DARA MEYERS-KINGSLEY: I?m from IMAP, and I have two questions. One is you mentioned that there are these different brands and formats of tape that seem to be stronger, or more hardy, than others. Are you in some way recording and documenting those, so we could have some kind of report, if you will, to the field on the history of the strength of tape? I actually wanted to ask the three of you to speak about your own personal professional training that brought you to do the video preservation work that you?re doing. Part of what the field is asking for and we?re all here about is to develop scientists and engineers and technicians to further preservation efforts, both in the academic world, as well as in the conservation/academic world. I wonder, Jon, are you an engineer?
SELSLEY: No. No, I?m not. My background is in communications and Eastern European history, so I feel I?m uniquely qualified. My relationship with the Bay Area Video Coalition started about eight years ago, as just sort of being the handyman, pretty much. Since then, I?ve been taking engineering courses, and I also do systems integration. I consult--digital newsrooms to big servers--and just the whole transition from linear to nonlinear. I?ve worked at a whole laundry list of post houses (SGI, KGO, and Oracle). So my background is really connecting and documenting everything. I mean, as far as the tape formats that sort of have come to the forefront or fallen by the wayside. But we deal, or try to deal with the tapes that people bring to us. We can?t transfer everything and we can?t clean everything; we?re really sort of handcuffed. You can?t bring us a tape and we don?t have a deck; you have to bring a deck, too. You can bring in a machine from 1956? or a tape from 1956, you?ve got to bring us the machine, as well. Really, what we deal with is trying to figure out what was the dominant format at the time. There are so many formats out there now. But they were used for mainly news gathering, or this was a consumer format. It just really depends on how the companies were marketing these.
HEATHER WEAVER: Well, we?re primarily a nonprofit arts organization, so we work with independent documentary and filmmakers. What we have the most experience with is what they?re shooting on ? which ranges from VHS, hi-8, mini-DV, BetaCam SP, all the way up to Digital BetaCam. And occasionally, we do have clients who have to bring in the odd M2 deck that we can use. I?m primarily a linear online editor. And my experience with format stability and how tapes hold up over time is just shuttling through hundreds of them as I?ve been putting together documentaries. I guess it?s bad that the record we have about what we find is mostly in our heads, and not on paper. I have been collecting a nice gallery of dropouts. What a dropout looks [like] on hi-8 versus what it looks like on DV. And I would say that BetaCam SP does experience probably more dropout than DV, from what I?ve seen ? although with DV, it hasn?t been around as long, so it?s not really a fair comparison. But in an online suite, where we?re also doing the finishing, I find that dropouts on analog formats, they?re easier to fix. When DV drops out, it usually alters three or four frames, and the dropouts are very big and chunky. On a BetaCam SP, or even a hi-8 ? although hi-8 tends to have excessive dropout ? it?s just a little line, and it?s pretty easy to cut and paste, if you will, to fix the image.
I just wanted to say something about Heather?s background, as well, because she didn?t mention it. Heather trained at the national PBS, with PBS engineers, to make sure that what was coming out of BAVC was meeting the specs before it got to PBS. Essentially, she edits the PBS programs that come out of BAVC ? which, there are a lot of them. She?s edited a lot of the programs that go onto film. And I certainly don?t know all the details, but I?m certain you?ve done a number that have gone on to be at least Academy Award nominated, or maybe won an Academy Award.
WEAVER: Yeah, we do well in Sundance, when we get pieces in there.
HONES: Essentially what that means is she?s in there working with the tools of the video trade. That?s the waveform, the vectorscope. Those are probably the big ones.
WEAVER: Also the color corrector? I do a lot of that. A lot of image repair, as well, which is how I know what?s harder to fix and what?s easier to fix, and what lasts longer, I guess.
HONES: I think Jon?s training has really been key to us because of his incredible ability of understanding how to put together good signal flow, and understanding, you know, what it looks like when equipment is working right together. Heather?s experience is that she knows, with a great deal of experience working as a production editor, how to put a piece together and what a good image looks like, you know, once we have a system set up correctly. Essentially my video background was at BAVC, and learning at BAVC how to put together the sort of equipment that we have, and how to assemble that sort of facility. Before that, I was a computer programmer, and I built computers systems, as well, back in the mid-eighties. I?d say more my experience was making sure we put together a good team, and a good team that could do what we needed to accomplish. That being said, I certainly did some of the early transfers. Mostly, I worked on the test tapes to get a sense of what we could expect out of the half-inch open reel decks that we?re working with, and what we could expect out of the cleaners that we?re working with. I had a hundred tapes that were donated from Redwood High. So I saw a lot of bad theater!
