tape blog

Codecs and Wrappers for Digital Video

In the last Greatbear article we quoted sage advice from the International Association of Audiovisual Archivists: ‘Optimal preservation measures are always a compromise between many, often conflicting parameters.’ [1]

While this statement is true in general for many different multi-format.. →

IASA – Resources and Research

There are an astonishing amount of online resources relating to the preservation and re-formatting of magnetic tape collections.

Whether you need help identifying and assessing your collection, getting to grips with the latest video codec saga or trying to uncover esoteric technical information.. →

1″ Type A Video Tape – The Old Grey Whistle Test

Sometimes genuine rarities turn up at the Greatbear studio. Our recent acquisition of four reels of ‘missing, believed wiped’ test recordings of cult BBC TV show The Old Grey Whistle Test is one such example.

It is not only the content of these recordings that are interesting, but their.. →

Digitising small audiovisual collections: making decisions and taking action

Deciding when to digitise your magnetic tape collections can be daunting.

The Presto Centre, an advocacy organisation working to help ‘keep audiovisual content alive,’ have a graphic on their website which asks: ‘how digital are our members?’

They chart the different.. →

Save our Sounds – 2030 and the threat of audiovisual extinction

At the beginning of 2015, the British Library launched the landmark Save Our Sounds project.

The press release explained:
‘The nation’s sound collections are under threat, both from physical degradation and as the means of playing them disappear from production. Archival consensus.. →

1/2″ EIAJ video tape – aesthetic glitches

The screening of Julien Temple’s new film The Clash: New Year’s Day 1977 at New Year put the spotlight on a video format dear to our hearts.

Parts of the film were taken from footage shot on EIAJ 1/2″ video tape while Temple was at film school. EIAJ, whose hey day was.. →

DVCAM transfers, error correction coding & misaligned machines

This article is inspired by a collection of DVCAM tapes sent in by London-based cultural heritage organisation Sweet Patootee. Below we will explore several issues that arise from the transfer of DVCAM tapes, one of the many Digital Video formats that emerged in the mid-1990s. A second article will.. →

Reel-to-reel transfer of Anthony Rye, Selborne’s nature poet

We have recently transferred a number of recordings of the poet, Anthony Rye, reading his work. The tapes were sent by his Grandson Gabriel who was kind enough to tell us a bit more about Anthony’s life and work.

‘Anthony Francis Rye is intimately associated with the Hampshire village.. →

World Day for Audiovisual Heritage – digitisation and digital preservation policy and research

Today, October 27, has been declared World Day for Audiovisual Heritage by UNESCO. We also blogged about it last year.

Since 2005, UNESCO have used the landmark to highlight the importance of audiovisual archives to ‘our common heritage’ which contain ‘the primary records of the 20th.. →

Transferring Digital Audio Tapes (DATs) to digital audio files

This post focuses on the problems that can arise with the transfer of Digital Audio Tapes (DATs).

An immature recording method (digital) on a mature recording format (magnetic tape), the audio digital recording revolution was never going to get it right first time (although DATs were not of.. →

Phyllis Tate’s Nocturn for Four Voices 3″ 1/4 inch reel to reel tape transfer

We have recently transferred a previously unpublished 3” ¼ inch tape recording of British 20th century composer Phyllis Tate’s Nocturn for Four Voices. The tape is a 2-track stereo recording made at 7.5 inches per second (in/s) at the Purcell Room in London’s Southbank Centre in 1975, and was.. →

Obsolete technologies and contemporary sound art

At the recent Supernormal experimental arts and music festival held at Braziers Park, Oxfordshire, a number of artists were using analogue technologies to explore concepts that dovetail nicely with the work we do at Greatbear collecting, servicing and repairing obsolete tape machines.

Hacker.. →

Reports from the ‘bleeding edge’ – The Presto Centre’s AV Digitisation TechWatch Report #02

The Presto Centre’s* AV Digitisation and Digital Preservation TechWatch Report #02, published July 2014, introduces readers to what they describe as the ‘bleeding edge’ of AV Digitisation and Archive technology.

Written in an engaging style, the report is well worth a read… →

Digital preservations, aesthetics and approaches

Digital Preservation 2014, the annual meeting of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance is currently taking place in Washington, DC in the US.

