HONES:  A TBC is a timebase corrector. Very quickly, when a tape is going through a tape path there is a little bit of flutter, and what is created is what's called timebase error. A TBC was created so the video signal goes into the TBC, it's corrected and, the timebase errors that come from dealing with the real world, they go through and they are cleaned up and then sent out. It's essential to getting a signal--not only for preservation but for broadcast as well--from a deck to another deck. Most of the equipment nowadays--if you're buying broadcast equipment--has TBC built in, so a lot of times you don't see them. But with older equipment, we have external TBCs.

 

ROBIN SCHANZENBACH:    Aren't you going through some sort of waveform and vectorscope, before you get to the timebase corrector?

 

WEAVER:  It's after the TBC.

 

SCHANZENBACH:  And my other question related to that, you  had said you work within broadcast specs. Are you always assuming that there are bars and tone at the head of the tapes to do setup with?

 

WEAVER:  I'm going over that in my presentation. But if there are bars and tone, we will use them. A lot of times on the half-inch open reel, there are not. We set to provide a good transfer without losing detail, highlight or shadow areas of an image.

 

HONES:  That is why it's very important to have someone like Heather, who's had the level of training she has, to work with these tapes that don't come to us with standards to help us figure out how things work. She's able to work with the tapes and come as close as, I'd say, is humanly possible.

 

SELSLEY:  In this process is a patch point. What we would do, our standard procedure, is to take bars and patch it in to this patch point. Then we'd set the TBC to bars, and then we'd also set the audio record levels to tone. Before we do a transfer, we'll spot check the first few minutes of a tape, and make sure that everything is within legal broadcast specs, using the Techtronix audio monitor. We have two TBCs, and our HR600. We have what's called a transcoder, because the signal that's coming out of the switcher is a composite video signal, and if we're going to a machine that has component video, this is what we go to. Then there is a Techtronix 1765 waveform and vectorscope. The whole preservation process, it is very exciting--what we're doing, this whole transfer and recovering this media.  First off, it's kind of a chore to match up the right deck and the right TBC, and it really is a monitor process throughout.  My job is to monitor, using this waveform and vectorscope.  What we're monitoring is what's coming off the tape, what's coming out of the TBC, and what's going in and out of all of the record decks. Then we're taking all that information through a waveform and vectorscope. The whole time, I'm bouncing back and forth with all the patches, monitoring all the various signals, to really ensure that what's coming off the tape and what's going to two or three or four record sources is within legal limits for your television, and it's also theoretically, the same image going to and from all the various play and record devices.

 

HONES:  Essentially, the waveform vectorscope is serving the same purpose as the color monitor. It's looking at the video.   The vectorscope allows you to look at the color signal, to see where the color signal is falling. The waveform, for the most part, I use for looking at the black and white part of the signal. Think of this in the same way that you think of the color monitor; it's helping you to look at what you're doing.

 

WEAVER:  It's just another much more precise way. Because you can actually measure the voltage levels of the electronic signal, so you know exactly what you're getting.

 

SELSLEY:  We have a transcoder that will take a composite into a component signal. Then we have an ADA, which can take an analog signal and transfer it and turn it into a digital signal, as well. We have this device if we want to go digital into DigiBeta or a DvCam, it's what does. Then we also have a Techtronix 601, which is a digital waveform. A digital signal is different from an analog signal, and it therefore has different measuring equipment--that's the quick and simple answer to months and months of talk! Also, there is a distribution amplifier we have, coming out of the switcher, is normalled to this timebase corrector. However, we can patch into any of the other two timebase correctors, and it's normalled into this distribution amplifier. We can patch anything into this, and it does the same thing as the audio distribution amplifier, which basically takes one signal in to six signals out and is normalled into a monitor.

Another important device is what's called a "feather". Every device that we have at Bay Area Video Coalition, the thirty decks that we have, the edit suites, every monitor, and every timebase corrector ó everything we have shares the same reference. Heather will get into exactly how important it is, but please understand that this is incredibly important.  What we have is our Grass Valley; it's a sync generator. From one source, one sync generator, we have the black  reference signal coming out to distribution amplifiers. These distribution amplifiers take one in and six out, and distribute the same black signal throughout the entire facility. I can't stress enough how important that is. And then also, another thing about the Grass Valley is it has color bars here and the color bars hit here, which is patch. It also has tone, a one kilohertz sine wave, which is an audio test signal. It hits the distribution amplifiers that it hits. Everything is sharing the same reference signal. Our record decks, a BVW-75 Sony, that's a Beta SP; another BVW-74 Sony Beta SP; and another BVW-75, which is actually an Ampex CVR-70. Then we have a DigiBeta, a DvCam, and a DVD burner.