KIM TOMCZAK: Hi, my name is Kim Tomczak, from V Tape. I have a number of questions. I understand that all tape manufacturers produce tape with an orange peel effect on it, so the tape bumps; it actually skips along the edge and doesn?t touch so there?s a certain kind of texture to them. In your experience, does the blade or the burnishing process remove any of that orange peel effect? That?s the first question.
WEAVER: I would say not as far as we can tell. But again, we?re not looking under a microscope.
HONES: I would say one other thing about the half-inch open reels. When I was first setting them up, I worked with a Sony engineer. What he was saying, the connection between the Sony half-inch open reel heads and the tape is a little more rough and ready than that. There?s actually a lot of contact.
KIM TOMCZAK: The problem with baking and the desiccation concept to me is that it doesn?t remove the dirt. There?s also hair, skin, smoke, dirt on the tape. So I?ve often thought that that was a non-issue, because really, you?re trying to get the stuff off the surface. That?s a statement. I am trying to think when they remaster ancient films, you know, they actually go back and they aesthetically decide on the way they?re going to look, based on what they think the filmmaker thought they should look like in 1920. Are you at a state now where you?re going to take an Ant Farm tape and, you know, put it into a noncompressed digital editing system and recreate it the way you would think of Chip Lord?
WEAVER: Actually, Chip Lord?s probably coming in to do that with us. But it?ll be in the linear suite, actually. We don?t digitize and compress.
HONES: It?s a very good point. When you?re talking to us, we?re the technicians and, you know, we would have someone like the folks at Video Data Bank come in to put together a program from those tapes. The other issue that?s got to be addressed with baking or with desiccating, if we?re talking about three days or eight hours or whatever, versus half an hour. And part of the whole issue of dealing with the clients that we deal with is how do we keep the price down as low as possible? So I think when we think about baking or desiccating, if there were tapes that couldn?t be transferred in the way that is most successful is there an alternative to go?
QUESTION: How much problem do you have with the actual tape degenerating? And how much of a problem is control track, a loss of control track? How much problem do you have with the tape not playing back, with timebase error that?s not easily correctable? And how many tapes that you absolutely can?t play have a problem with timebase or control track, and how many have a problem with disintegration of the actual record medium? Like what are the percentages?
HONES: As far as the timebase error, when we first started out, one of the TBCs I was looking at was from Prime Image. I thought it was a pretty good bet, because the guy who owns Prime Image has a long history working with TBCs. But we could not feed half-inch open reel through that TBC without the image freezing. Essentially, what we settled on for a full frame TBC was the DPS TBC IV, and it passes video through really well. The way that we have our system set up, we have an alternative. At the same time, we?re passing it through a BVT-810, which is not a full frame TBC. For those things that are still causing problems in the full frame system, we can go through the BVT-810.
QUESTION: And that takes care of most of it? Or do you have any tapes that absolutely won?t play back for control track reasons? What is that, relative to the percentage that won?t play back from actual loss of record medium?
SELSLEY: We have three TBCs and we also have three play decks, so if we?re having a problem on a tape, we?ll go through all TBCs. We?ll go through a process of verifying that our test tapes work, and try all the different play decks. It has been such a small loss because of those kinds of errors. The biggest thing why we can?t transfer a tape is if a tape is at what we consider end of life ? something that has gone through these twenty passes of cleaning, and it?s just not coming clean?.But some of the problems we?ve also had are actually if the tape was recorded on a deck that really wasn?t up to par; it was in poor shape to begin with. So that?s a process where the tape is clean, the image that?s on the tape is really fine, it?s just it was recorded where maybe the heads were worn, where the heads were out of sync, out of alignment, or it had any number of a hundred and one things wrong in the deck. So actually, in certain circumstances, since we are lucky enough to have three play decks, three AV play decks and the one CV play deck, and also a nice gentleman that can tinker on the decks. He has actually modified our deck to reproduce the sort of horror recording that was done initially in the early seventies.