The Library of Congress’s digital preservation blog The Signal.. →

D-1, D-2 & D-3: histories of digital video tape

Videokunstarkivet – Norway’s Digital Video Art Archive

We have recently digitised a U-matic video tape of eclectic Norwegian video art from the 1980s. The tape documents a performance by Kjartan Slettemark, an influential Norwegian/ Swedish artist who died in 2008. The tape is the ‘final mix’ of a video performance entitled Chromakey Identity.. →

New additions in the Greatbear Studio – BBC-adapted Studer Open reel tape machine

We recently acquired a new Studer open reel tape machine to add to our extensive collection of playback equipment.
This Studer is, however, different from the rest, because it originally belonged to BBC Bristol. It therefore bears the hall marks of a machine specifically adapted for broadcast.. →

The difference ten years makes: changes in magnetic tape recording and storage media

Generational change for digital technologies are rapid and disruptive. ‘In the digital context the next generation may only be five to ten years away!’ Tom Gollins from the National Archives reminds us, and this seems like a fairly conservative estimate.

It can feel like the.. →

Digitisation: methodologies, processing and archival practices

We work with a range of customers at Greatbear, digitising anything from personal collections to the content of institutional archives. Because of this, what customers need from a digitisation service can be very different.
A key issue relates to the question of how much we process the digital.. →

Future tape archaeology: speculations on the emulation of analogue environments

At the recent Keeping Tracks symposium held at the British Library, AV scoping analyst Adam Tovell stated that
‘there is consensus internationally that we as archivists have a 10-20 year window of opportunity in which to migrate the content of our physical sound collections to stable digital.. →

Capitalising on the archival market: SONY’s 185 TB tape cartridge

In Trevor Owen’s excellent blog post ‘What Do you Mean by Archive? Genres of Usage for Digital Preservers’, he outlines the different ways ‘archive’ is used to describe data sets and information management practices in contemporary society. While the article shows it.. →

Going ‘tape-less’: AS-11 Digital Production Partnership standards

Is this the end of tape as we know it? Maybe not quite yet, but October 1, 2014, will be a watershed moment in professional media production in the UK: it is the date that file format delivery will finally ‘go tape-less.’

Establishing end-to-end digital production will cut out what.. →

Significant properties – technical challenges for digital preservation

A consistent focus of our blog is the technical and theoretical issues that emerge in the world of digital preservation. For example, we have explored the challenges archivists face when they have to appraise collections in order to select what materials are kept, and what are thrown away. Such complex.. →

Irene Brown’s reel to reel recordings of folk and Gaelic culture

We are currently migrating a collection of tapes made by Irene Brown who, in the late 1960s, was a school teacher living in Inverness. Irene was a member of the Inverness Folk Club and had a strong interest in singing, playing guitar and collecting the musical heritage of folk and Gaelic culture.

The.. →

Mistress or master? Digitising the cultural heritage of women’s movements

The Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) is full of quirky examples of how womyn tried to wrestle culture from the sordid grip of male domination.

Part of this process was reinventing the world in wimmin’s image, word and song; to create and reclaim a lasting herstory in which sisterhood.. →

Seeing tracks: viewing magnetic information as an aid for tape digitisation

We use a Sigma Hi-Chemical MV-95 magnetic viewer in order to aid our digitisation work. By pressing the viewer against the tape we are able to read the magnetic information recorded on it. The reader helps us to visually identify the position of the recorded tracks on the tape, and enables accurate.. →

Digital preservation – a selection of online resources

Update 2020: We are updating and maintaining this list of useful web links in the Resources section of our website here: Digital and Audiovisual Preservation – Online Resources

If you are new to the world of digital preservation, you may be feeling overwhelmed by the multitude of technical.. →

Climate Change, Tape Mould and Digital Preservation

The summer of 2008 saw a spate of articles in the media focusing on a new threat to magnetic tapes.

The reason: the warm, wet weather was reported as a watershed moment in magnetic tape degradation, with climate change responsible for the march of mould consuming archival memories, from personal.. →

Digitising Stereo Master Hi-Fi VHS Audio Recordings

The history of amateur recording is peppered with examples of people who stretched technologies to their creative limit. Whether this comes in the form of hours spent trying things out and learning through doing, endlessly bouncing tracks in order to turn an 8-track recording into a 24-track epic.. →

‘Missing Believed Wiped’: The Search For Lost TV Treasures

Contemporary culture is often presented as drowning in mindless nostalgia, with everything that has ever been recorded circulating in a deluge of digital information.