 

HONES:  And what happens if it doesn't [share the same reference]?

 

SELSLEY:  You get sync shifts. You'll have a big black line across your image. On the top of your screen, you'll have the bottom of the image; on the bottom of the screen, you'll have the top of the image.  Essentially, reference is the heartbeat; it's the heartbeat that all of your equipment is listening to. What is going down the cable is just electrical impulses. It's not like film.

 

WEAVER:  There was actually a good article on the Experimental Television Website that Sherry Hocking wrote about sync.

 

SELSLEY:  This is an awful lot of information. But the important thing here is this is what ties everything together--how everything is connected. This gets down to the actual cables, so that if you're having a problem with anything, you can say, "Hey, this cable here, let's check it." At any point, you can check your sync. You can say, "Well, how do you know that you're sharing the same sync?" You can check it on a waveform and say, "Oh, well, that sync is off." So rather than rewire your whole facility, or freak out because you're having a sync shift or some sort of problem, you can test every single cable in this whole system.

 

HONES:  As complex as it looks, it's what allows a facility to run. It keeps the downtime down, when you have this level of planning that has gone into place before cable is even laid. Drawings actually come to us before the system is set up, and we approve them.

 

QUESTION:  Was your system designed primarily for postproduction, and modified for preservation? What is the relationship between these two things?

 

WEAVER:  Preservation was added, so it was just more equipment in the racks. We did already have the infrastructure; we already had the patch bays.

 

HONES:  The design for the preservation center is more than just the decks. A lot of thought went into. It was very new to me, and unusual to me, to think of putting a switcher before a DA. But we did that, becauseó unlike postproduction ó we potentially needed to try a tape out on three machines. We needed to do it as efficiently as possible so we could worry about the stuff that the client would want us to worry about.

 

QUESTION:  What percentage of time on this system is actually used for preservation?

 

SELSLEY:  Really, that's about a fourth of the time, is actually transferring the tape. Somebody drops off a one hour reel, a large open reel--that's about three to four hours of handling by the time that it's cleaned and we've found the right deck and the right timebase corrector. Then there's also all the prepping of the record tapes (Heather will discuss test signals on the record tape) and getting everything ready, and any patching you need to do. Of course there's documentation for the whole process. The transfer is such a small part of the process. There is a technician there the whole time to make sure that nothing happens--no patches get pulled and nothing gets stuck. That's almost like the hairiest process, because you're monitoring what's coming off the tape, audio and video; what's coming out of the timebase correctors; what's going into the record decks; what's coming out of the record decks. Even though everything's in the same room in eight racks wide, you're running back and forth checking everything.

 

QUESTION:  Would there be any difference in the system if you only did preservation--If that was your main task? Would the components and the things that you put together be different?

 

HONES:  We'd have a smaller patch panel.

 

WEAVER:  Yeah, we'd just have a smaller patch bay and a smaller physical room. Everything on there, I feel, is essential.

HONES:  I was just listening to Jon's description, and it's true, a lot of that stuff gets used for postproduction.  Pretty much most of what we have in that control room is a lot of video DAs and audio DAs to pass signals, and they're being used for video preservation.

 

QUESTION:  I'm interested in knowing what people can do on a smaller scale that will still be effective.

 

WEAVER:  Well, I guess it depends on what format you want to transfer to, because if you're not going to transfer to Digital BetaCam, you don't need the box that changes an analog signal into something digital. It really depends on what formats you're going to go to. I would still highly recommend a patch bay, timebase correctors, and the scopes are essential.

 

HONES:  For preservation, we need three TBCs, where normally you'd need one.

 

SELSLEY:   A lot of play decks have an internal TBC. If somebody brings in a BetaCam, Beta SP tape to you or to your facility, your deck will most likely have a timebase corrector in it.

 

WEAVER:  But that only works on the output of the deck, not the input.