WEAVER: It?s also moving the heads, because if the heads were out of alignment on the tape path when it was originally recorded, to get the head to misalign our aligned heads to get it to play a tape back.
COMMENT: That?s also do-able. I mean, it would occur to me (but only if that?s a major problem) that today you could build a deck fairly easily and inexpensively, where all of that is variable under computer control and re-memorable?
HONES: Yeah. I mean, I would love to do that. My only concern is would it be actually affordable? We were talking with someone about building a cleaning machine. And I think they were going to charge us thirty thousand? I don?t remember the numbers, and I?m glad I don?t because it was a lot of money, just to build the cleaning machine. Now, if we had them in there actually making sure? I mean, if we?re going to build a new machine, are we going to have a really nice tape path, and take into consideration some of the technologies that have come since these machines were first built? Are we going to make it a much nicer machine?
COMMENT: Well, if you do that, you have some problems. But if you just want controllability of all the elements that could have gone wrong in the original deck, it?s not prohibitive. I guarantee it?s not a prohibitive enterprise.
QUESTION: I was just wondering if I could ask a questions about the RTI machines, if anybody knows of any research or anything that?s been done on cleaning tapes through those RTI machines? RTI, it?s a company that makes machines that are really tape evaluators; but they also have some of the same components as the Recortec. They are used in a lot in libraries, for instance, to run the tapes through. They check for certain errors.
HONES: And the formats are U-matic, VHS, and probably Beta.
COMMENT: Yeah, they have a Beta. And one-inch.
COMMENT: There was a time when broadcast insisted that a tape be evaluated before they used it. So if you were at CBS in the seventies or sixties every tape that you put up would be an evaluated tape. You paid less for an unevaluated tape. There were machines that actually did that. Ampex, I think, built one; several companies built one. They built one for whatever format they brought out, because broadcasters would not use tapes that couldn?t be evaluated, and therefore, you needed a standards machine to evaluate it.
HONES: And those broadcasters were reusing their tapes so much. I mean, definitely, the local news stations.
QUESTION: In the same vein of talking about RTI machines, has anyone thought about taking one of the half-inch RTI machines, with a cassette m chanism?an open-able cassette mechanism, to load half-inch open reel in, and use the RTI for that?
WEAVER: Yeah, but they don?t make one specifically for half-inch open reel.
QUESTION: No, no, I?m saying to take a cassette?like a pre-loaded cassette that screws open?
WEAVER: That would be something that we would be definitely interested in partnering with them or trying. But right now, I don?t believe that we have the resources at BAVC to do something like that.
QUESTION: With the Recortec, the hubs and the transport, the takeup reels, how did you have to modify those ? or did you have to modify those ? for videotape?
SELSLEY: Well, it was initially for a one-inch computer tape. Actually, the entire tape path, the posts, the vacuum, everything was modified per our requests to Recortec. So we just told them pretty much what we wanted.
HONES: Yeah. If you look at the machine, you can see essentially, the modules and everything are just screwed in, and they just built it to spec.
QUESTION: I?m going to go out on a limb here with regard to the RTI tape deck, especially the error evaluation. I have observed them a great deal, and I don?t think that they are worth anything. I think it is bells and whistles. I think the people who rely on them to determine the condition of their tape are being misled. I don?t think that it does anything. We looked at tapes that had been cleaned by the RTI tape check that had, you know, various amounts of bells and whistles coming off of them for, you know, very dirty, edge damage, blah-blah-blah. The tapes were fine when you look at them under these more sophisticated machines, such as FTIR. They don?t have the damage. I don?t know what those bells and whistles are doing. I think that the tape cleaning part is fine. And no one has ever been able to actually tell me what supposedly they?re detecting, because they?re not expensive machines--in comparison to what we?re truly trying to determine about tape damage of the surface. Sometimes they have a blade that you want to take off because some of the RTI tape decks come with a blade you take off. But in essence, there is polyester, non-woven webbing that the tape runs up against, precisely as yours does in your record one-half inch cleaning material. And it does the thing.
SELSLEY: Just a couple quick things about the RTIs. We just purchased their VHS cleaner, and we didn?t go with the evaluator. First, for money, and secondly, we were unsure. What are we really doing here? So we sort of did without it. And also, we?re very happy to have that machine; however, it was three or four thousand dollars, and I?m not going to take our VHS machine apart and try to adapt it for half-inch open reel. However, I?d certainly be happy to take somebody else?s machine apart!
