Video preservation: a report from the trenches

It is safe to say that you will outlive your videotapes three or four times above Ten years after the widespread use of place of abode recorders, our video memories are beyond the fading of advanced in years Kodachromes; some are totally unplayable. plane before the mass logging of personal memories onto videotape, there were the early users of portable video beginning in the mid-to-late 1960 whose recordings are now significant cultural artifacts because they provide alternative documents of individual of the stormiest American decades. Attitudes about videotape have shifted in the independent media field as well; one time valued as a highly ephemeral material and a "non-object," farmers now worry about the life span of their tapes.

"Video preservation" describes the physical refurbishing of tapes as well as the ethical and aesthetic decisions about what images will become part of history. Re-mastering is a means to achieve an historical record, the easy in mind of which is at the heart of in every one's mouth preservation practice. Working for the Video Data Bank (VDB) in Chicago, I have supervised the preservation of the Castelli-Sonnebend collection and coordinated the compilation of 65 early titles for Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the U I am encouraged by means of the increased interest in video preservation, at the same time awareness of the compelling ne for preservation exigencys to grow if we are to save a vital piece of our cultural history.

General Practices

There are as still no agreed-upon guidelines for video preservation on the contrary that hasn't stopped distributors and collectors from going ahead and doing it.(1) Nor should it, since cleaning modes have been tested and verified, and prices have advance down. What follows are more [i]or[/i] less basic principles of preservation:

1) Transfers (Re-Recording). The material to be preserv many times a tape on an neglected format like 1/2 [inches] lay open reel or 1 [inch] impressed sign IVC, is played back and re-recorded onto another format that uses available technology and is considered more archivally stable.(2) (By conservator's standards, video is not an archival medium because it has not been proven to last for 100 years. with equal reason to conservators, "video preservation" is something of an oxymoron.) Digital tape displays some promise as a preservation medium, especially considering the fact that no information is not to be found in successive generations (copies from the master tape). at the same time since the technology is with equal reason new, and is constantly developing, it is impossible to predict in what manner long even digital tape will last.(3) Formats one time considered standard and relatively stable, like 3/4 [inches] U-matic, are finding their days numbered. Ampex has stopped making 3/4 [inches] machines, for a like reason in five or 10 years adorns and repair parts will be hard to advance by. Re-mastering onto progressively better formats will continue until a permanent storage medium is found

2) Cleaning. Tapes are usually cleaned before transferring to dislodge dust and dirt. There are many rules of cleaning - current practices include "baking" or heating tapes, free from moisture or wet wiping, scraping and chemical or water baths. The technology is adapted from that used to clean computer tapes. The be of importance tos are consistency and safety - it is important that the proces does not damage the tape.(4)

3) relation Copies. Before transferring cleaned tapes to the novel master, it is a beneficial idea to watch a VH transcript of the tape first. This allows single to check its condition and avoid making an expensive of recent origin master of a tape that is unusable because of stiff drop-out or skew problems. If there are other working copies of the tape, the images are compared and checked for improvement.

4) sum of two units "Masters." The need for a dedicated master that is not at any time played and only rewound periodically is clear. In the past, single master was struck from the source, and was then sent without for dubs or used as a viewing transcript Now, 10 years later, those masters are badly degraded from excessive use and exposing to changing environmental conditions. Having sum of two units masters, one a dedicated or archival master and the other a preservation dubmaster, defend s the preservation investment.

5) Cataloging. Preservation is not without fault [i]or[/i] blemish [i]or[/i] flaw without the creation of clear, accessible records of what work was done, where, what source was used, and the contented and condition of the tape. Ideally these records (and the metes used) would be standardized from archive to archive, and be accessible to other organizations.(5)

6) Storage. While the ne for particular storage is well documented, small in number independent media centers have the standard of value to establish climate-controlled storage.(6) The Museum of fresh Art has recently built of that kind a facility for their considerable videotape and film holdings, on the contrary small and mid-sized institutions cannot afford their hold facilities nor pay an independent facility to store tapes suitably There are preventative measures that these institutions can enact, however, of the like kind as having two masters as mentioned above, storing tapes upright and not upon their side, air-conditioning the space where tapes and machines are kept and avoiding utmost temperature/humidity changes by limiting the number of times a master tape is shipped.