 

HONES:  The other real value of this sort of setup and this big control room is that we run one signal; it could go to six decks, if you have six decks to record to. And so it's one pass, and you have your VHS copy, your Beta SP, or whatever you're transferring to.

 

WEAVER:  So you might not need as big a DA, distribution amplifier.

 

HONES:  You won't have to run it as many times, so in that way, there becomes a lot of efficiency in that size a system.

 

QUESTION:  Are you planning to add non-compressed digital video as a recording stage?

 

WEAVER:  Well, Avid's not really non-compressed.

 

SELSLEY:  Even putting it through a timebase corrector does digitally alter the image, so you are digitally altering the original analog image to a digital type of image.

 

WEAVER:  We can go to an Avid right now. We can go to a Smoke, or an Octane SGI right now.  That's not how someone would walk away with it yet, at this time, but for postproduction we can do that. If you transfer to Beta SP or Digital BetaCam, we can edit in the linear suite, as well.

 

QUESTION:  I'd be surprised if you've got a D-1 machine, which would be the digital uncompressed, really the best quality.

 

WEAVER:  We're not really looking at that right now.

 

SELSLEY:   It's time and it's space.  Our relationship with people that come in with their collections-- it really is a long relationship. People will come in and it will be a year or two, three, five years. "What do I have? What do I do with it? Does it need transfer? What do I transfer it to?"  Uncompressed digital tape format is very, very expensive for us, and to say, "Ok, now by the way, we've got to get a hundred dollars for just for the tape stock on this one tape." Like our Digital BetaCam decks, we have them because we use them for postproduction. Our cost is fifty to seventy dollars just for the tape, and when somebody has a hundred tapes. I mean, we are nonprofit, but we're not free.

 

HONES:  It's pretty expensive, even Beta SP stock.

 

WEAVER:  Yeah, it's thirty-eight dollars, about, for a one hour tape. It's still a cost.

 

STEINA VASULKA:  I am very sympathetic with everything you're doing, and I've tried the same thing. I have also several timebase correctors and CV tapes and AV tapes, and I've found a shortcut for me. But then I'm lucky because I lived in New York State for ten years, then I moved to Santa Fe. I'm realizing from the discussion here now, I moved into the baking oven, so my tapes are in a good shape. First I clean them. This is, again, something we haven't talked about here much--stock. The CV tapes almost don't need any cleaning, because there is no black coated Sony. It didn't exist then, they hadn't started manufacturing it, and so all those tapes are in a better shape. I just use a tape recorder to go back and forth. Then I take them just directly and play them into a DvCam ó no timebase correctors, nothing. You look at your scope and you can't believe it--it just looks so bad. It's just wobbling this way, it's wobbling that wayó your picture, as well as your signaló as you see it. What comes out of the DvCam has added burst, color burst to everything. You don't have to worry about black and white additional information. It is, for me, an incredible shortcut. And it works. I don't think it would work for the worst case scenario that they get, but I find that we are going into such an over-engineering in this discussion of the worst scenario tapes. Some tapes are in a very good shape. They have been sitting in baking ovens, in boxes. You take them out, you do a little cleaning, and you just transfer them straight to digital. And I'm very happy with the result. I find there is no deterioration, because first of all, reel to reel wasn't such a high definition to begin with, so it is never really going down. So relax a little bit, some of you. It isn't all that horrible.

 

SELSLEY:  I'd like to add that we at BAVC do sort of anticipate worst case scenarios, so I think that's already built into our process. There are many things that we anticipate, like different formats to transfer to and what formats come in the door. We're always trying to work with people for that. But with individual collectors and collections, you may have a pile of tapes that were recorded on the same deck, maybe over a short period of time, and stored in the same way. You're going to have a much different scenario than what we deal with. I guess you can simplify the process. We would discuss with you folks what you are trying to do, and where you want to be in ten or thirty years. What do you want to do with your material, if you're setting up a facility to remaster your tapes?

 

WEAVER:  One collection versus setting up another preservation remastering center, where you can have tapes from all over being sent to you.