HONES: Then you have to put it back on the reel because of the tape path difference for the two machines. I did kind of think about that. I was looking to see how close the tape path was to half-inch open reel. It?s very different. As I understand it, there?s a process in tape duplication, where you run your master tape next to another tape, and magnetically, the signal is transferred. I was thinking: Boy, if you could do that with half-inch open reel, that would be the most interesting, if you were transferring it to brand new stock.
SELSLEY: Now, I?ll basically go over how we have things set up at BAVC. This is an engineering program. It?s a CAD program. But it also has a database of about thirteen thousand pieces of equipment that are commonly used ? distribution amplifiers, timebase correctors, decks, monitors. And it?s about seventy-five hundred dollars. And we really don?t want to just suddenly, you know, make this information, like, you know, start giving it out. It?s really, like, a twenty-four inch by thirty-inch piece of paper that three or four people can look around and say, ?I?m having some problems with the signal; where is it?? And it really allows you to track down your signal and find exactly which cable is giving you the hard time. This is an AV-8650, and that is one play deck.
HONES: Let me ask you, Jon, in red are basically boxes, so over here is a VTR, here is a switcher?
SELSLEY: Yeah. This is a deck and this is a deck. This represents two AV-8650 half-inch open reel decks, like we have up front here, that are mounted in a rack, so we don?t have to keep switching the cables around, we don?t have to move the deck around; it?s in the rack, in our control room, with all of our equipment. Here is the audio for one deck, here?s the audio for another deck, and it goes into a switcher. What the switcher allows us to do is take one tape and switch back and forth between the decks without any recabling or repatching; all we do is just hit a button on the switcher. Then we have the output of the switcher you can really get down to the exact wire and say, ?Ok, this is the one.? If we?re having a problem, we can troubleshoot. This is incredibly valuable for troubleshooting. There is a line conditioner, because the audio coming out of the play decks is unbalanced audio. Professional audio tends to be balanced. It?s coming in unbalanced, and goes out balanced. Also, with the audio, we have this mixer we can bring in, and that?s where we can really tweak the levels. You can mix it, bring up the levels, and bring down the levels. But we really make sure that our audio levels are just within basic broadcast specs and guidelines. We?re not going to sit there and ride the levels through the tape; there are just too many questions and concerns about artist?s intent and it?s not really for us to decide. We basically clean the tape and get the best possible transfer that we can off that tape. In post, you can always go back and make changes, or you can say, ?Hey, can you retransfer this tape, riding the levels,? or? But really, our concern is getting the original master cleaned and transferred, and then essentially, that?s the end of our preservation.
And then there is an audio distribution amplifier, so we have coming out of the mixer, patch, into a distribution amplifier. It comes ?normalled? out of the mixer, which basically means you don?t have to patch anything, but you can use any of these other patches to go straight into patch to the distribution amplifier. The important thing is that you can have one source and six destinations, all at the same time, so really what we?re doing is we have the one master, and we can remaster to up to six different formats with the same audio. So when we say we can go to three formats at a time or six formats at a time, or if you drop something off and you want two formats, it?s in the same pass. And then here?s an audio monitor so we can monitor the levels, Techtronix, and that?s normalled out of the sixth output of the distribution amplifier. Then coming out of the mixer we?ve got some speakers.
HONES: This represents essentially our attempt to try and set up a system that would strategically help us be as efficient as possible in working with half-inch open reel. And that means that we have three decks here. If a tape arrives, we don?t know if it?s going to work on this deck; these decks are essentially identical, they seem to play a little differently. We don?t know if that tape?s going to be skip field or if it?s going to be EIAJ half-inch open reel. So that was the key, is we have this switcher and essentially, we have everything down the line. So we put it on this deck, play it, and everything else is patched, and so it?s going to the record deck. If it doesn?t work on that deck, we move it over, play it, and all we have to do is flip a button and it goes to all the places it was going from on this deck. It?s a little different than most of the other installations that we?ve done, in that our key thing is we need to move from deck to deck to deck, with basically only pressing one or two buttons.
QUESTION: I?m curious to know why you?re using 8650s. I mean, this is the question. Why wouldn?t you be using 3650s?
