how the value of archival information has shifted in the digital landscape, so that it is increasingly seen as a resource through which money can be made.

A transformation of copyright laws would not necessarily lead to a weakening of commercial interests as Smiers and Van Schinjdel speculate, but would most probably enable the re-use of information across a range of profit and profit-making initiatives. Charlesworth insists we are ‘clinging to copyright practices that reflect outdated business models rather than attempting to establish new practices to address the prevailing mixed analogue/digital environment’ (7).

The digital information revolution has required all sectors of society to change how they relate to, use, record, save and consume information. While we have all become, to a lesser or more degree, record keepers, this brief survey of copyright law may help us appreciate the challenges professional archivists face in negotiating this complex area. After all, ‘life would be much simpler for archivists if the law relating to the preservation of copyright works in general, and digital works in particular, was both clarified and, where necessary, extended to permit more robust strategies for collection, preservation and reuse of copyright works’ (5).

 

Posted by debra in audio tape, video tape, 0 comments

Digitise VHS Tapes – Bristol’s Meet Your Feet

We recently digitised some VHS tapes from when Bristol-based band Meet Your Feet performed on HTV in 1990. Meet Your Feet

‘formed in 1988 as a result of three of the women getting together to start a women’s music workshop, Meet Your Feet played its first gig in June 1988, when asked to get a set together for a Benefit Gig against section 28. This gig was so successful that the band decided to stay together and gradually the original line-up of the early years of the band evolved: Carol Thomas, vocals; Diana Milstein, founder member, bass and lyricist; Diggy, percussion; Heie Gelhaus, founder member, keyboards and songwriter; Julie Lockhart, vocals; Karen Keen, sax; Sue Hewitt, founder member, drums and songwriter; Vicki Burke, sax’ (taken from the  Women’s Liberation Music Archive).

During the 80s the band achieved great success and performed at prestigious festivals such as Glastonbury and WOMAD, as well as appearing on Radio 4’s Women’s Hour. They played together until 1992 before disbanding, reformed in 2010 and continue to play shows in Bristol and beyond. Meet Your Feet’s style, which draws from Latin, Jazz and Soul influences, interspersed with passionate, upbeat political lyrics, align them with other ‘women’s music’ bands from the 1980s, such as The Guest Stars and Hi-Jinx.

Meet Your Feet from Adrian Finn on Vimeo.

The video clip we digitised is interesting because it indicates how novel women’s bands were in 1990.

After the band finish performing their new single, they take part in a short interview where they are asked:

‘Its an obvious question, but I am going to ask it, why all women?’

Julie Lockhart, one of the singers, responds wittily, but not without a tinge of bewilderment, ‘Um, we were born that way!’

Can you imagine an all male group being asked a similar question in a television interview, either now or in the early 1990s?! It just wouldn’t happen because no one notices if all the members of a group are male, it just seems completely normal.

The interview goes on to emphasise gender issues, rather than focus on other aspects, such as themes in their music or that it is a large group (there are nine people in the band after all, which is a lot!)

This is not a criticism of the interviewer’s questions as such. Yet the fact it was necessary to asks them about their gender speaks volumes about how surprising it was to see women playing music together. The interview continues as follows:

Presenter: Are there any real advantages to being an all female group?

Sue Hewitt: We listen to each other more, and spin ideas of each other a lot more easily

Julie Lockhart: We giggle a lot more

Presenter: Do you row a lot because you are on the road, its a hard life isn’t it, very intense?

Julie Lockhart: No, that’s the obvious difference we never row!

Presenter: Do you find it hard to be taken seriously by men who come to see an all girl band?

Sue Hewitt: Well no, not all the time. I think initially some men take the view of ‘oh well, its just a bunch of girls on stage’ but when we get up there and start playing they think, ohhh [they can play as well]

It is frustrating that such questions had to be asked, and maybe they wouldn’t be now – although it is still often the case that in music, as in other areas of cultural life, women’s gender is marked, while male gender is not. We have all heard, for example, the phrase ‘female-fronted band’. When do we ever hear of bands that are ‘male-fronted’?

It is really valuable to have access to recordings such as those of Meet Your Feet, not only as a documentation of their performances, but also to demonstrate the attitudes and assumptions that women faced when they participated in a male dominated cultural field.

It is also good to know that Meet Your Feet are still performing and undoubtedly upsetting a few stereotypes and expectations along the way, so make sure you catch them at a show soon!

Posted by debra in video tape, 0 comments

Parsimonious Preservation – (another) different approach to digital information management

We have been featuring various theories about digital information management on this blog in order to highlight some of the debates involved in this complex and evolving field.

To offer a different perspective to those that we have focused on so far, take a moment to consider the principles of Parsimonious Preservation that has been developed by the National Archives, and in particular advocated by Tim Gollins who is Head of Preservation at the Institution.

In some senses the National Archives seem to be      bucking the trend of panic, hysteria and (sometimes)  confusion that can be found in other literature relating  to digital information management. The advice given in  the report, ‘Putting Parsimonious Preservation into  Practice‘, is very much advocating a hands-off, rather  than hands-on approach, which many other  institutions, including the British Library, recommend.

The principle that digital information requires  continual interference and management during its life  cycle is rejected wholesale by the principles of  parsimonious preservation, which instead argues that  minimal intervention is preferable because this entails  ‘minimal alteration, which brings the benefits of  maximum integrity and authenticity’ of the digital data object.

As detailed in our previous posts, cycles of coding and encoding pose a very real threat to digital data. This is because it can change the structure of the files, and risk in the long run compromising the quality of the data object.

Minimal intervention in practice seems here like a good idea – if you leave something alone in a safe place, rather than continually move it from pillar to post, it is less likely to suffer from everyday wear and tear. With digital data however, the problem of obsolescence is the main factor that prevents a hands-off approach. This too is downplayed by the National Archives report, which suggests that obsolescence is something that, although undeniably a threat to digital information, it is not as a big a worry as it is often presented.

Gollins uses over ten years of experience at the National Archives, as well as the research conducted by David Rosenthal, to offer a different approach to obsolescence that takes note of the ‘common formats’ that have been used worldwide (such as PDF, .xls and .doc). The report therefore concludes ‘that without any action from even a national institution the data in these formats will be accessible for another 10 years at least.’

10 years may seem like a short period of time, but this is the timescale cited as practical and realistic for the management of digital data. Gollins writes:

‘While the overall aim may be (or in our case must be) for ―permanent preservation […] the best we can do in our (or any) generation is to take a stewardship role. This role focuses on ensuring the survival of material for the next generation – in the digital context the next generation of systems. We should also remember that in the digital context the next generation may only be 5 to10 years away!’

It is worth mentioning here that the Parsimonious Preservation report only includes references to file extensions that relate to image files, rather than sound or moving images, so it would be a mistake to assume that the principle of minimal intervention can be equally applied to these kinds of digital data objects. Furthermore, .doc files used in Microsoft Office are not always consistent over time – have you ever tried to open a word file from 1998 on an Office package from 2008? You might have a few problems….this is not to say that Gollins doesn’t know his stuff, he clearly must do to be Head of Preservation at the National Archives! It is just this ‘hands-off, don’t worry about it’ approach seems odd in relation to the other literature about digital information management available from reputable sources like The British Library and the Digital Preservation Coalition. Perhaps there is a middle ground to be struck between active intervention and leaving things alone, but it isn’t suggested here!

For Gollins, ‘the failure to capture digital material is the biggest single risk to its preservation,’ far greater than obsolescence. He goes on to state that ‘this is so much a matter of common sense that it can be overlooked; we can only preserve and process what is captured!’ Another issue here is the quality of the capture – it is far easier to preserve good quality files if they are captured at appropriate bit rates and resolution. In other words, there is no point making low resolution copies because they are less likely to survive the rapid successions of digital generations. As Gollins writes in a different article exploring the same theme, ‘some will argue that there is little point in preservation without access; I would argue that there is little point in access without preservation.’

This has been bit of a whirlwind tour through a very interesting and thought provoking report that explains how a large memory institution has put into practice a very different kind of digital preservation strategy. As Gollins concludes:

‘In all of the above discussion readers familiar with digital preservation literature will perhaps be surprised not to see any mention or discussion of “Migration” vs. “Emulation” or indeed of ―“Significant Properties”. This is perhaps one of the greatest benefits we have derived from adopting our parsimonious approach – no such capability is needed! We do not expect that any data we have or will receive in the foreseeable future (5 to 10 years) will require either action during the life of the system we are building.’

Whether or not such an approach is naïve, neglectful or very wise, only time will tell.

Posted by debra in audio tape, 2 comments

Bristol Archive Records – ¼ inch studio master tapes, ½ inch 8 track multi-track tapes, audio cassettes, DAT recordings and Betamax digital audio recordings

Bristol Archive Records is more than a record label. It releases music, books and through its website, documents the history of Bristol’s punk and reggae scenes from 1977 onwards. You can get lost for hours trawling through the scans of rare zines and photographs, profiles of record labels, bands, discographies and gig lists. Its a huge amount of work that keeps on expanding as more tapes are found, lurking in basements or at that unforeseen place at the back of the wardrobe.

Greatbear has the privilege of being the go-to digitisation service for Bristol Archive Records, and many of the albums that grace the record store shelves of Bristol and beyond found their second digital life in the Greatbear Studio.