 

HONES:  I know, having dealt with a lot of insurance salesmen, how for health insurance and they start telling you how terrible it is be without life insurance. They go down the list and they paint these horrible pictures. I think what Jon is saying is right. Really, where we're coming from is we've always tried to anticipate whatever may be coming down. But in no way do we want to suggest that it's scary or horrifying. Jon also said, and we all agree, that we have a wonderful time not only working with the tapes and seeing what comes out, but also working with the clients. It can be a really wonderful experience.

 

WEAVER:  After a tape is cleaned, that tape is mounted onto a playback machine, and we transfer the video image to the format of the client's choice. I'm going explain the process that we use at BAVC to transfer the tapes. When we're mastering a videotape or making dubs, it is important to route the video signal through a device called the time base corrector. The time base corrector stabilizes the video image going through it by replacing the synced signal of the tape with a cleaner house reference signal. Most modern machines have built in time base correctors, but the half-inch open reel machine and three-quarter inch machine do not. This makes having an external TBC a necessity. At BAVC, we have three external stand-alone TBCs. Because TBCs can sometimes add unwanted artifacts to an image, we use the TBC that provides the cleanest transfer. A TBC will also usually include a processing amplifier, or proc amp, which allows the user to adjust the video signals going through it. We can adjust the video level or the brightness; the setup or the black level; chroma, how much color's in an image; and hue, what color makes up the image.

Because the video signal can be altered in so many ways, we want to make sure that the video system is just stabilizing the signal and not actually altering it. We also want to make sure that the signal we are creating is within standard specifications for a video signal, so videotape machines will be able to properly play the signal back and display it. Some equipment is less tolerant to signals that fall above a hundred IRE and below 7.5 IRE on a vectorscope. Video travels as an electronic signal, and the components of this signal can be measured with special oscilloscopes called the waveform monitor and the vectorscope.

It's important to note that the scopes do not alter the image in any way, or alter the signal in any way. They just monitor the signal. If you move the knobs on the scopes the image is not affected. Only the TBC alters the image on demand. The video goes from 7.5 to one 100 IRE, which stands for Institute of Radio Engineers, and it corresponds to millivolts. What we see on the scope is every single line of video that makes up the image.  Darker areas are out on your 7.5 IRE, and the brighter areas are near a 100 IRE. One field of the video frame is on the left, the other is on the right. In the center is the horizontal blanking information; that's the area of the video signal that holds the synchronizing pulses, which tells an electron gun when to stop drawing one line of video and to go back and begin drawing the next. On the waveform, you can see color burst, depending on the way the waveform monitor is set up.

The vectorscope only describes the color information. The phase, or angle of the signal, tells us what color something is.  The amplitude, or how far from the center the signal reaches, tells us how much color there is.

What we see on the normal test pattern are the pluge bars. When you raise it, there are three bars on the color bar pattern. You use the setup on the TBC to adjust it, so that the middle bar falls at 7.5 IRE. Then on your TBC, when you're adjusting your video level or your brightness, you use the white bar at the bottom of the screen, and you use the video level knob to set that. To set the hue and saturation, we use the vectorscope, that's set up to easily read the colorbar test pattern. Each bar of color corresponds to a box on the scope. The scopes are labeled: yellow, cyan, green, magenta. We adjust our chrominance, giving us how much color, so that the little dots line up in the correct box. Then, as far as hue, we use our phase knob to adjust it so the colors align properly.

So now we know that our TBC is set properly, we go ahead and look at the video signal. We play the tape in various places for a few minutes and monitor it, both in monitors and scopes, to ensure that the video signal is within the limits that machines can tolerate without losing detail in the shadow or highlights area. When you have detail under 7.5 IRE, you lose that detail. So when we do a transfer, when we watch the tape, we make sure that we don't have dark areas below 7.5 IRE ó otherwise, they'll be gone and won't be in your remastered tape. The same thing with the brightness levels--when we have brightness over 100, we're losing detail in the highlight areas of the image. So we have to bring the levels down to make sure that it stays below 100 IRE. Occasionally with moving video, you get peaks above 100 and below 7.5 IRE. That's ok. The occasional peaks, while they're not ok for broadcast, most modern equipment will tolerate it. If you have black that's too far, the black can interfere with that synchronizing signal, which tells the electron beam when to start drawing on your monitor. What will happen is you'll get an image disturbance or an error, because it can't read the sync. The other thing is if you have white levels over 100 IRE, in a broadcast situation, it can interfere with the audio levels. And some machines are unable to accept such a high level, and you'll lose the detail that you once had. So at BAVC, we don't sit and adjust the TBC levels as the transfer goes. We simply look at the tape and pick one best light, basically best TBC setting, to do the whole transfer. That way, the integrity of the original scene to scene relationship remains intact. If you have something that's going bright, dark, bright, dark, you can't really sit there and manually adjust, because once you see it, it's too late. So rather than risking altering the original image, we go ahead and just use one setting.

