As well as analogue tape, at Great Bear we also migrate digital tape to digital files. Digital media has become synonymous with the everyday consumption of information in the 21st century. Yet it may come as a surprise for people to encounter digital tape when we are so comfortable with the seemingly formless circulation of digital information on computers, at the cinema, on televisions, smartphones, tablets and other forms of mobile media. It is important to remember that digital information has a long history, and it doesn’t need to be binary or electronic – abacuses, Morse code and Braille are all examples of digital systems.

Digital Betacam tapes were launched in 1993 and superseded both Betacam and Betacam SP. Betacam remains the main acquisition and delivery format for broadcasting because there is very little compression on the tape. It is a very reliable format because it has a tried and tested mature transport mechanism.

While Digital Betacam is a current broadcast format, technology will inevitably move on – there is often a 10 year lifespan for broadcast media, as the parent company (SONY in this case) will cease to support the playing machines through selling spare parts.

We were sent some Digital Betacam tapes by Uli Meyer Animation Studios who are based in London. Uli Meyer make 3 and 2 D commercials, long and short films and TV commercials. 5-10 years ago the company would have had Digital Betacam machines, but as technology develops it becomes harder to justify keeping machines that can take up a lot of physical space.

Workflow in broadcasting is also becoming increasingly ‘tape less’, making digital tape formats surplus to requirements. Another issue facing the Digital Betacam is that it records information in Standard Definition format. With broadcasters using High Definition only, the need to transfer digital information in line with contemporary technological requirements is imperative for large parts of industry.

We have recently been digitising Betacam SP (‘superior performance’) video recordings, a cassette based component analogue format that is used extensively in the broadcast world. Betacam SP offered fantastic video and audio quality from its introduction in 1986, and a very similar digital cassette,  Digital Betacam, is still used now.

Betacam SP was commonly used throughout the 90s and 00s and was not threatened with obsolescence as many older formats are. However Betacam VTR machines will soon become very hard to find spares for, thus becoming another threatened video tape format. Luckily at Great Bear we have every type of Betacam machine (PAL and NTSC) available, as well as spare parts (such as head drums), so we are able to migrate analogue formats to digital so they can be utilised by current media practitioners.

The tapes that have inspired this post are public domain tapes from the National Archives in the USA. They feature the tension filled politics of the Cold War, including footage of President John F. Kennedy, missile silos, Stalin, B29s taking off, graphics of the Iron Curtain, air raid warnings and people running into shelters. Collectively they give a powerful impression of Cold War international relations from the perspective of the American government.

The tapes were sent to us by renowned investigative journalist Paul Lashmar and were the raw material for his BBC Timewatch programme Baiting the Bear: How the real life Doctor Strangelove brought us close to Armageddon, aired in 1996.

Paul has covered many of the main news stories of the past 30 years related to terrorism, intelligence, organised crime, offshore crime, business fraud and the Cold War. He has written for newspapers such as the Independent on Sunday, the Guardian and the Evening Standard, is a regular TV and radio broadcaster and a lecturer in journalism at Brunel University.

We were recently contacted Frank Whelan of the Comhaltas Regional Resource Centre who wanted us to digitise a recording of the Fleadh Cheoil traditional music festival in Buncranna, Co. Donegal in 1975.

Frank sent us an EIAJ ½ inch video that was recorded on a Sony High Density V-60H video tape for Helican Scan Video Tape Recorder. The tape was suffering from binder hydrolysis (often referred to as sticky shed syndrome), so needed treatment before it could be played. The tape was incubated and cleaned before the digitisation process.

The recording contains fascinating footage of solo and group performers from the biggest traditional Irish musical festival in the world. The first Fleadh Cheoil took place in 1951 and has happened every year since. Comhaltas are currently collecting archive material for every year the festival was held in order to create a document for future generations. The digitised film will go towards an exhibition and will be stored in a research facility focused on Irish traditional music.

This is an excerpt of the film that Frank kindly said we could use on our site.

Yet again bad capacitors have reared their electrolytic fluid! This time in a Gundig Video 2000 video tape player, or V2000.

Pictured above is a X2 mains film cap in the power supply of the video machine, made by Frako. This brand of capacitors are German and used in many Studer audio tape machines too which commonly have similar smoking fun such as the B67 and sometimes the A80.

A nice satisfying repair though – all Frako film and electrolytic capacitors were desoldered and replaced with 105 degrees rated Panasonics. The circuit boards on these type of machines are also well made with thick tracks so there’s little risk of lifting solder pads with this type of repair.

