Fall 2007, Week 6

With the U-Matic deck malfunctioning again last week I had some time to rethink my project plan. I realized late last week that I was trying to do too much. I need to scale back my own efforts in a way that allows me to get my hands on reformatting creating metadata, cataloging, and designing an interface. I also need to set up a system that allows others to easily pick up the bulk of reformatting, and maybe some of the metadata.

This was what I was thinking early in the week. On Wednesday, however, I had a 3 hour meeting with Bob Burns, Chief Engineer for the Cinema & Comparative Literature department. Bob had been involved in repairing our U-Matic deck and was curious to learn more about what I was doing. It took some time to figure out why the guy was being so nice to me, but it turns out that he is of like-mind about video preservation. It turns out there are film and video caches abound that need reformatting. Bobs efforts in the past have generated great interest, but not enough to garner any funding. He saw what I was working on and offered to share his experience and technical wizardry.

From our meeting I discovered there were many things I was doing wrong.
1) I had been reformatting to 124 minute DVCam tapes. Sony is able to stuff 124 minutes of tape into the same cartridge used for a 60 minute tape by reducing the backing of the tape by half. This is bad, bad news from a preservation standpoint.
2) Not only was I using the wrong tape, but tape is is just plain vulnerable; it should only be viewed as a transitional reformatting medium. Though I understand the point here, its a little unfair since all formats have vulnerabilities.
3) If I'm reformatting from U-Matic to DVCam I should be capturing the signal to the Final Cut Pro workstation since the DVCam deck is already connected to the computer.... I did realize this its just that having the time to reformat a tape then convert it to DVD was something I was still trying to negotiate.
4) Bob thinks DVcam is unnecessary. He educated me on certain brands of DVD Video discs that under proper conditions should hold their content for approximately 100 years.
Two things about this:

I don't think we could get away with just a DVD reformat of the U-Matic content. This is because for video to fit on a DVD it needs to be compressed to MPEG-2, so any future reformatting efforts would not be from the raw video file.
Second, if we're digitizing the entire tape for DVD production, we already have the digital file, so why not make a digital master file and store it on a server or an external hard drive, or both?

Bob also showed me a little about DVD Studio Pro.

All of this was so great and I am forever indebted to Bob, but now I am as confused as ever about the direction of the ATN digital collection. What I am going to do now is a cost analysis report to determine the most effective way to reformat the ATN collection. I will also do some more in-depth research on video preservation. It seems obvious to me know that this research should have been done earlier, but I am new this is a learning process for me. Its not like I came to school here after having worked at the UCLA Film and Television archives for 5 years.

While that is happening I am going to digitize excerpts from the limited VHS access copies that resulted from the last preservation effort ten years ago. This will allow me to start working on cataloging with metadata and building an interface. Finally I see a way for this to go forward as it needs to. We were just moving too fast to consider all the preservation needs. I'm not sure DLS sees me as having a role in the preservation side of this, but I am actually quite interested in video preservation and this was partly what drew me to this project.

So new plan: From cost analysis and preservation research develop a plan for reformatting; meanwhile build a prototype digital ATN collection from VHS access copies; later, develop catalog of reformatted ATN collection using metadata records. Somewhere in there the whole ATN digital collection will get attention.