 

SELSLEY:  We make a note of it as part of the documentation.

 

WEAVER:  While the tape is being transferred, a preservation technician sits with the deck the entire time, within arms reach of the deck, and monitors the entire transfer process. It's a labor-intensive, time consuming process, because it's not like the technician can just put the tape on there and walk away; just in case it's still sticking, or in case something happens, like we have a power outage. You don't want anything bad to happen to your tape. So while the technician is sitting there, they're using this form that we call the preservation dub watch form. (Note: This form is posted on the Experimental Television Center's Video History Site, in the Preservation area. See Reel to Real.) The form has a little column where you can jot down a time code number. And then you would jot down if you notice any drastic changes in the video signal. It's unrealistic for a technician to be able to note every dropout or every flaw, but the technician will write down if there's a drastic audio or video change, or if there's excessive dropout, or if there's tape damage. So the new transfers are then spot-checked in at least three spots to make sure that we did a proper transfer. After that, we label the tape and send it to billing and that's about it.

 

QUESTION:  Do you do any kind of documentation during the cleaning aspect of it also? We didn't seem to talk about that.

 

WEAVER:  We do, and on the form there is also a space to say how many passes we had to run it through.

 

QUESTION:  Do you get feedback from your clients on the dub watch form? Do you send the tape back to your client with the dub watch form?

 

WEAVER:  I know we send it when it's requested.

 

SELSLEY:   We take the notes that Jon makes on it and put it into a template and send it off if it's requested. But it's always kept on record, so that if a clientÖ

 

QUESTION:  Would you have an example of a time when the documentation form was useful for questions for a client?

 

WEAVER:  Yeah, it's very useful. Because if a client doesn't understand why their transfer went the way it did, we can go back and refer to it and refresh our memories. Not all of our clients understand dropout and skew and sync problems, so it's helpful for us to be able to communicate better with clients.

 

SELSLEY:  The dub watch form does several things. If audio or video levels go way up or way down during a transfer, it really allows the client in post to correct it. The last thing that we want to hear is that our equipment is screwy. Basically, we want to assure ourselves, and also assure the client, that we've done everything that we can to get the best possible image off the tape as it exists--picking the right deck to play the tape, and picking the right time base corrector. Still, we will have tapes, like edited pieces, that just have problems. Or if the tape has a lot of dropout. It's really a note for the client. Then also, if the tape has problems, we can always go back at the end. When the tape's recorded, maybe halfway through the tape it looks like the head's clogged, but our heads are fine-- that's a very, very important note. At the end of the transfer I'll immediately put a test tape on. If the test tape plays fine, then that's a very important notation. Then we can say that yes, without a doubt, that problem is on the tape. We can also go to the same spot on the master and put it on a different deck. That's really what the documentation process is all about, did we get the best possible image? We want to give you information that's helpful, not only if you want to edit, but also, in twenty, thirty, forty, a hundred years down the roadó my name goes on the tape, and I don't want somebody cursing it! A hundred years from now, "This guy Selsley, what was he thinking here?" We want to assure, in every way that we can, that we've done everything that we could, and that's really what the dub watch is all about.

 

HONES:  A good early anecdote that led to the dub watch form, and also really was a great client interaction, was I was working with the Minnesota Historical Society. We sent back a tape, a new copy to them, and they said, "Well, what's this going on?" When you looked at the tape, there was this moiré effect, essentially. I'm looking at it like this, saying, "Well, what is that?" As we're standing there, this one guy who worked for them said, "This is a tape that was shot off a TV." You know, that was an example of an artifact that we had to sort through, and it actually helped sorting through it with the client, as well.