The tapes that Mike Darby has given us to digitise include ¼ inch studio master tapes, ½ inch 8 track multi-track tapes, audio cassettes, DAT recordings and Betamax digital audio recordings. The recordings were mostly made at home or in small commercial studios, often they were not stored in the best conditions.  Some are demos, or other material which has never been released before.  Many were recorded on Ampex tape, and therefore needed to be baked before they were played back, and we also had to deal with other physical problems with the tape, such as mould, but they have all, thankfully, been fixable.

After transfers we supply high quality WAV files as individual tracks or ‘stems’ to label manager Mike Darby, which are then re-mastered before they are released on CD, vinyl or downloads.

Bristol Archive Records have done an amazing job ensuring the cultural history of Bristol’s music scenes are not forgotten. As Mike explains in an interview on Stamp the Wax:

‘I’m trying to give a bit of respect to any individual that played in any band that we can find any music from. However famous or successful they were is irrelevant. For me it’s about acknowledging their existence. It’s not saying they were brilliant, some of it was not very good at all, but it’s about them having their two seconds of “I was in that scene”.’

While Darby admits in the interview that Bristol Archive Records is not exactly a money spinner, the cultural value of these recordings are immeasurable. We are delighted to be part of the wider project and hope that these rare tapes continue to be found so that contemporary audiences can enjoy the musical legacies of Bristol.

Posted by debra in audio tape, 1 comment

1/2 inch EIAJ skipfield reel to reel videos transferred for Stephen Bell

We recently digitised a collection of 1/2 inch EIAJ skipfield reel to reel videos for Dr Stephen Bell, Lecturer in Computer Animation at Bournemouth University.

CLEWS SB 01 from Stephen Bell on Vimeo.

Stephen wrote about the piece:

‘The participatory art installation that I called “Clews” took place in “The White Room”, a bookable studio space at the Slade School of Art, over three days in 1979. People entering the space found that the room had been divided in half by a wooden wall that they could not see beyond, but they could enter the part nearest the entrance. In that half of the room there was a video monitor on a table with a camera above it pointing in the direction of anyone viewing the screen. There was also some seating so that they could comfortably view the monitor. Pinned to the wall next to the monitor was a notice including cryptic instructions that referred to part of a maze that could be seen on the screen. Participants could instruct the person with the video camera to change the view by giving simple verbal instructions, such as ‘up’, “down”, “left”, “right”, “stop”, etc. until they found a symbol that indicated an “exit”.’

My plan was to edit the video recordings of the event into a separate, dual screen piece but it was too technically challenging for me at the time. I kept the tapes though, with the intention of completing the piece when time and resources became available. This eventually happened in 2012 when, researching ways to get the tapes digitized, I discovered Greatbear in Bristol. They have done a great job of digitizing the material and this is the first version of piece I envisaged all those years ago.’

Nice to have a satisfied customer!

Posted by debra in audio tape, video tape, 0 comments

Paper-backed Soundmirror ‘magnetic ribbon’ – early domestic magnetic tape recorders

The oldest tape we have received at the Greatbear is a spool of paper backed magnetic tape, c.1948-1950. It’s pretty rare to be sent paper-backed tape, and we have been on a bit of adventure trying to find more about its history. On our trail we found a tale of war, economics, industry and invention as we chased the story of the ‘magnetic ribbon’.

The first thing to recount is how the development of magnetic tape in the 1930s and 1940s is enmeshed with events in the Second World War. The Germans were pioneers of magnetic tape, and in 1935 AEG demonstrated the Magnetophon, the first ever tape recorder. The Germans continued to develop magnetic tape, but as the 1930s wore on and war declared, the fruits of technological invention were not widely shared – establishing sophisticated telecommunication systems was essential for the ‘war effort’ on both sides.

Towards the end of the war when the Allies liberated the towns and cities of Europe, they liberated its magnetic tape recording equipment too. Don Rushin writes in ‘The Magic of Magnetic Tape.’

‘By late 1944, the World War II Allies were aware of the magnetic recorder developed by German engineers, a recorder that used an iron-powder-coated paper tape, which achieved much better sound quality that was possible with phonograph discs. A young Signal Corps technician, Jack Mullin, became part of a scavenging team assigned to follow the retreating German army and to pick up items of electronic interest. He found parts of recorders used in the field, two working tape recorders and a library of tapes in the studios of Radio Frankfurt in Bad Nauheim.’

In the United States in WW2, significant resources were used to develop magnetic tape. ‘With money no object and the necessity of adequate recording devices for the military, developments moved at a brisker pace’, writes Mark Mooney.

This where our paper tape comes into the equation, courtesy of Polish-born inventor Semi J. Begun. Begun began working for the Brush Development Company in 1938, who were one of the companies contracted to develop magnetic tape for the US Navy during the war. In his position at Brush Begun invented the ‘Sound Mirror.’ Developed in 1939-1940 but released on the market in 1946, it was the first magnetic tape recorder to be sold commercially in the US post WW2.

As the post-war rush to capitalise on an emerging consumer market gathered apace, companies such as 3M developed their own magnetic tapes. Paper backed magnetic tape was superseded toward the end of the 1940s by plastic tape, making a short but significant appearance in the history of recording media.

This however is a story of magnetic tape in the US, and our tape was recorded in England, so the mystery of the paper tape has not been solved. Around the rim of the rusted spool it states that it is ‘Licensed by the Brush Development Co U.S.A’, ‘Made in England’, ‘Patents Pending’ and ‘Thermionic Products Ltd.’

Thermionic were the British company who acquired the license to build the Soundmirror in 1948. Barry M Jones, who has collected a wider history of the British tape recorder, home studio and studio recording industries writes, ‘[Soundmirror] was the first British-built domestic tape-recorder, whereas the first British built-and-designed tape recorder was the Wright & Weaire, which appeared a few weeks later. Production began in autumn 1948 but the quality of the paper tape meant it shedded oxide too readily and clogged the heads!’

Production of the Soundmirrors continued to late 1954 so it is possible to date the tape as being recorded some time between 1948 and 1958. The weight of the spool and the tape is surprisingly heavy, the tape incredibly fragile, marking its passage through time with signs of corrosion and wear. It is a beautiful object, as many of the tapes we get are, that is entwined with the social histories of media, invention, economy and everyday life.

Posted by debra in audio tape, 6 comments

Remembering Ray Dolby pioneer of analogue noise reduction

We have already written about noise reduction this week, but did so without acknowledging the life of Ray Dolby, one of the inventors of video tape recording while working at Ampex and the inventor and founder of Dolby Noise Reduction, who died on 12 September 2013.

An obituary in The Guardian described how:

‘His noise-reduction system worked by applying a pre-emphasis to the audio recording, usually boosting the quieter passages. The reverse process was used on playback. Removing the boost – lowering the level – also removed most of the tape hiss that accompanied all analogue recordings. Of course, people did not care how it worked: they could hear the difference.’

 Dolby managed to solve a clear problem blighting analogue tape recording: the high frequency noise or tape hiss inherent when recording on magnetic tape.

Like many professional recording studios from the 1960s onwards, the Great Bear Studio uses the Dolby A noise-reduction system that we use to play back Dolby A encoded tape. On the Dolby A the input signal is split into four individual frequency bands and provided 10 dB of broadband noise reduction overall.

We also have a Dolby SR system that was introduced in 1986 to improve upon analogue systems and in some cases surpass rapidly innovating digital sound technologies. Dolby SR maximises the recorded signal at all times using a complex series of filters that change according to the input signal and can account for up to 25dB noise reduction.

Posted by debra in audio tape, video tape, 0 comments

Audio Noise Reduction and Finn’s World War Two Stories

We get a range of tape and video recordings to digitise at the Great Bear. Our attention is captured daily by things which are often unusual, interesting and historically significant in their own way.

Last week we received a recording of Pilot Officer Edwin Aldridge ‘Finn’ Haddock talking about his experiences in the Second World War. Finn, who has since passed away,  had made the tape in preparation for a talk he was doing at a local school, using the recording in order to rehearse his memories.

Despite the dramatic nature of the story where he is shot down in Northern France, sheltered by the French resistance and captured by the Germans, it is told in a remarkably matter of fact, detached manner. This is probably because the recording was made with no specific audience in mind, but was used to prompt his talk.

Finn’s story gives us a small insight into the bravery and resilience of people in such exceptional circumstances. The recording tells us what happened in vivid terms, from everyday facts such as what he ate during his shelter and capture to mass executions conducted by the Gestapo.

The now digitised tape recording, which was sent to us by his niece, will be shared among family members and a copy deposited with the local history club in Wheatley Hill, where Finn was born.

Finn was also interviewed by the Imperial War Museum about his experiences, which can be accessed if you click on this link.

On a technical note, when we were sent the tape we were asked if we could reduce the noise and otherwise ‘clean up’ the recording. While the question of how far it is reasonable to change the original recording remains an important consideration for those involved in digital archiving work, as was discussed last week on the Great Bear tape blog, there are some things which can be done if there is excessive hiss or other forms of noise on a recording.

The first step is to remove transient noise which manifest as clicks and pops which can affect the audibility of the recording. Family home recordings that were made with cheap tape recorders and microphones often picked up knocks and bangs, and there were some on Finn’s tape that were most probably the result of him moving around as he recorded his story.

