High resolution audio and video digital tape conversions can use large amounts of computer storage. 8 bit uncompressed Standard Definition (SD) PAL video runs at 70 GB per hour and 24 bit 96 kHz audio files at 2 GB per hour.

As a result of this many of our analogue to digital tape transfers require the use of external storage, usually USB 2.0 portable hard drives, to supply the copied digital transfers back to the customer. Some drives supplied by customers have not been of great quality and not designed to be sent about in the post. One such drive we had recently, a Sony Vaio branded 2.5″ USB drive wouldn’t copy certain directories of important files with the Mac OS Finder or the Windows Explorer. While most of the drive copied this certain folder always resulted in a crashed computer!

Thanks to GNU/Linux we have a bit more power and information at our disposal about hard drives and IDE or USB interfaces. It’s always best practice to copy as much information from the drive or mirror it before attempting any other types of data recovery or file system repair. Using the standard dd

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.

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

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.

I recently ordered and replaced the capstan and counter belt on this cassette deck. These parts are easily available from Fred Marrs who sells a huge range of correctly sized replacement belts through his eBay shop. He has even gone to the lengths of remanufacturing the Nakamichi OC 8096 capstan belt to the correct specs.

This Teac machine is a really nice 3 head cassette deck, built like a tank, and very similar if not identical to the original Tascam 122. I don’t use this deck for normal cassette transfers as I feel my Nakamichi decks generally sound better but this is one of the few decks that can record and playback at double the normal speed so it’s reserved for these transfers and as a backup.

The transport is quick and easy to remove and the belt was easy once the capstan had been removed – this was also greased and oiled a little too.

Teac C-3x transport removed

Teac C-3x capstan motor with new belt

Everything went well until  I tested it with an old tape – It would play for a few seconds then the take up reel would stop letting tape get pulled around the pinch wheel, well and truly chewed!  It looked like the rubber drive wheel that the reel motor works against has perished at one point or slips. I also noticed that the little rubber sleeves that act as brakes on the reels have perished too. I’m going to have to get it all apart again to fix this – see below for more soon..

Oh and here’s a the service manual for free, so you don’t have to get fleeced by an eBay seller who’s downloaded a load of free manuals.

Teac C-3x Service Manual

Recently a customer sent me a VHS tape for transfer which looked like this:

I didn’t even attempt to play it in my machines as I didn’t want to be cleaning the transport all day but I did find an interesting U.S. based company that specialises in restoration of very damaged video tape.

http://www.videointerchange.com/video_recovery.htm

I have no direct experience of this company but from their site they seem very knowledgeable and can transfer some very, very obscure formats from the past.