 

WEAVER:  As far as the labeling goes, the other thing we do when tapes come in ó because we don't have much room here ó we look at the tape and we'll assign it a number, like "one of twenty, two of twenty, three of twenty," just to make sure we don't lose any tapes. We make an Excel spread sheet, and we'll note what the label is, the label information on the reel and the label information on the outside of the case, and then any other notes, like, "Case was ripped," or "The reel was damaged." Those notes are mainly for us, just to make sure that we don't misplace cases or do anything horrible like that.

 

SELSLEY:  Regarding the preservation process, I have to stress that if a collection comes in ó if it's one tape, if it's twenty tapes, if it's a hundred tapes ó we handle one tape at a time.  That's through the entire process of cleaning and transferring. This is because as tapes come in, there are just so many times the case doesn't match what's on the reel. Or what it says is on the case and on the reel, is not what is on the reel. So we document as much information as we can, just to make sure that we have the same tape and the same case.  Part of the documentation is also, if it's totally offó like, it says this is show A and this is piece B, but it's something entirely different, I'll say, "Hey, this is absolutely not what it says." Because yet again, I don't want somebody coming back a hundred years from now to whomever replaces us, and says, "Hey, you know, these clowns at BAVC lost our tapes, or got them all mixed up." That's part of the process, but it's important to stress it is one tape at a time through the entire cleaning and transferring.

 

WEAVER:  What I wanted to do was stress the importance of a processing amplifier, a TBC, and a scope when you do the transfer, because if you do have detail under 7.5 or above 100, some systems just clip that information right off. If you don't have that information when you do your original remaster, it's gone forever--unless you go back to the half-inch open reel.

 

QUESTION:  On your preservation dubs, the remastered tapes, do you routinely, or on a standard basis, do you put colorbars and tone? And what is it that you do?

 

WEAVER:  Yes. We set it up how we set up every other postproduction tape. We have time code starting at 58 ó 58:00:00. It's generally nondropframe. From 58 to 58:30, you have black. 58:30 to 59:30 you have SMPTE bars. And you have to be careful with bars, too, because there are 75% bars, 100% bars, and SMPTE. SMPTE's the best, because you have the pluge, so it helps a lot. Those go from 58:30 to 59:30. And then from 59:30 to 01:00:00:00, hour one, you have black again. Sometimes a client requests information slates. And if that's the case, we leave six to eight seconds, depending on if we have to put one slate or two, or how much information it is, at the head. Then we assemble edit the transfer. All the tapes are prepped prior to the transfer.

 

HONES:  Just a real quick thing about colorbars with pluge, the SMPTE bars. What that is most useful for is adjusting color monitors. Speaking for myself, I would tend to trust waveforms and vectorscopes before I'd ever trust color monitors. You can set up color monitors so they can be relatively useful, and the way to do that is with this pluge ó what Heather's calling SMPTE bars.  Essentially, it has a black that's darker than official video black, which is 7.5 IRE so you can adjust the monitor and see SMPTE black. You can see the black that's just a little hotter than SMPTE.

 

WEAVER:  You can see the 11.5 IRE pluge.  The 7.5 is the one right at black, but then there's one at 3.5 IRE. The 3.5 and 7.5 will just look like its own little box, and then you'll just see this little rectangle of the 11.5 IRE.  When I'm in the online suite working with clients, color's very importantÖ it's so the way an artist intended something to look can be carried through when it's projected somewhere else.

 

HONES:  And because we didn't set up the projector using SMPTE barsóit was a little darker than we than we would prefer it.

 

WEAVER:  No, we did not. It was much darker.

 

QUESTION:  And your audio tones?

 

WEAVER:  At the one kilohertz sin wave.

 

QUESTION:  Is that during bars?... Thirty seconds?

 

WEAVER:  No, from 58:30 to 59:30, so one minute.

SELSLEY:  With the bars.

 

WEAVER:  With bars. It's bars and tone; it usually goes together.

 

QUESTION:  Do you do channel one and channel two separately, or do you do them together?

 

WEAVER:  We generally do them together on the half-inch open reel and three-quarter transfers, because that's helpful when you want to mix the audio after the fact and it's stereo. But usually, that's not an issue with those.

 

QUESTION:  I understand what you're talking about, and it's certainly appropriate for 90% of what you're talking about. But if it's an experimental work, where the limits have been pushed all over the place, how do you handle that and keep the intent of that intact?