Whole subcultures have emerged in this memory boom, as digital technologies enable people to come together via a shared passion.. →

2″ Quad Video Tape Transfers – new service offered

We are pleased to announce that we are now able to support the transfer of 2″ Quadruplex Video Tape (PAL, SECAM & NTSC) to digital formats.

2” Quad was a popular broadcast analogue video tape format whose halcyon period ran from the late 1950s to the 1970s. The first quad video.. →

Software Across Borders? The European Archival Records and Knowledge Preservation (E-Ark) Project

The latest big news from the digital preservation world is that the European Archival Records and Knowledge Preservation – (E-Ark), a three year, multinational research project, has received a £6M award from the European Commission ‘to create a revolutionary method of archiving data, addressing.. →

Digitising Low Band U-matic Video Tapes – The resurgence of Philip Jap, pop icon

Philip Jap came from a time when mime, dance, slapped bass lines, mascara and techno-dystopic anthems were staple parts of a successful popular music career. Cut from the same new wave goth cloth as Gary Numan, Human League and John Foxx, sporting mesmeric dance moves like a male Kate Bush, Jap lit.. →

EIAJ ½ inch Video Tape Transfers – Working with Community Groups to Develop Digitisation Projects

We understand that when organisations decide to digitise magnetic tape collections the whole process can take significant amounts of time. From initial condition appraisals, to selecting which items to digitise, many questions, as well as technical and cultural factors, have to be taken into account.. →

reel to reel audio tape restoration and digitising of Manchester Oi! band State Victims

Often the tapes we receive to digitise are ‘forgotten’ recordings. Buried under a pile of stuff in a dark, cold room, their owners think they are lost forever. Then, one day, a reel of the mysterious tape emerges from the shadows generating feelings of excitement and anticipation. What.. →

Open Source Solutions for Digital Preservation

In a technological world that is rapidly changing how can digital information remain accessible?

One answer to this question lies in the use of open source technologies. As a digital preservation strategy it makes little sense to use codecs owned by Mac or Windows to save data in the long term… →

Early digital tape recordings on PCM/ U-matic and Betamax video tape

We are now used to living in a born-digital environment, but the transition from analogue to digital technologies did not happen overnight. In the late 1970s, early digital audio recordings were made possible by a hybrid analogue/digital system. It was composed by the humble transport and recording.. →

Digital Optical Technology System – ‘A non-magnetic, 100 year, green solution for data storage.’

‘A non-magnetic, 100 year, green solution for data storage.’
This is the stuff of digital information managers’ dreams. No more worrying about active data management, file obsolescence or that escalating energy bill.

Imagine how simple life would be if there was a way.. →

Digital Records of the First World War

Across the world, 2014-2018 will be remembered for its commitment to remembrance. The events being remembered are, of course, those related to the First World War.

What is most intriguing about the centenary of the First World War is that it is already an occasion for growing reflection on.. →

Digital Preservation – Establishing Standards and Challenges for 2014

2014 will no doubt present a year of new challenges for those involved in digital preservation. A key issue remains the sustainability of digitisation practices within a world yet to establish firm standards and guidelines. Creating lasting procedures capable of working across varied and international.. →

End of year thank yous to our customers

What a year it has been in the life of Greatbear Analogue and Digital Media. As always the material customers have sent us to digitise has been fascinating and diverse, both in terms of the recordings themselves and the technical challenges presented in the transfer process. At the end of a busy.. →

Paul Roche recordings & preservation challenges with acetate reel-to-reel magnetic tape

We were recently sent a very interesting collection of recordings of the late poet, novelist and acclaimed translator Paul Roche. During his colourful and creative life Roche published two novels, O Pale Gallellean and Vessel of Dishonour, and several poetry collections, and brushed shoulders with.. →

Voice Letter – Analogue Reel-to-Reel Tape Transfer

What can the packaging of a tape object tell you?

Even before a tape is played back prior to transfer the packaging can tell you a lot about how and where it has been stored, and what it was used for.

Whether the boxes include sparse notation or are covered in stamps from countries across.. →

Big Data, Long Term Digital Information Management Strategies & the Future of (Cartridge) Tape

What is the most effective way to store and manage digital data in the long term? This is a question we have given considerable attention to on this blog. We have covered issues such as analogue obsolescence, digital sustainability and digital preservation policies. It seems that as a question it.. →

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