The second step is to deploy broadband noise reduction, which removes noise across the audio spectrum. To do this we use high pass and low pass filters which effectively smooth off unwanted noise at either end of the frequency range. The limited frequency range of the male voice means that it is acceptable to employ filters at 50 Hz (high pass) and 8000 Hz (low pass) and this will not affect the integrity of the recording.

It is important to remember that noise reduction is always a bit of a compromise because you don’t want to clean something up to the extent that it sounds completely artificial. This is why it is important to keep the ‘raw’ transfer as well as an uncompressed edited version because we do not know what noise reduction techniques may be available in five, ten or twenty years from now. Although we have a lot of experience in achieving high quality digital transfers at the Great Bear, any editing we do to a transfer is only one person’s interpretation of what sounds clear or appropriate. We therefore always err on the side of caution and provide customers with copies of uncompressed raw, edited and compressed access copies of digitised files.

https://cdn.thegreatbear.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/harding-cassette-noise-reduced.mp3?_=2

Finn’s story noise reduced

https://cdn.thegreatbear.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/harding-cassette-unprocessed.mp3?_=3

The ‘raw’ transfer

A further problem in noise reduction work is that it is possible to push noise reduction technology too much so that you end up creating ‘artefacts’ in the recording. Artefacts are fundamental alterations of the sound quality in ways that are inappropriate for digitisation work.

Another thing to consider is destructive and non-destructive editing. Destructive editing is when a recording has been processed in software and changed irrevocably. Non-destructive editing, not surprisingly, is reversible, and Samplitude, the software we use at the Great Bear, can save all the alterations made to the file so if certain editing steps need to be undone they can be.

Again, while in essence the principles of digital transfer are simple, the intricacies of the work are what makes it challenging and time consuming. 

 

Posted by debra in audio tape, 0 comments

Measuring signals – challenges for the digitisation of sound and video

In a 2012 report entitled ‘Preserving Sound and Moving Pictures’ for the Digital Preservation Coalition’s Technology Watch Report series, Richard Wright outlines the unique challenges involved in digitising audio and audiovisual material. ‘Preserving the quality of the digitized signal’ across a range of migration processes that can negotiate ‘cycles of lossy encoding, decoding and reformatting is one major digital preservation challenge for audiovisual files’ (1).

Wright highlights a key issue: understanding how data changes as it is played back, or moved from location to location, is important for thinking about digitisation as a long term project. When data is encoded, decoded or reformatted it alters shape, therefore potentially leading to a compromise in quality. This is a technical way of describing how elements of a data object are added to, taken away or otherwise transformed when they are played back across a range of systems and software that are different from the original data object.

To think about this in terms which will be familiar to people today, imagine converting an uncompressed WAV into an MP3 file. You then burn your MP3s onto a CD as a WAV file so it will play back on your friend’s CD player. The WAV file you started off with is not the same as the WAV file you end up with – its been squished and squashed, and in terms of data storage, is far smaller. While smaller file size may be a bonus, the loss of quality isn’t. But this is what happens when files are encoded, decoded and reformatted.

Subjecting data to multiple layers of encoding and decoding does not only apply to digital data. Take Betacam video for instance, a component analogue video format introduced by SONY in 1982. If your video was played back using composite output, the circuity within the Betacam video machine would have needed to encode it. The difference may have looked subtle, and you may not have even noticed any change, but the structure of the signal would be altered in a ‘lossy’ way and can not be recovered to it’s original form. The encoding of a component signal, which is split into two or more channels, to a composite signal, which essentially squashes the channels together, is comparable to the lossy compression applied to digital formats such as mp3 audio, mpeg2 video, etc.

A central part of the work we do at Greatbear is to understand the changes that may have occurred to the signal over time, and try to minimise further losses in the digitisation process. We use a range of specialist equipment so we can carefully measure the quality of the analogue signal, including external time based correctors and wave form monitors. We also make educated decisions about which machine to play back tapes in line with what we expect the original recording was made on.

If we take for granted that any kind of data file, whether analogue or digital, will have been altered in its lifetime in some way, either through changes to the signal, file structure or because of poor storage, an important question arises from an archival point of view. What do we do with the quality of the data customers send us to digitise? If the signal of a video tape is fuzzy, should we try to stabilise the image? If there is hiss and other forms of noise on tape, should we reduce it? Should we apply the same conservation values to audio and film as we do to historic buildings, such as ruins, or great works of art? Should we practice minimal intervention, use appropriate materials and methods that aim to be reversible, while ensuring that full documentation of all work undertaken is made, creating a trail of endless metadata as we go along?

Do we need to preserve the ways magnetic tape, optical media and digital files degrade and deteriorate over time, or are the rules different for media objects that store information which is not necessarily exclusive to them (the same recording can be played back on a vinyl record, a cassette tape, a CD player, an 8 track cartridge or a MP3 file, for example)? Or should we ensure that we can hear and see clearly, and risk altering the original recording so we can watch a digitised VHS on a flat screen HD television, in line with our current expectations of media quality?

Richard Wright suggests it is the data, rather than operating facility, which is the important thing about the digital preservation of audio and audiovisual media.

‘These patterns (for film) and signals (for video and audio) are more like data than like artefacts. The preservation requirement is not to keep the original recording media, but to keep the data, the information, recovered from that media’ (3).

Yet it is not always easy to understand what parts of the data should be discarded, and which parts should kept. Audiovisual and audio data are a production of both form and content, and it is worth taking care over the practices we use to preserve our collections in case we overlook the significance of this point and lose something valuable – culturally, historically and technologically.

Posted by debra in audio tape, digitisation expertise, video tape, 0 comments

Magnetic Reel to Reel Tape and New Transfer Machines – Pictures from the Greatbear Studio

The Greatbear studio always has a wealth of interesting material in it, that somehow have survived the test of time.

From racks stacked full of obsolete audio and video tape machines, to the infinite varieties of reel-to-reel tape that were produced by companies such as Scotch, E.M.I. and Irish Recording Tape.

As objects in themselves they are fascinating, instilled with the dual qualities of fragility and resilience, the boxes worn at the edges and sometimes marked with stamps, identificatory stickers or scrawled, handwritten notes.

A selection of ‘audio letters’ sent to us by a customer

 

The latest addition to the Great Bear Studio – the Fostex Model 80 8 Track Recorder

Posted by debra in audio tape, 0 comments

Curating Digital Information or What Do You With Your Archive?

Today is the first day of iPres 2013, the 10th international conference on the preservation of digital objects held in Lisbon, Portugal. To mark the occasion we want to reflect on an issue that is increasingly important for the long term management of digital data: curation.

Anyone who has lived through the digital transition in the 21st century surely cannot ignore the information revolution they have been part of. In the past ten years, vast archives of analogue media have been migrated to digital formats and everyday we create new digital information that is archived and distributed through networks. Arcomen, who are running a workshop at iPres on ‘Archiving Community Memories’, describe how

‘in addition to the “common” challenges of digital preservation, such as media decay, technological obsolescence, authenticity and integrity issues, web preservation has to deal with the sheer size and ever-increasing growth and change rate of Web data. Hence, selection of content sources becomes a crucial and challenging task for archival organizations.’

As well as the necessary and sometimes difficult choices archival organisations have to make in the process of collecting an archive, there is then the issue of what to do with your data once it has been created. This is where the issue of digital curation comes in.

Screenshot of the SONY website from 1996

Traditionally, the role of the curator is to ‘take care’ and interpret collections in an art gallery or a museum. In contemporary society, however, there is an increasing need for people to curate collections that are exclusively digital, and can only be accessed through the web. Part of any long term digitisation strategy, particularly if an archive is to be used for education or research purposes, should therefore factor in plans and time for curation.

Curation transforms a digital collection from being the equivalent of a library, which may be searchable, organised and catalogued, into something more akin to an exhibition. Curation helps to select aspects of an archive in order to tell deliberate stories, or simply help the user navigate content in a particular way. Curating material is particularly important if an archive deals with a specialist subject that no one knows about because visitors often need help to manoeuvre large amounts of complex information. Being overwhelmed by content on the internet is an often cited expression, but ensuring digital content is curated carefully means it is more likely that people visiting your site will be able to cope with what they find there, and delve deeper into your digitsed archival treasures.

Like all things digital, there is no one steadfast or established guidelines for how to ensure your collection is curated well. The rapid speed that technology changes, from preferred archival formats, software to interface design, mean that digital curation can never be a static procedure. New multiple web authoring tools such as zeega, klynt and 3WDOC will soon become integrated into web design in a similar fashion to the current Web 2.0 tools we use now, therefore creating further possibilities for the visual, immersive and interactive presentation of digital archive material.

Screenshot of the Fostex website from Dec 1998

Curation is an important aspect of digital preservation in general because it can facilitate long term use and engagement with your collection. What may be lost when archive sites become pruned and more self-consciously arranged is the spontaneous and sometimes chaotic experience of exploring information on the web.

Ultimately though, digital curation will enable more people to navigate archival collections in ways that can foster meaningful, transformative and informative encounters with digitised material.