 

WEAVER:  Well, one thing we do is we look at the tape coming directly off the half-inch open reel machine. It goes up to a patch bay, so we can patch straight out of the half-inch open reel into our monitor. We can also look at the output of our TBC into a monitor. So not only do we have scopes, but we can match our eyes, we can use our eyes to help that. But if you have something that's really pushing those limits, it's not going to play back on a monitor. It's going to upset the sync. Or you just lose everything that's there. Modern equipment is not set up to be able to handle stuff like that. So if it's going above 100 IRE, us bringing it down really doesn't affect the overall intent.

 

SELSLEY:  Some of you might be aware of the amount of video art that was going on, when it became affordable, with the Portapac in the late 1960s--when suddenly, people that didn't have access to video suddenly had access. The first thing you would do is just take the camera and shoot it into the monitor and start doing weird things; it's just the early sort of graphics that people were doing. We get tapes like that from time to time. So I think your question's more like how would we handle that? We see what's coming off the deck, we see what's coming through the TBC, we refer back to our test tapes to verify that our equipment's in good working order, and then we just make sure that the audio and video are within the acceptable levels.   William Wegman, before he  struck it with the gray dog, he used to do experimental things, like with noise. Those are sort of particularly difficult to handle. For instance, he would be in a room such as this, and take a bookcase, knock it down, pick it up, knock it down, and have this reverberating room noise. So how do you handle that? And how do you handle when he's taking a broom and sort of sweeping the microphone around the room? Then all the various feedback that people were experimenting with in video. It's an interesting question, but  I guess my point is we trust our equipment, and make no judgment on the content of the tape. Once again, making sure that our equipment ó our time base correctors, and our play decks, and our monitors, and waveform/vectorscope ó are all calibrated properly. Then we also refer to the test tapes, and trust the waveform to tell us where the levels are.

 

COMMENT:  I guess what I was getting at is that you also have to do some detective work sometimes. Often it's the producer or whoever, the curator who's bringing that in, or even the person who created the tape has that kind of chain of understanding.

 

QUESTION:  How often do you have artists bringing in tapes?

 

SELSLEY:  Occasionally. An interesting one was a few months ago, where we actually transferred a few tapes. An artist sent a modest amount of tapes just to see: Ok, I'm going to send you five tapes of this large collection. He received them back and said, "You know what? I remember them being a little sharper." It's sort of is interesting, "Ok, sirÖ We've been doing it for thirty yearsÖ" I mean, you know? "What do you remember?"

 

WEAVER:  The other thing that's really difficult with that is with every monitor. If I gave everybody a VHS tape to take home, you'd all have a very different experience of what something looks like, unless everyone sets to bars and tone every day--which I doubt.

 

COMMENT:  We want to just kind of recap. Again, our mission here is to come out of this with some very concrete things that we could do, or need to be done, in terms of this work. I was taking notes, and others probably have notes about some of the things that were mentioned, in terms of possible work. I have: Testing of baking, as a method of preparing tapes; Testing of the failure of a tape ó when does a tape fail on the cleaning system? Creation of a microclimate with a Desiccant, and possibly documenting points in the tape path through some kind of photographic process; Getting information out of Heather and Jon's heads; Replacing motors on VTRs; Loading half-inch open reels into cassettes; modifying the RTI; and clarifying or exploring the relationship between postproduction facilities and preservation facilities.  Are there other things generated out of this discussion that people think we need to look forward ó specifically around the cleaning and remastering section?

 

CAROLE LAZIO: I wanted to repeat Sarah's observation that we should talk about how to engage scientists in doing research in this area.

 

LINDA TADIC:  I don't know if anybody's already mentioned this, but the Image Permanence Institute, which did all the research on vinegar syndrome for acetate degradation, and also developed the acid detection strips, they're beginning work now on something for video, for magnetic media, from what I understand. Or they're creating a device like an acid detection strip that will be able to detect when hydrolysis is starting to affect binder in video that would be great if they can develop it. It's a multi-year project that they're just beginning to work on right nowÖ So you can test so if you have, you know, a huge room of videotapes, you don't have to pull it out to test if it's starting to deteriorate.

EXPERIMENTAL TELEVISION CENTER

Looking Back/Looking Forward: A Symposium on Electronic Media Preservation

May 31 ñ June 1, 2002

Issues in Physical Preservation     1