I began to call tape manufacturers and remastering specialists to get a sense of best practices. Some were very open about their work; others were concerned about releasing proprietary information. Soon I began to get calls from other professionals in the business curious about BAVC's intentions. In some cases I felt like I was being "warned off," but I always made it clear that BAVC's course was set: we were committed to setting up a 1/2" open reel remastering facility.

An early attempt had been made to call our fledgling center the "National Center for Video Preservation" which created a stir with a national film preservation organization. While there was no evidence that the organization had any interest in physically preserving video, BAVC could not expect funding by initiating a branding war. After Sally discussed the issue with the National Endowment for the Arts, we settled on referring to our center as a model remastering center. The term "model" also allowed us to distinguish BAVC's center from remastering facilities that chose not to share their techniques. We believed that information-sharing was important.

BAVC also wanted to meet with staff from Media Alliance who had encouraged the discussion among facilities on the east coast, to introduce ourselves. While BAVC had the advantage of being somewhat outside preservation debates, we felt we could easily become unwelcome interlopers if we didn't proceed carefully. We met Mona Jimenez of Media Alliance for the first time at an NEA conference in Chicago in 1994. At that point we had done some tests with a borrowed 1/2" open reel machine from the Optic Nerve collective, but it was still a few months before we acquired our first machines, in trade for remastering services.

After meeting with Mona, it was clear BAVC could no longer act independently. Up to that time, BAVC had been a "local" San Francisco media arts center bent on providing services and differentiating itself from Film Arts Foundation and other local media arts centers. BAVC's vision was to capitalize on opportunities to benefit BAVC's growth; we focused on our strengths and pursuing projects where we could be successful. Mona made it clear that if we intended to do the work of remastering, our obligation to the larger field and to media producers would deepen. Our vision would need to go beyond BAVC's bottom line and organizational concerns.

In addition to Media Alliance, BAVC worked to develop relationships with key organizations and individuals such as Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), Video Data Bank, and Arthur Tsuchiya, who at the time was in the Media Arts Program at the NEA. In order to develop a funding and client base, we needed to be represented at meetings of archivists and librarians. We began to attend events organized by the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) and the American Library Association (ALA). We also visited the American Film Institute to connect with the staff working on the National Moving Image Database (NAMID), a cataloging project.

With the basic groundwork in place, BAVC applied for and was awarded a Challenge Grant from the NEA in 1993 to develop the model center. Sections of the original proposal "The National Video Preservation Center - A Brief Overview" is on the Video History site Resources>Groups>Bay Area Video Coalition. At this point, there was no turning back. The NEA challenge was matched in the years following with funds from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the San Francisco Foundation, NAMID and the California Arts Council.