Posted by debra in audio tape, video tape, 0 comments

C-120 Audio Cassette Transfer – the importance of high quality formats

In archiving, the simple truth is formats matter. If you want the best quality recording, that not only sounds good but has a strong chance of surviving over time, it needs to be recorded on an appropriate format.

Most of us, however, do not have specialised knowledge of recording technologies and use what is immediately available. Often we record things within limited budgets, and need to make the most of our resources. We are keen to document what’s happening in front of us, rather than create something that will necessarily be accessible many years from now.

At the Great Bear we often receive people’s personal archives on a variety of magnetic tape. Not all of these tapes, although certainly made to ensure memories were recorded, were done on the best quality formats.

Recently we migrated a recording of a wedding service from 1970 made on C-120 audio cassette.

Image taken using a smart phone @ 72 dpi resolution

C60 and C90 tapes are probably familiar to most readers of this blog, but the C-120 was never widely adopted by markets or manufacturers because of its lesser recording quality. The C-120 tape records for an hour each side, and uses thinner tape than its C90 and C60 counterparts. This means the tape is more fragile, and is less likely to produce optimum recordings. Thinner tapes is also more likely to suffer from ‘print-through‘ echo.

As the Nakamichi 680 tape manual, which is pretty much consulted as the bible on all matters tape in the Great Bear studio, insists:

‘Choosing a high quality recording tape is extremely important. A sophisticated cassette deck, like the 680, cannot be expected to deliver superior performance with inferior tapes. The numerous brands and types of blank cassettes on the market vary not only in the consistency of the tape coating, but in the degree of mechanical precision as well. The performance of an otherwise excellent tape is often marred by a poor housing, which can result in skewing and other unsteady tape travel conditions.’

The manual goes on to stress ‘Nakamichi does not recommend the use of C-120 or ferrichrome cassettes under any circumstances.’ Strong words indeed!

It is usually possible to playback most of the tape we receive, but a far greater risk is taken when recordings are made on fragile or low quality formats. The question that has to be thought through when making recordings is: what are you making them for? If they are meant to be a long term record of events, careful consideration of the quality of the recording format used needs to be made to ensure they have the greatest chance of survival.

Such wisdom seems easy to grasp in retrospect, but what about contemporary personal archives that are increasingly ‘born digital’?

A digital equivalent of the C-120 tape would be the MP3 format. While MP3 files are easier to store, duplicate and move across digital locations, they offer substantially less quality than larger, uncompressed audio files, such as WAVs or AIFFs. The current recommended archival standard for recording digital audio is 24 bit/ 48 kHz, so if you are making new recordings, or migrating analogue tapes to digital formats, it is a good idea to ensure they are sampled at this rate

In a recent article called ‘3 Ways to Change the World for Personal Archiving’ on the Library of Congress’ Digital Preservation blog, Bill LeFurgy wrote:

‘in the midst of an amazing revolution in computer technology, there is a near total lack of systems designed with digital preservation in mind. Instead, we have technology seemingly designed to work against digital preservation. The biggest single issue is that we are encouraged to scatter content so broadly among so many different and changing services that it practically guarantees loss. We need programs to automatically capture, organize and keep our content securely under our control.’

The issue of format quality also comes to the fore with the type of everyday records we make of our digital lives. The images and video footage we take on smart phones, for example, are often low resolution, and most people enjoy the flexibility of compressed audio files. In ten years time will the records of our digital lives look pixelated and poor quality, despite the ubiquity of high tech capture devices used to record and share them? Of course, these are all speculations, and as time goes on new technologies may emerge that focus on digital restoration, as well as preservation.

Ultimately, across analogue and digital technologies the archival principles are the same: use the best quality formats and it is far more likely you will make recordings that people many years from now can access.

Posted by debra in audio tape, 0 comments

Greatbear Studio Visit – Archive for Mathematical Sciences and Philosophy

This week in the Greatbear Studio we are being visited by Michael Wright, Director of The Archive Trust for Research in Mathematical Sciences and Philosophy.

The Archive Trust for Research in Mathematical Sciences and Philosophy holds an extensive collection of audio and video recordings on subjects in mathematics, physics and philosophy, particularly the philosophy and foundations of mathematics and the exact sciences recorded since the early 1970s.

The website explains further the rationale for collecting the recordings:

Such recordings allow historians of science and mathematics to form a better appreciation of the background to the emergence of new ideas; and also of the complex pattern formed by “roads not taken” – ideas which for whatever reason were laid aside, or apparently subsumed in other developments. Those ideas may later re-emerge in ways yielding a new perspective on those developments. Such a rich archive of primary oral source material naturally aids historical study of the Sciences and the conceptual and philosophical questions to which they give rise.

 The project started in 1973 when Michael recorded lectures, seminars and courses relating to Maths and Philosophy when he was a doctoral student. The early recordings were made in Oxford, London and Cambridge and were done on an enthusiastic, if amateur basis. In the 1980s and 1990s the recording process became more systematic, and more video recordings were taken. The archive is still collecting material, and Michael often travels to conferences and lectures to record contemporary debates in the field, as he is this week when he travels to Warsaw for Samuel Eilenberg Centenary conference (there are recordings of Eilenberg’s lectures and an interview collected in the archive).

What started as a hobby for Michael has now become a full time commitment. The archive contains a staggering 37,000 recordings, those he made and ones solicited from other individuals. They include recordings of figures such as Imre Lakatos, Ilya Prigogine, contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou and many more.

The majority of recordings from 1973-2003 were recorded on audio cassette format, although some were done on reel-to-reel recorders. Many of these recordings remain on analogue tape, and the biggest challenge for the archive is now to find the funds to migrate several thousand hours of recordings to digital format.

The archive also track downs and publishes existing material that may be collected in other archives, or are stored in people’s personal collections. For Michael the biggest revelation in constructing the archive was finding out about the amount of material people have that are sitting in the back of their cupboards. This is either because people have forgotten they exist, or because they simply do not known what to do with them.

The archive became a charitable trust in 2008 and names among its trustees English mathematical physicist and philosopher Sir Roger Penrose, and Martin Rees, former Master of Trinity College and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology at the University of Cambridge and President of the Royal Society.

Its an exciting, and transitional, time for the archive as it plans to take its next steps. In the coming years there are plans to develop the website through uploading ‘born digital’ information, attain funds for wholesale digitisation of tape and paper resources and continue to collect recordings. This ambitious project is well on its way to becoming a vital and unique contribution to the subject, and will interest many other people who are simply curious about these rich and complex topics.

 

Posted by debra in audio / video heritage, audio tape, video tape, 0 comments

How sustainable is digitisation?

Often when we think about the reasons to digitise magnetic tape collections we are considering the future. We digitise to make material accessible so it can be used again, or to preserve it so subsequent generations can benefit or learn from it. But how sustainable is digitisation and digital technology? What is the ecological impact of the widespread and breathtakingly fast adoption of digital technologies since the late 1990s?

At an everyday, consumer level, the use of digital technologies comes with real human and environmental costs, as Professor Toby Miller and Professor Richard Maxwell demonstrate in a recent article in The Guardian. They argue that the very metaphors we use to describe digital media – ‘virtual,’ ‘cloud’, ‘streams’ and ‘mobiles’ – dangerously obscure the fact they come from materials, such as the minerals Tatalun, Tungsten, Tin and Gold, and cover up the exploitative labour conditions, and war torn situations from which they are extracted:

‘Suggestions that we live in a dematerialised world are not only exaggerated; they are doing more harm than good. One person’s cloud is another’s pollution, and one person’s mobile is another’s enslavement. From electronic waste to conflict minerals, the new media leave an indelible mark on bodies and the Earth they inhabit.’

The extent of violence and exploitation that lie at the end of the digital supply chain is hardly a secret. At a consumer level there seems to be very little resistance to the use of mobile digital devices, probably because our very social existence is dependent upon them in a culture where media is pervasive. It is not easy to opt out, and what would you do if you did?

As heavy users of digital technologies we walk with our heads in the clouds, so to speak, unable to access the wider environmental impact of our actions. This impact is intensified by the pressure to continually upgrade our devices, as Dr Chris Priest writes,

‘the regularity with which you replace a device becomes more important in determining the overall footprint of the device. If we take a hypothetical device with a 50% use footprint, and replace it after two years rather than three, then it will increase our overall footprint by 25%. Of course, new devices might be becoming increasingly efficient and this could offset the increase to some extent. Though even if the new device used no power, it could not offset it completely.’

Yet these are speculations not empirical fact. It is hard to know concretely what the environmental consequences of becoming immediate adopters of the latest (fastest, smallest, bestest) digital technologies are. One thing is certain, new goods will appear and people will be told they can’t live without them. This is how an economy driven by innovation works.

Thinking about the uptake of digital technologies at an institutional level, it is clear that within a technological climate pre-disposed to the production of ‘digital waste’ and obsolescence, the mismanagement of energy resources in order to keep digital data ‘alive’ (that is useable, accessible) is a real possibility. One only need turn to the financial and technological waste produced from the BBC’s Digital Media Initiative (DMI) to confirm that the creation of technical systems devised to manage large digital archives are not moving at the same relentless speed as the neoliberal market.

Which begs the question: can there be an ecological solution to the problem of digitisation, and the use of digital technologies in an innovation/ obsolescence economy? Can digitisation ever be energy efficient, non-exploitative and flexible enough to cope with the technological changes that will inevitably happen? What would a sustainable and ethical approach to digital information management look like?

