A recent addition to our video arsenal is this rare 1976 vintage 1/2″ colour reel to reel machine.

This has needed some work to get it functioning well such as new belts, hardened grease cleaned off the mechanism, etc but is now able to transfer colour recordings made in this format of reel to reel video.

A more detailed article on the repair of this will appear soon as will information about our other reel to reel video machines, the Hitachi / Shibaden EIAJ machine, the Sony CV-2100 skip field VTR and the enormous Ampex VPR-2B 1″ video machine… and we’ve got two of these!

Thanks to Rich at www.labguysworld.com for the JVC service manuals.

The regular service of analogue machines which will involve the mechanical alignment then electrical alignment / calibration is really important if you’re attempting to get optimum transfers and reduce any risk of damaging the potentially fragile tape.

While some of our machines are serviced by others we like to regularly check them and have gradually bought our regular servicing in house. Of course this needs specialised tools, test tapes and gauges, often totally unavailable new now.

On a lucky eBay day I happened to win one of these beauties, an Information Terminals M-300 gauge. This enables you to accurately set the tape guide height and also the head stroke. It is a universal gauge and can be used across many decks.

Nakamichi tape deck owners have had a hard time doing this part of their servicing as the original Nakamichi gauges are very very rare now as is this.

A member of the naktalk mailing list though recently borrowed our gauge and has had it measured and will soon have a small batch CNC machined and made available. These remanufactured gauges will have a few small modifications to improve the design.

Thanks to Willy at www.willyhermansnervices.com many more tape deck transports will be able to be aligned correctly.

An odd, frustrating but very easy to fix problem appeared on a old Windows 2000 Professional system recently.

The check boxes, task menu arrows and window minimise, maximise and close graphics all changed and made some aspects of the OS more difficult than usual to use. The user thought a virus  or spyware had done this but after realising that these parts of the Windows user interface are characters from a TrueType symbol font, Martlett, the solution is trivial. As in print when a font is missing, software substitutes it with another one that usually always looks odd.

The font was installed but corrupt, using a copy of Martlett from another install fixed the problem immediately. MS has something to say about this here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/134861

A beautiful guesthouse and a beautiful site!

In conjuntion with Bremner Design, we’ve created another simple but powerful Wordpress based site that is easy to use and can grow as their business grows. Developed and hosted by us on GNU  / Linux systems.

not far though – just upstairs to a much roomier space with better natural light.

Anyone who’s visited will know how much equipment we have and this move has meant quite alot of downtime as we’re taking the opportunity to re-rack, redesign and re-wire. Anyone with existing orders will have these processed as soon as possible but please bear with us for the next week or so….

Our revised address is:

greatbear analogue and digital media
Unit 26
The Coach House
2 Upper York Street
Bristol, BS2 8QN

0117 985 0500

To contact us by email, please use our contact form here…

We’ve been honored recently to have won a large contract to help in the digital migration of an extensive educational video archive by the transfer from U-matic archive copies to uncompressed video files.

While the archive had been stored in an suitable environment and rarely if at all played, they had not survived well. The Sony branded tapes from the 1970’s and 1980’s all exhibited binder hydrolysis or sticky shed syndrome. We were still able to get good transfers though using our range of umatic machines, particularly the Sony BVU-950P and For-A Time Base Corrector.

greatbear recently helped the Streetscene section of Bristol City Council in an investigation in a serial flytipper.

DVD footage of the flytipper had been taken by a member of the public of flytipping activity but this DVD had other unrelated footage on that needed removal. The DVD was also damaged and needed slow, repeated reading to rip the MPEG stream successfully.

Using MPEGstreamclip it was then straightforward to trim the stream, resave and create a new DVD with just the necessary footage.

See the BBC news article with the video, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/8029183.stm

www.rockblastingservices.com

Rock Blasting Services ,a new site for an African based Blasting, Road cutting and Drilling company. This site is hosted by us and uses the Wordpress Content Management System, bringing an appropriate combination of simplicity and flexibility to the project.

www.mowbraywoodwards.co.uk

We’ve recently been happy to be involved, with Mobray Woodwards Solicitors,  in the audio transfer of important evidence in a  local Crown Court case.

Even given the poor quality or the recordings, made on the slowest tape speed of 1.2 cm/s we were able to make transfers to CD which were clear and understandable with CD track markings for easy access to specific sections of the audio.

Microcassettes, until recently, were used regularly for voice recording in small, portable dictaphone type of machines. Their fidelity is not high but when used for voice it is usually acceptable.

Greatbear are able to transfer all formats and speed of microcassette in addition to 1/2 speed standard cassettes that were common for voice recording of interviews and meetings in the police service, inquests, etc.

For more information on high quality audio tape transfer and restoration please visit our transfer pages.

Over the last 12 months we’ve seen this side of our business grow and adapt to the range of transfer needs that individuals, businesses and media creation organisations have.

We are able to support a wide range analogue and digital, consumer and professional video formats from the late 1970’s onwards such as: Betamax, VHS, SVHS, VHS-C, Video 2000, 8mm, Hi8, uMatic, Betacam, miniDV, DVCAM, etc.

We offer straight video transfer to DVD and a higher quality transfer service to DV or  uncompressed AVI which can then be supplied on hard drive, edited, encoded to a very high quality DVD or supplied on digital tape.

We pride ourself on our positive, friendly service and are happy to give advice over the phone or by email. When you call us you won’t be stuck in a voicemail system or told we’re an internet company so don’t like speaking on the phone!

Feel free to contact us by phone or email.