greatbear audio and video digitising
audio and video tape transfer, digitising, preservation
We recently spoke to Martin Theophilus, Executive Director of the Museum of Magnetic Sound Recording based in Austin, Texas.
While the Greatbear studio is a kind of museum – it is full of old machines that we maintain and preserve – we wanted to know more about this ‘proper’ Magnetic Sound Recording Museum.
World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, which is sponsored by UNESCO and takes place every year on 27 October, is an occasion to celebrate how audio, video and film contribute to the ‘memory of the world.’ The theme for 2016 – ‘It’s your story, don’t lose it!’ – conveys the urgency of audio visual preservation and… Continue reading Happy World Day for Audiovisual Heritage!
Assessment and treatment is an important part of Greatbear’s audiovisual preservation work. Even before a tape is played back we need to ensure it is in optimum condition. Sometimes it is possible to make a diagnosis through visual assessment alone. A tape we received recently, for example, clearly displayed signs of ‘spoking.’ Spoking is a term used in… Continue reading Spoking – Treating and Assessing Magnetic Tape
On a recent trip to one of Britain’s most significant community archives, I was lucky enough to watch a rare piece of digitised video footage from the late 1970s. As the footage played it raised many questions in my mind: who shot it originally? What format was it originally created on? How was it edited?… Continue reading Digital Video in Mixed-Content Archives
U-matic made video cassette a core part of many industries. Flexible and functional, its popularity endured until the 1990s.
At Greatbear, we have a significant suite of working NTSC/ PAL/ SECAM U-matic machines and spare parts.
Often customers ask us to deliver their transferred sound files on CD, in effect an audio CD-R of the transfer. Although these recordings can still be high resolution there remains a world of difference—in an archival sense—between a CD-R, burnt on a computer drive (however high the quality of drive and disc), and CD recordings… Continue reading Going CD-R-less – digital file-based delivery
The Alesis ADAT digital multi-track tape recorder is an iconic piece of early 1990s audio recording equipment. ADATs used consumer S-VHS video tape to record up to 8 tracks of digital audio. They were modular, meaning that each machine could be synched with up to 15 other ADAT machines. It was therefore possible, in theory, to… Continue reading ADAT digital multi-track recorders
We have previously written on this blog about the problems that can occur when transferring Digital Audio Tapes (DATs). According to preliminary findings from the British Library’s important survey of the UK’s sound collections, there are 3353 DAT tapes in the UK’s archives. While this is by no means a final figure (and does not include the… Continue reading Mouldy DATs
There are an astonishing amount of online resources relating to the preservation and re-formatting of magnetic tape collections. Whether you need help identifying and assessing your collection, getting to grips with the latest video codec saga or trying to uncover esoteric technical information relating to particular formats, the internet turns up trumps 95% of the time.… Continue reading IASA – Resources and Research
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… Continue reading Digital Preservation and Copyright
In a blog post a few weeks ago we reflected on several practical and ethical questions emerging from our digitisation work. To explore these issues further we decided to take an in-depth look at the British Library’s Digital Preservation Strategy 2013-2016 that was launched in March 2013. The British Library is an interesting case study because they were… Continue reading Digitisation strategies – back up, bit rot, decay and long term preservation