As our world gets increasingly networked these are pressing questions effecting everyone. And clearly understanding the wider impact of the use of technology on people and the earth is a serious issue, usually forgotten when scrolling through data feeds in a voracious, but often distracted, manner. These are admittedly big questions and we welcome comments, links and ideas on how to answer them.

As keen hoarders of mechanical waste from the analogue era who are passionate about making data accessible in digital form, we are contributing to a world that places unprecedented value on technological information.

Need this, however, always be at the expense of people and the world we share as currently it seems to be?

 

Posted by debra in audio tape, video tape, 0 comments

Sony V62 EIAJ reel to reel video tape transfer for Barrie Hesketh

We have recently been sent a Sony V62 high density video tape by Barrie Hesketh. Barrie has had an active career in theatre and in 1966 he set up the Mull Little Theatre on the Isle of Mull off the West Coast of Scotland with his late wife Marianne Hesketh. Specialising in what Barrie calls the ‘imaginative use of nothing’ they toured the UK, Germany and Holland and gained a lot of publicity world wide in the process. Both Marianne and Barrie were awarded MBEs for their services to Scottish Theatre.

You can read a more detailed history of the Mull Little Theatre in this book written by Barrie.

Panasonic VTR NV-8030 EIAJ ½” reel to reel video recorder

The video tape Barrie sent us came from when he and Marianne were working as actors in residence at Churchill College at Cambridge University. Barrie and Marianne had what Barrie described as ‘academic leanings,’ gained from their time as students at the Central College of Speech and Drama in London.

In a letter Barrie sent with the tape he wrote:

‘I own a copy of a video tape recording made for me by the University of Cambridge video unit in 1979. I was researching audience/actors responses and the recording shows the audience on the top half of the picture, and the actors on the bottom half – I have not seen the stuff for years, but have recently been asked about it.’

While audience research is a fairly common practice now in the Creative Arts, in 1979 Barrie’s work was pioneering. Barrie was very aware of audience’s interests when he performed, and was keen to identify what he calls ‘the cool part’ of the audience, and find out ways to ‘warm them up.’

Recording audience responses was a means to sharpen the attention of actors. He was particularly interested in the research to identify ‘includers’. These were individuals who influenced the wider audience by picking up intentions of the performers and clearly responding. The movement of this individual (who would look around from time to time to see if other people ‘got it’), would be picked up in the peripheral vision of other audience members and an awareness gradually trickled throughout. Seeing such behaviour helped Barrie to understand how to engage audiences in his subsequent work.

Barrie’s tape would have been recorded on one of the later reel-to-reel tape machines that conformed to the EIAJ Standard.

The EIAJ-1 was developed in 1969 by the Electronic Industries Association of Japan. It was the first standardized format for industrial/non-broadcast video tape recording. Once implemented it enabled video tapes to be played on machines made by different manufacturers.

Prior to the introduction of the standard, tapes could not be interchanged between comparable models made by different manufacturers. The EIAJ standard changed all this, and certainly makes the job of transferring tapes easier for us today! Imagine the difficulties we would face if we had to get exactly the right machine for each tape transfer. It would probably magnify the problem of tape and machine obsolescence effecting magnetic tape collections.

In the Greatbear Studio we have the National Panasonic Time Lapse VTR NV-8030 and Hitachi SV-640.

Like Ampex tapes, all the Sony EIAJ tape tend to suffer from sticky shed syndrome caused by absorption of moisture into the binder of the tape. Tapes need to be dehydrated and cleaned before being played back, as we did with Barrie’s tape.

The tape is now being transferred and Barrie intends to give copies to his sons. It will also be used by Dr Richard Trim in an academic research project. In both cases it is gratifying to give the these video tapes a new lease of life through digitisation. No doubt they will be of real interest to Barrie’s family and the wider research community.

Posted by debra in video tape, 2 comments

What is the future of analogue media?

In a recent blog article on the Presto Centre website, Richard Wright argues that ‘the audiovisual collections of the 20th century were analogue, and we are now at a critical time for considering the digital future of that analogue content.’ He goes on to say, emphatically:

‘All analogue audio and video formats are obsolete. Digital content walks through walls, travels at the speed of light, can be in many places at the same time, and can (with care) be perfectly copied, again and again. So digitisation has become the solution to the obsolescence of all analogue audio and video formats.’

Although careful not to make too clinical a statement, he bookmarks 15 April 2023 as the date when analogue obsolescence really kicks in.

We have written extensively on this blog about the problem of obsolescence, and how we collect machines and learn the skills to fix them.

A major problem is finding spare parts for machines after manufacturers stop producing them. Many components were made according to very precise specifications that are hard to make from scratch. When machines and their parts wear out it will therefore be difficult, if not impossible, to keep them working.

This means that the cost of transfers will rise due to machine scarcity. At an institutional level this may lead to selective decisions about what gets digitised and what doesn’t.

There is one analogue format that has flourished in the 21st century: vinyl.

Writing for music magazine The Wire, Numero Group’s Rob Sevier and Ken Shipley describe how ‘vinyl’s violent sales spike has been a lonely bright spot in what has been a 14 year deterioration in sales of recorded music’.

Yet the resilience of vinyl and other contemporary fringe uses of analogue media, such as the cassette tape and floppy disk, is not enough to stop the march of digitisation. For experts like Wright the digital future for the majority of people is inevitable, irresistible even, given how it enables collections to be open, replicable and accessible.

Yet committing to digital technologies as a preservation and access strategy does not solve our information problems, as we have been keen to stress on this blog. There is also a worrying lack of long term strategy for managing digital information, a problem which is ever more pronounced in film preservation where analogue tape is still marked as the original from which digital copies are made.

It is clear that the information we create, store and use is in transition. It probably always has been. The emergence of digital technologies has just made this a pressing issue, not only for large institutions, but for people as we go about our day to day lives.

‘Digitise now!!’ is Richard Wright’s advice – and of course we agree.

Posted by debra in audio tape, video tape, 0 comments

4 track 1/4 inch reel to reel tape recorded in mono – The Couriers Folk Club, Leicester

We were recently sent a ¼ inch tape by Ed Bates that included recordings from the Couriers Folk Club in Leicester,  which ran from Autumn 1964 – June 1974.

The tape features performances from The Couriers (Jack Harris and Rex Brisland), George and Thadeus Kaye, Bill Pickering, Mark Newman and Mick Odam.

Jack Harris, who alongside Rex Brisland ran the club, describes how ‘traditional singers like Bert Lloyd, Ewan MacColl and Pete Seeger, Bob Davenport were regular visitors together with ageing ploughboys, miners and fishermen who were often so infirm or unlikely to make their own way to Leicester they had to be fetched by car.’

As well as supporting grassroots folk music from the local area, well known performers such as musical superstar Barbara Dickson, Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell graced the stage.

The tape recordings we received span five years. The first recording was made on 6 August 1966, then 3 September 1966, 8 February 1970 and finally 9 April 1971.

Each performance was recorded on a separate track in mono. This means that the 7” long spool contains 8 hours of music!

Like today’s MP3 digital files, the quality of the recorded sound is compromised because so much information is squeezed into a smaller space on the tape. A better quality recording would have been made if all four channels were used for a single performance, rather than one track for each performance.

The speed at which recordings were made also effects the quality of the recordings, simply because you can record more information per second at a faster rate. The tapes we were sent were recorded at 7 ½ per second on what is likely to have been a domestic tape recorder such as the Sony TC-263D. Ed’s letter to us speaks volumes about the conditions in which the recordings were made:

‘I was present at the Couriers Folk Club in Leicester when they were recorded so I can say that the recording quality is not good. The Sony recorder was used as an amplifier and on some occasions (if someone remembered) a tape was recorded.’

While the recordings certainly would have benefited from less haphazard recording conditions, the quality of the transfer is surprisingly crisp, as you can hear from this excerpt.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54164190/couriers-folk-club-leicester-example.mp3?_=4

Excerpt from the digitised recordings of the Couriers folk club

The tape was in good condition, as Philips magnetic reel-to-reel tape often survives well over time, which aided a good transfer. One thing we were especially attentive to in the transfer process was carefully adjusting the azimuth, because of the slow speed of the original recording and the narrow track width.

Image taken from the BASF magnetic tape manual that  illustrates  how  four tracks can be recorded on magnetic tape

The emergence of recordings of the Couriers Club is especially timely given the recent launch of the English and Folk Dance Society‘s The Full English online digital archive . This contains a massive 44,000 records and over 58,000 digitised images about English folk history.

With a dozen or more tapes recently found from the Club, we look forward to helping this unique part of cultural heritage become accessible again.

Posted by debra in audio tape, 15 comments

Digitising Audio Tape – Process, Time & Cost

Last week we wrote about the person time involved in transferring magnetic tape to digital files, and we want to tell you more about the processes involved in digitisation work.

While in theory the work of migrating media from one format to another can be simple, even the humble domestic cassette can take a substantial amount of time to transfer effectively.

Doing transfers quickly would potentially keep the costs of our work down, but there are substantial risks involved in mass migrations of tape-based material.

Problems with digital transfers can occur at two points: the quality of the playback machine and the quality of the tape.

