Unseen to 32 years, although there could possibly be other tapes in the vaults at Abbey Road.
This ntsc umatic transfer to uncompressed quicktime files was a damaged tape that at some point in it’s life had been ‘eaten’ by a greedy u-matic machine! The tape shell also had some plastic debris inside that needed removing before it was safe to attempt loading and migration.
We’re very happy to be working with Mike Wright and the Archive for Mathematical Sciences and Philosophy on a large scale and ongoing transfer, restoration and online management programme.
We have several time base correctors and frame synchronisers at our disposal. One recent addition is a new old stock (NOS) CEL Tetra. This is an early 1990′s motion adaptive Standards Converter for PAL, SECAM, NTSC 3.58 and NTSC 4.43 systems. A very flexible unit with composite, Y/C (S-Video), umatic DUB High Band/Low Band and component inputs and outputs.
Out unit still has it’s shipping caps over the BNC sockets and looks unused but after 5 minutes of power a cloud of white smoke billowed out of the cooling fan accompanied by a pungent smell. The Shaffner EMI mains filter had a nasty, sticky brown residue leaky out and all around the back of it. This is the second TBC that I’ve had this happen to. I’d assumed these units get left on for long periods when used in broadcast applications which would hasten their demise. According to their website, the mean time between failures (MTBF) of their recent products is around 2,000,000 hours! Our CEL TBC doesn’t look like it’s done more than 30 minutes so maybe there’s been some dodgy electrolytic fluid in these units just like the motherboard capacitor problems between 2000 and 2003.
We use time base correctors and frame synchronizers all the time in the transfer and digitising of analogue video tape.
One of our more flexible and high quality units had recently developed an annoying and very obvious fault on it’s video outputs. While the unit was working there were faint but distinct horizontal lines on the video. This phenomenon is often called a hum bar and can be caused by ground loops.
In this case we isolated the unit from the rest of our installation and using a separate power point the problem was still there. Looking at the unit itself it is a very deep and heavy 1U case with two 40mm cooling fans at the rear corners. It is quite old too and being designed for continuous studio use is likely to get hot and have been on for very long periods.
The video fault appeared to be AC ripple ‘riding’ on the DC power. It was time to look at the electrolytic capacitors in the power supply.
Although I could have tested each one, all these caps were old and only rated for 3000 hrs at 85 celcius so they all had to go! Here’s a list of them:
The only one hard to find was the large 400v dump one. Most units now are thinner and taller but eBay came to rescue here.
This shotgun approach worked beautifully and the fault had gone. While tracing the exact fault is always the best way, capacitor often get a hard life and will not last indefinitely, especially in switch mode power supplies.
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.
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.
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.