HONES: 8650s give us color. There are plenty of tapes that have part color, part black and white on it so we had no way of knowing, with tapes coming in, whether they were going to be color or black and white. Essentially, we had to go with color. It?s not like we can just throw the black and white switch in the middle of a program.
SELSLEY: Well, we keep the color switch on until we?ve determined that it is a black and white tape. Because if it?s a black and white tape and you leave the color switch on, sometimes you get false color from time to time.
WEAVER: Well, prior to the transfer, we do spot check the tape for several minutes at lots of different places, to get our video levels at that time, you?d know if there?s color.
HONES: If it was half and half, would you keep the color up nowadays?
SELSLEY: No, I?d keep it black and white on the black and white part, and then color. And then, also, we?ll get into the documentation, as well, later. But that also goes into documentation. That would be noted, so that that can be carried to future generations. So fifty years from now, you don?t come back and say, ?Why is this black and white? Make it color. Somebody please do something.? No, it was black and white when it was recorded, and when it was transferred; and then the second part was color. We get that when there are edited pieces, which we actually see a lot in the education industry. People take something that was color and tape over it, tape their own program over it. So somebody had a program on it, it was color; they take it for their own use, and say the first twenty minutes of the tape is their own black and white footage; the last, say, twelve minutes on a thirty minute tape is color. I?m going to transfer everything, because that?s everything that?s on the tape. I don?t worry about, you know: Ok, well, this is some TV show from twenty-five years ago. You?re going to get everything that?s on there, and I?m going to note that the first twenty minutes is black and white then it switches over to color.
HONES: Yeah, we?ve run into that, with part of it being EIAJ and part of it being skip field, as well.
SELSLEY: And also, on these 8650s here, which is actually about 99% of our half-inch open reel tapes are the 80 series. We do have three, but we keep two up and running. And then when one goes out to service, we sort of rotate it in. They never go out to service all at the same time. So there could very well be one deck that?s literally fresh back from service ? fresh alignment, fresh heads, it?s got a new scanner and capacitors all over the place ? and we?ll start with that. Then we rotate through, and that?s just really to match up the right tape with the right deck, because the tape might not have been recorded on a perfect deck to begin with. It might need something where the heads were a little worn, where it had a different signal-to-noise ratio, or it had the tape contact.
HONES: The other thing I wanted to mention about the signal flow is coming off of these decks ?I think it?s probably minus ten dB, as far as unbalanced audio goes. The matchbox corrects it to plus four, which is usually the input that you essentially have on Beta SP.
SELSLEY: That?s automatically in the system; we also have our BVU-800 and VO-9850--three-quarter decks. They have audio, and time code is an audio signal? Those don?t go through the switcher, because this audio?s actually coming out balanced, and coming out two channels; whereas on the other decks, it?s coming out one channel that we mix, and it?s coming out unbalanced so what that does is it allows us to take the audio out, patch, and then actually go into this distribution amplifier, straight in out of the decks. Then once again, coming out of the distribution amplifier, we listen to it with our ears, and we monitor it. This Tectronix 760 audio monitor is a very sensitive piece of equipment that tells us: Is this within legal limits? In this industry, everybody?s always told to think outside the box, and that?s wonderful--that?s how innovation comes up. Except at this point, it?s where we really have to think inside the box, because you?re going to be looking at it through a television, and we don?t want audio levels bleeding into the video; you don?t want to have things way out of whack.
Now let me bring up the video. Once again, we have the AV-8650 play decks, CV-2100, BVU-800, and the VO-9850; these are the three-quarter decks. This is video only. For the video of the half-inch decks, once again, we go to the switcher; we can carry the video of the three-quarter decks also to the switcher, because it doesn?t have the same limitations or differences that the audio has--where the audio coming out of the decks is a different signal type. It?s also one channel instead of two channels. This is the same kind of video that?s coming off the half-inch open reel decks. We have the composite video out, and then there?s also the monitor out, which carries the time code on the video signal.
Then we have our first TBC, the DPS ES-2200. It?s normalled out from the switcher. So really nine out of ten times, our transfers go into this particular TBC. Luke goes into it in depth in his paper. Regarding the nature of how TBC handle an image: there are different proprietary cone filters, and various proc amps that are used. This is basically matching up the right tape with the right deck, then the right TBC, to get the best possible image.