Let’s focus on the playback machine.

Each time a cassette is transferred we have to ensure that the cassette deck is calibrated to the technical specification appropriate to that machine. Calibration is a testing procedure where a standard test tape is used to set the levels for tape to be digitised. The calibration process allows us to check tapes are played back at the correct speed and audio levels, that wow and flutter levels are set and the azimuth is aligned.

Azimuth refers to the angle between the tape head(s) and tape. Differences in Azimuth alignment arise from the azimuth of the original recording. You cannot know this information from just looking at a tape and you will get a sub-optimal transfer unless you adjust your machine’s azimuth to match the original recording.

Regularly checking the Wow and Flutter on the tape machine is also very important for doing quality transfers. Wow and flutter refer to fluctuations in speed on the playback mechanism, flutter being a higher rate version of wow. If you have listened to a tape you will probably be familiar with the sound of warped and woozy tape – this is the presence of wow. All tape machines have wow and flutter, but as components in the mechanisms stretch there is the potential for wow and flutter to increase. It is therefore essential to know what level the wow and flutter are set on your tape deck –less than 0.08% Weighted Peak on our Nakamichi 680 machines – to ensure optimal transfer quality.

Not all cassette machines were made equal either, and the quality of playback is absolutely dependent on the type of machine you have. There is a massive difference between the cheap domestic cassette machines made by Amstrad, to the cassette decks we use at Great Bear. Nakamichi machines were designed to squeeze the most out of the cassette, and their performance is way above the standard ‘two head’ cheap domestic machines.

Even with a Nakamichi deck, however, they have to be regularly checked because they are fragile electromagnetic machines that will drift out of specification over time. When machines drift they slip out of alignment, therefore effecting their operating capacity. This can occur through subtle knocks, everyday wear and tear and general ageing of mechanical and electrical components. For example, with extended use the grease in the components dries up and goes hard, and therefore affects the movement of the mechanisms.

Problems can also arise with the tapes themselves.

Most issues arise from tapes not being played back in well calibrated machines.

With audio cassettes the potential for azimuth error is increased because the speed the tape moves pasts the head is very slow. The tape therefore needs to be assessed to see if it is in a playable condition. It is played back in mono because it is easier to hear if there are problems with the azimuth, and then the azimuth is manually adjusted on the machine.

Migrating tape is unquestionably a ‘real time’ process. You need to listen and monitor what’s on the tape and the digitised version to ensure that problems with the transfer are detected as it is happening. It is a very hands on activity, that cannot be done without time, care and attention.

Posted by debra in audio tape, 2 comments

From digital files back to analogue tape

The bread and butter work of Greatbear Analogue and Digital Media is to migrate analogue and digital magnetic tape to digital files, but recently we were asked by a customer to transfer a digital file to ¼ analogue tape.

The customer was concerned about the longevity of electronic digital formats, and wanted to transfer his most valued recordings to a tangible format he knew and trust. Transferring from digital to analogue was certainly more expensive: the blank tape media cost over £50 alone.

In a world where digital technology seems pervasive, remaining so attached to analogue media may appear surprising. Yet the resilience of tape as a recorded medium is far greater than is widely understood.

Take this collection of old tapes that are in the back yard of the Greatbear office. Fear not customers, this is not what happens to your tapes when you send them to us! They are a collection of test tapes that live outside all year round without shelter from the elements. We use them to test ways of treating degraded tapes because we don’t want to take unnecessary risks with our customers’ material.

Despite being subject to pretty harsh conditions, the majority of material on these tapes is recoverable to some degree.

Would digital data stored on a hard drive survive if it had to endure similar conditions? It is far less likely.

Due to its electronic composition digital data is fragile in comparison with analogue magnetic tape. This is also the ironic conclusion of Side by Side (2012), the documentary film narrated by Keanu Reeves which explores the impact of digital technology on the film industry.

Requests for digital to analogue transfers are fairly rare at Great Bear, but we are happy to do them should the need arise!

And don’t forget to back up your digital files in at least three different locations to ensure it is safe.

Posted by debra in audio tape, 0 comments

Real time transfers – digitising tape media

In theory the work we do at Greatbear is very simple: we migrate information from analogue or digital magnetic tape to electronic digital files.

Once transferred, digital files can be easily edited, tagged, accessed, shared or added to a database. Due to the ubiquitous nature of digital media today, if you want to use your data, it needs to be in a digital form.

In practice however, there are a lot more issues that arise when migrating tape based media. These can stem from the obsolescence of machines (spare parts being a particular issue), physical problems with the tape and significantly, the actual person-time involved in doing the transfer.

While large institutions like the Library of Congress in USA can invest in technology that enables mass digitisation like those developed by Samma Systems, most transfers require operators to do the work. The simple truth is that for fragile and obsolete tape media, there is no other option. In the film ‘Living Archive – Preservation Challenge‘ David Crostwait from American digitisation company DC Video describes the importance of careful, real time transfers:

‘When a tape is played back, that tape starts from the very beginning and may run for 60-65 minutes straight. One person sits in front of that machine and watches that tape from beginning to end, s/he does nothing else but watch that tape. We feel this procedure is the only way to guarantee the highest quality possible.’

At Greatbear we echo this sentiment. We give each transfer individual attention so that the information is migrated accurately and effectively. Sometimes this means doing things slowly to ensure that tape is spooled correctly and the tension within the tape pack is even. If transfers are rushed there is always the danger that tape could get crumpled or damaged, which is why we take our time.

 

Posted by debra in audio tape, video tape, 0 comments

Archiving for the digital long term: information management and migration

As an archival process digitisation offers the promise of a dream: improved accessibility, preservation and storage.

However the digital age is not without its archival headaches. News of the BBC’s plans to abandon their Digital Media Initiative (DMI), which aimed to make the BBC media archive ‘tapeless’, clearly demonstrates this. As reported in The Guardian:

‘DMI has cost £98.4m, and was meant to bring £95.4m of benefits to the organisation by making all the corporation’s raw and edited video footage available to staff for re-editing and output. In 2007, when the project was conceived, making a single TV programme could require 70 individual video-handling processes; DMI was meant to halve that.’

The project’s failure has been explained by its size and ambition. Another telling reason was cited: the software and hardware used to deliver the project was developed for exclusive use by the BBC. In a statement BBC Director Tony Hall referred to the fast development of digital technology, stating that ‘off-the-shelf [editing] tools were now available that could do the same job “that simply didn’t exist five years ago”.’

The fate of the DMI initiative should act as a sobering lesson for institutions, organisations and individuals who have not thought about digitisation as a long, rather than short term, archival solution.

As technology continues to ‘innovate’ at startling rate,  it is hard to predict how long the current archival standard for audio and audio-visual will last.

Being an early adopter of technology can be an attractive proposition: you are up to date with the latest ideas, flying the flag for the cutting edge. Yet new technology becomes old fast, and this potentially creates problems for accessing and managing information. The fragility of digital data comes to the fore, and the risk of investing all our archival dreams in exclusive technological formats as the BBC did, becomes far greater.

In order for our data to survive we need to appreciate that we are living in what media theorist Jussi Parikka calls an ‘information management society.’ Digitisation has made it patently clear that information is dynamic rather than stored safely in static objects. Migrating tape based archives to digital files is one stage in a series of transitions material can potentially make in its lifetime.

Given the evolution of media and technology in the 20th and 21st centuries, it feels safe to speculate that new technologies will emerge to supplant uncompressed WAV and AIFF files, just as AAC has now become preferred to MP3 as a compressed audio format because it achieves better sound quality at similar bit rates.

Because of this at Greatbear we always migrate analogue and digital magnetic tape at the recommended archival standard, and provide customers with high quality and access copies. Furthermore, we strongly recommend to customers to back up archive quality files in at least three separate locations because it is highly likely data will need to be migrated again in the future.

Posted by debra in audio tape, video tape, 0 comments

Digitise VHS Tape – Martin Smith’s Life Can Be Wonderful

In February 2013 we digitised a VHS tape from Martin Smith, the 1994 documentary Life Can Be Wonderful. The VHS tape was the only copy of the film Smith owned, and it is quite common for Great Bear to digitise projects where the film maker does not have the master copy. This is because original copies are often held by large production companies, and films can be subject to complex distribution and screening conditions.

Life Can Be Wonderful is a film was about the life of his good friend Stanley Forman, a committed communist and major figure in British left-wing cinema, who passed away at the age of 91 on 7 February 2013. Forman’s dedication to communism remained a controversial issue until his death. Smith described his conflicts with his friend which ‘most often they centred on what I saw as his refusal to own up to the enormity of Stalin’s crimes. On camera he told me that I was his dear friend, “but not a dear comrade” and apologised for failing to convey “the spirit of the times”‘.

Stanley Forman is a fascinating figure in terms of the work we do at the Great Bear. He is described on the website Putney Debater as ‘the archive man.’ The site goes on to say

His company, Plato/ Education and Television Films (ETV), held a unique library of left- wing documentaries which amounted to the history of the twentieth century from a socialist perspective. Established in 1950 as Plato Films, the outfit was what would be called in Cold War ideology a front organisation, set up by members of the Communist Party to distribute films from behind the Iron Curtain. Under the slogan ‘See the other half of the world’, Plato provided the movement with a film distributor for documentaries from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, taking in China (until the Sino-Soviet split), Cuba, Vietnam and elsewhere, which would otherwise never be seen here.

The Educational and Television Films archive is held at the British Film Institute, and some material is available to view on the JISC Media Hub website.

Posted by debra in video tape, 0 comments

Digitising & Restoring Personal Archives – 1/4 inch reel to reel audio tape

In today’s digital society most people have an archive. On personal computers, tablets and mobile devices we store, create and share vast amounts of information. We use archives to tell others about our lives, and the things that are important to us.

Gone are the days when archives were dusty, dark places where experts went to research esoteric knowledge. Archives are everywhere. They are dynamic, digital and personal, as well as being institutional, historical, corporate and civic.

The creation of personal archives is of course nothing new, but the digital age forces us to have a far more intimate relationship with information, and its organisation. Put simply, there is loads more information, and if it isn’t collected in a systematic way you may well drown in a sea of your own, not to mention everybody else’s, data. Maybe this is happening to you right now! If so, you need to embrace the archival moment and get your own collections in shape.

Part of this everyday information management is migrating archives stored on obsolete formats, such as the many different types of analogue and digital magnetic tape we work with at Greatbear. Digitising tape gives it new life, allowing it to be easily circulated, shared and used with today’s technologies.

A significant amount of the Greatbear’s work involves digitising the diverse collections people produce in their everyday working, creative and social lives.

Here are two recent digitisation projects which are a good example of our work.

Swansea Sound 1976

We were sent a number of ¼ inch reel to reel Scotch 3M tape ‘made for the BBC’ tape, recorded at the rate of 7 ½ inches per second from local radio station Swansea Sound in 1976. The tapes were all in good condition, although the boxes had some evidence of water damage. Over time the tension in the tape pack had also changed, so they required careful re-spooling before being played.

The recordings were fascinating to digitise because they communicated how little the format of radio programmes have changed since the late 1970s. Jingles, news reports, chat and music were all part of the show, and anyone familiar with BBC Radio 2 would certainly enjoy the recordings, that still seem to be played every Saturday morning!

Brian Pimm-Smith’s recording diaries and tape letters

A collection of Brian’s 1/4 inch tapes

Another collection was sent to us from Brian Pimm-Smith. Brian enthusiastically documented his life and work activities using a Uher open reel portable tape recorder which he acquired in 1963.  The box included many ¼ inch tapes that could record up to 10 minutes at 3 and ¾ inches per second. These tapes could also record up to 4 mono tracks at 10 minutes each, allowing for storage of up to forty minutes at a time. The main bulk of the collection is a series of spoken letters sent to and from Pimm-Smith and his family, who between them lived in Britain, Pakistan, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Japan and Saudi-Arabia, but it also includes recordings of when Brian worked taking weather measurements for the British Antarctic Survey.

Some of the 1/4 inch tapes were marketed by companies such as Scotch and EMI specifically to be used as ‘voice letters’ that ‘links absent friends’. Despite this Pimm-Smith said that making such recordings was pretty rare, something ‘quite out there’ for most people. Brian’s mother nonetheless embraced the activity, as they shared correspondence back and forth between wherever they lived at the time.

Voice Letters

The 1/4 inch tape boxes in themselves are a colourful record of international postage in the late 1960s. Sent from Pakistan, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Saudi Arabia, Australia and Japan, the small boxes are plastered with stamps. The boxes were reinforced with sellotape to ensure the contents didn’t fall out (which is still stuck fast to the boxes, by the way, clearly demonstrating the surprising longevity of some forms of sticky tape). Pimm-Smith’s tapes are fascinating objects in themselves that bear the marks of travel through space in the form of postal stamp marks, and time, as they sit on the desk now in the Greatbear Studio.

Perhaps the most exciting and unique recording Brian has kept is the audio diary of his trip through the Sahara desert. For the trip Brian drove an early 70s Range Rover which had a cassette player-recorder, a technological device only available in Africa which used audio cassette tapes. This enabled him to document his impressions as he drove along. Brian describes how he had taken a portable typewriter with the intention of keeping a written diary, but he used the tape recorder because it was more ‘immediate.’ On hearing the digitised tapes Brian was amazed at how clear the recordings sound today, particularly because he was driving at the same time and there was likely to be background noise. You can hear the hum of the car engine in the extract below, but the voice is still clearly very audible.

http://thegreatbear.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/blog-example-cassette-tape-1.mp3

Listen to Brian talk about problems with his tyre as he drove across the Sahara Desert in 1976

The stories Swansea Sound radio and Pimm-Smith’s collection tell are part of wider social histories. They tell us about communities and places, as well as the continuities of style in broadcast radio. They tell us how people used analogue tape recordings to document personal adventures and communicate with families who lived in different countries.

Both tapes are examples of the sheer diversity of personal, magnetic tape based archives that people have been keeping for years, and which we digitise at the Greatbear. Brian Pimm-Smith contacted Greatbear because he wanted to make his tapes accessible, and preserve them for future use. He is hoping one day to write a book from his many adventures and these recordings can now remind him not only of what he did, but how he felt in the moment he made them.

Posted by debra in audio tape, 20 comments

Audio cassette transfer and Martin Parr’s The Non Conformists

We were recently sent a collection of recorded interviews with residents of Hebden Bridge, a mill town in the Pennines. They were recorded on regular, domestic tapes of the mid-1970s, the kind that were sold in shops such as Woolworths or WHSmith.

As magnetic cassette tapes go, these cheaper tapes can often deteriorate at a fast rate because they were aimed at a mass consumer market, and therefore not made with longevity in mind. These tapes however were in excellent condition, and no issues arose in the digitisation process.

Here is what Susie Parr told us about the project behind the tapes, and the publishing plans for the material later this year. We were very happy to be part of a creative project that will enable the stories to be shown to new audiences because of digitisation.

‘In 1975 photographer Martin Parr moved to Hebden Bridge, a mill town in the Pennines, with some friends from art school in Manchester. In a project that was to last five years, he started photographing the area, documenting a traditional culture and way of life that were slowly declining. Susie Mitchell, who also lived in Hebden Bridge, wrote about the people and places that Martin photographed. Together they built up a record of the day to day lives of mill-workers, game-keepers, coal miners, hill-farmers and chapel-goers. As part of their research, Susie and Martin would tape record their conversations with some of the characters they met. Thirty years later, the elderly audio tapes have been digitised and the photographs and texts are going to be published by Aperture in a book called The Non Conformists. In September, an exhibition will open in London.’

Below is an audio snippet of one of the tapes. This is a raw unprocessed version, notice the tape hiss inherent in these types of recordings. Sympathetic noise reduction to reduce this type of noise, can be process on these file if necessary.

parr-cassette-oral-history-snippet-1975

Posted by debra in audio tape, 0 comments

Delivery formats – to compress or not compress

Screenshot of software encoding a file to MP3 used at the Great Bear

After we have migrated your analogue or digital tape to a digital file, we offer a range of delivery formats.

For video, using the International Association of Sound & Audiovisual Archives Guidelines for the Preservation of Video Recordings, as our guide, we deliver FFV1 lossless files or 10-bit uncompressed video files in .mkv or QuickTime compatible .mov containers. We add viewing files as H264 encoded .mp4 files or DVD. We’ll also produce any other digital video files, according to your needs, such as AVI in any codec; any MacOS, Windows or GNU/Linux filesystem (HFS+, NTFS or EXT3.

For audio we offer Broadcast WAV (B-WAV) files on hard drive or optical media (CD) at 16 bit/44.1 kHz (commonly used for CDs) or 24 bit/96 kHz (which is the minimum recommended archival standard) and anything up to 24 bit / 192 kHz. We can also deliver access copies on CD or MP3 (that you could upload to the internet, or listen to on an ipod, for example).

Why are there so many digital file types and what distinguishes them from each other?

The main difference that is important to grasp is between an uncompressed digital file and a compressed one.

On the JISC Digital Media website, they describe uncompressed audio files as follows:

‘Uncompressed audio files are the most accurate digital representation of a soundwave, but can also be the   most resource-intensive method of recording and storing digital audio, both in terms of storage and management. Their accuracy makes them suitable for archiving and delivering audio at high resolution, and working with audio at a professional level, and they are the “master” audio format of choice.’

Why uncompressed?

As a Greatbear client you may wonder why you need a large, uncompressed digital file if you only want to listen to your old analogue and digital tapes again. The simple answer is: we live in an age where information is dynamic rather static. An uncompressed digital recording captured at a high bit and kHz rate is the most stable media format you can store your data on. Technology is always changing and evolving, and not all types of digital files that are common today are safe from obsolescence.

It is important to consider questions of accessibility not only for the present moment, but also for the future. There may come a time when your digitised audio or video file needs to be migrated again, so that it can be played back on whatever device has become ‘the latest thing’ in a market driven by perpetual innovation. It is essential that you have access to the best quality digital file possible, should you need to transport your data in ten, fifteen or twenty years from now.

Compression and compromise?

Uncompressed digital files are sound and vision captured in their purest, ‘most accurate’ form. Parts of the original recording are not lost when the file is converted or saved. When a digital file is saved to a compressed, lossy format, some of its information is lost. Lossy compression eliminates ‘unnecessary’ bits of information, tailoring the file so that it is smaller. You can’t get the original file back after it has been compressed so you can’t use this sort of compression for anything that needs to be reproduced exactly. However it is possible to compress files to a lossless format, which does enable you to recreate the original file exactly.

In our day to day lives however we encounter far more compressed digital information than uncompressed.

There would be no HD TV, no satellite TV channels and no ipods/ MP3 players without compressed digital files. The main point of compression is to make these services affordable. It would be incredibly expensive, and it would take up so much data space, if the digital files that were streamed to televisions were uncompressed.

While compression is great for portability, it can result in a compromise on quality. As Simon Reynolds writes in his book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past about MP3 files:

‘Every so often I’ll get the proper CD version of an album I’ve fallen in love with as a download, and I’ll get a rude shock when confronted by the sense of dimension and spatiality in the music’s layers, the sculpted force of the drums, the sheer vividness of the sound. The difference between CD and MP3 is similar to that between “not from concentrate” orange juice and juice that’s been reconstituted from concentrate. (In this analogy vinyl would be ‘freshly squeezed, perhaps). Converting music to MP3 is a bit like the concentration process, and its done for much the same reason: it’s much cheaper to transport concentrate because without the water it takes up a lot loss volume and it weighs a lot less. But we can all taste the difference.’

As a society we are slowly coming to terms with the double challenge of hyper consumption and conservation thrown up by the mainstreaming of digital technology. Part of that challenge is to understand what happens to the digital data we use when we click ‘save as,’ or knowing what decisions need to be made about data we want to keep because it is important to us as individuals, or to wider society.

At Greatbear we can deliver digital files in compressed and uncompressed formats, and are happy to offer a free consultation should you need it to decide what to do with your tape based digital and analogue media.

Posted by debra in audio tape, digitisation expertise, video tape, 0 comments

digitising tape issues

The main work of Greatbear is to make analogue and digital tape-based media accessible for people living in a digital intensive environment. But once your tape-based media has been digitised, is that the end of the story? Do you never need to think about preservation again? What issues arise for information management in the future, and how do they relate to our actions in the present?

This year (2013) the National Archives in the UK are facing a huge challenge as the ’20-year rule‘, in which the government will be releasing records when they are 20 years old, instead of 30, comes into effect. A huge part of this process is the digitisation of large amounts of material so they can be easily accessible to the public.

What does this have to do with the digitisation of tape you may be wondering? Well, mostly it provides food for thought. When you read the guidelines for the National Archives’ digitisation strategy, it raises many points that are worth thinking about for everyone living inside an information intensive environment, professional archivist or not. These guidelines suggest that many of the problems people face with analogue media, for example not being able to open, play or use formats such as tape, floppy disks  or even digital media, such as a cd-r, do not go away with the move toward wholesale digitisation. This is summed up nicely in the National Archive’s point about digital continuity. ‘If you hold selected digital records that are not yet due for transfer, you will need to maintain their digital continuity. This means ensuring that the records can be found, opened, understood, worked with and trusted over time and through change’. This statement encapsulates the essence of digital information management – the process whereby records are maintained and kept up to date with each technological permutation.

Later on in their recommendations they state something which may be surprising to people who assume that digitisation equates to some form of informational omnipotence: ‘Unlike paper records, digital records are very vulnerable and will not survive without active intervention. We cannot leave digital records on a shelf in an archive – they need active management and migration to remain accessible in the long term.’ These statements make clear that digital records are just as vulnerable as their analogue counterparts, which although subject to degrading, are in fact more robust than is often assumed.

What is the answer to ensuring that the data we create is usable in the future, is there an answer? It is clear on whatever format we choose to archive data there is always risk involved: the risk of going out of date, the risk of vulnerability, the risk of ‘not being able to leave them on the shelf’. Records, archives and data cannot, it seems, simply look after themselves. They have to adapt to their technological environments, as much as humans do.

Posted by debra in audio tape, video tape, 0 comments

Digitising U-matic tape: Diagnosing & Treatment

We have recently completed a job for Quarry Faces, the Mendip Hills Community Heritage Project which has been funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. Quarry Faces gave us 20 U-matic video tapes that were commissioned for a corporate video in the 1980s.

The Quarry Faces project aims to tell the industry’s story, produce teaching materials for both educational purposes and general interest, and create an archive to preserve images and memories of quarrying over time.

This video we digitised was shot by Coloroll Films of Kilmarnock in 1985, and was delivered to us on U-matic tape. It features a giant walking crusher at Foster Yeoman’s Merehead Quarry (Torr Works).

Walking Crusher at Foster Yeoman Ltd’s Torr Works in 1985 from Quarry Faces on Vimeo.

The video tapes we were sent were high band recordings, rather low band and of very good quality. One AMPEX U-matic tape however was problematic as the tape shell / mechanism had degraded over time and needed careful hand rewinding and reshelling in a known good and newer cassette shell.

When faced with damaged tape, often people automatically assume it needs dehydrating, a process that forces the moisture out of the tape through stable, precise, low temperature baking. However if this is not what is wrong with the tape, dehydrating or ‘baking‘ as it is more commonly called, may in fact damage the tape. If you bake acetate tape that was commonly used in the 1950s and 1960s for example, it would be destroy it.

Ampex filed for a patent for the correct temperature to recover Ampex tapes. The patent referred to “a typical temperature used is 54’C. and a typical effective time is 16 hours”.

The simple truth is, there is no all encompassing answer to know what happens to tape when it degrades, or when the cassette shell mechanism malfunctions, and each tape that is sent to us is of course individual. Digitisation and the art of restoring old tape is a relatively new area, and no one has yet made a machine that is able to precisely diagnose what is wrong with each individual tape when problems occur. Is the tape suffering from sticky shed syndrome or binder hydrolysis, or is it ‘vinegar syndrome’, a condition which afflicts acetate tape? Only through careful diagnostic work, which at Greatbear includes using our range of in-house test tapes, can the correct remedy be found.

Posted by debra in video tape, 0 comments

video machine room equipment racks / patchbay rewire

With the work we are involved with we have to use, keep working and store a large amount of old and usually large tape machines and other electronics. With a couple of machines it’s easy to store and easy to connect but as you grow and the variety and scope of machines develops it can soon become a wiring and space nightmare.

Racks and patchbays are the answer and the time’s come to rewire our racks as many new / old machines have joined our collection as has different types of digitising work. Key to this is the need to accurately monitor and digitise several sources while having the flexibility to change the workflow quickly whenever.

Richard from westent is providing support in this video redesign and it will be an interesting challenge mixing the old with the new to get the highest quality transfers with the most efficiency.

Posted by greatbear in video tape, 0 comments

azimuth adjustment when you transfer and convert cassettes to cd

Cassette tapes run at a very slow speed of 178 inches per second (ips) with a very small track width of 1.59mm

Cassette decks when they left the factory or a service centre should have been aligned to a standard reference for the position of the record and play heads. Unfortunately they often weren’t all the same and over time the alignment can drift, get knocked out or manually ‘fiddled with’ by an owner.

What this means is that unless you’re playing back your tape on the machine it was originally recorded on, you may not be getting the maximum quality as the angle of the head to the recording or azimuth will not be optimal.

Without calibration tones recorded at the start of the tape (which is very unlikely on most domestic cassette tape recordings), you must set the playback azimuth manually. A few high end tape decks, namely those made by Nakamichi, either had a easily accessed Azimuth Adjust or could even automatically adjust this throughout the tape. The Nakamichi Dragon was one such tape deck and could be the best, if working well, for high quality playback.

If you want to transfer or convert a cassette to CD and adjust the azimuth yourself this is the easy way to do it:

  1. Look at the tape path (everything the tape will move across) and if it looks brown and dirty get some isopropyl alcohol and give it a good clean with a cotton bud.
  2. If you haven’t demagnetised your deck for a while now would be a good time to do it..
  3. Power up your cassette deck, which hopefully works correctly and doesn’t have too much speed instability!
  4. Pop your tape in the cassette well and start to play.
  5. Turn your amplifier’s volume up and if you can put it in Mono.
  6. Now, look under the tape machine’s playback or combined record and playback heads you should see a small screw or nut possibly with anti tamper paint on it.
  7. Using an appropriate tool, turn this nut or screw a little left or right while listening to the audio.
  8. You should hear the recording, especially if it has a lot of high frequency content such as cymbals etc. get bright and dull sounding or more technically get more in or out of phase.
  9. Your aim is to get the most in phase or bright sounding playback.
  10. Sounds better now?? Great, start to record using you favourite computer audio software. We like SoX for the control but there’s a huge range out there.

 

Posted by greatbear in audio tape, audio technology, machines, equipment, 1 comment

U-matic transfer to DVD, Uncompressed Quicktime and Digi Beta

We’ve been honored recently to have won a large contract to help in the digital migration of an extensive educational video archive by the transfer from U-matic archive copies to uncompressed video files.

While the archive had been stored in an suitable environment and rarely if at all played, they had not survived well. The Sony branded tapes from the 1970s and 1980s all exhibited binder hydrolysis or sticky shed syndrome. We were still able to get good transfers though using our range of U-matic machines, particularly the Sony BVU-950P and For-A Time Base Corrector.

Posted by greatbear in video tape, 12 comments