Other than their ageing capacitors and some dry solder joint problems these Grundig machines are excellent although as with many older domestic formats the important proprietory spares like the V2000 upper head drums are very rare new now so keeping these machines running will get harder and more expensive over time.

It’s a good idea to digitise and transfer any video recordings on formats like Video 2000 to file based digital formats or at the very least DVD sooner rather than later.

 We’ve recently had an interesting archive of poorly stored and initially unplayable half inch, EIAJ, black and white video reels dating from the late 1970′s and early 1980′s.

This format was commonly used in education and in industry and was much cheaper than the u-matic and one inch formats.

We usually see Scotch and Sony branded tape stock in this format. The Sony tape, is absolutely unplayable and dangerously so. It becomes ‘sticky’ or suffers from binder hydrolysis as Ampex audio tape commonly does. The tape will squeal loudly on any fixed guides and often stop moving around the head drum often damaging the head tips.

This tape can be restored and recovered but must be dehydrated at a very stable and constant low temperature. We’ve found this tape takes much longer than audio tape in this process and it’s also necessary to address any tape pack slip too. Custom winding machines are essential here as winding this tape on the vintage machines necessary for playback is too aggressive.

The image to the right is a tape we received and has an uneven tape pack and a small amount of mould growth too.

After dehydrating, winding and cleaning the tape and and tape pack looks more like this:

So how do you do it?

Contact us, of course! No seriously, how to transfer video to dvd or any other digital format is a very simple concept but the reality can be pretty complex. As with much mature technology, the domestic video formats and machines were often made pretty straightforward to use and hid much of the complexity of analogue video from us.

The simplest methods are to use the few machines ready made for the transfer purpose but these were only made for the most common video formats. Several manufacturers made VHS to DVD units and these can work well if MPEG2 DVD Video is the only format you require.

The problems come for the less common formats and when the tapes themselves start exhibiting physical problems.

Times are changing though and even the most common domestic formats like VHS will soon become harder to work with. While it’s still possible to buy older video machines that may work and your old video machine at home or in the attic may still work this situation is changing fairly quickly.

Very few manufacturers carry a full range of spares for their older machines anymore and often what stock they have, once sold is never remade. Even in the professional and broadcast markets companies like Sony only guarantee spares support for equipment up to 10 years from manufacture.

What this all means is that to support a range of legacy, analogue video formats as we do, constant sourcing of parts, parts machines, obsolete service manuals and older specialist knowledge is vital. this isn’t always easy or cheap and highlights one of the key issues in digitising video tape.

One of our audio and video archive customers has a large collection of AVCHD video files that are stored in 1.9GB ‘chunks’ as xxxxx.MTS files. All these files are of 60 minute and longer duration and must be joined, deinterlaced, re encoded to a suitable size and bitrate then uploaded for online access.

This is quite a task in computer time and file handling. These small domestic cameras produce good HD movies for a low cost but the compression to achieve this is very high and does not give you a file that is easily edited. The .MTS files are MPEG transport stream containers for H264 encoded video.

There are some proprietary solutions for MacOS X and Windows that will repackage the .MTS files into .MOV Quicktime containers that can be accessed by MacOS X or re-encoded to a less compressed format for editing with Final Cut Pro or Premiere. We didn’t need this though, just a reliable and  quick open source workflow.

1. The first and most important issue is to rejoin the camera split files.
   These cameras use FAT32 file systems which cannot handle individual files larger than 2GB so they split the .MTS video file into chunks. As each chunk in a continuous sequence references the other chunks these must be joined in the correct order. This is easily achieved with the cat command.
2. The rejoined .MTS files can now be reencoded to a more manageable size using open source software such as Handbrake. We also needed to deinterlace our footage as it was shot interlaced and it would be accessed on progressive displays. This will increase the encoding time but without it any movement will look odd with visible artifacts.
3. Finding the ‘sweet spot’ for encoding can be time consuming but in this case was important as projected text needed to be legible but the file sizes kept manageable for reasonable upload times!

A documentary we transferred and created DVD access copies for its director recently. He only had a VHS copy of the 8mm original unfortunately but it’s still a great piece of history about St Pauls, the St Pauls Carnival and Bristol.

If anyone can recognise themselves or anyone else, please contact the director, Colin Thomas by email, ctbr...@blueyonder.co.uk

2 u-matic video tapes were discovered of a Black Roots live performance in Bristol in the 1980′s. We were able to restore, digitise and make the umatic transfer of this recording as a high quality, uncompressed Quicktime file then encode and author a DVD for future release by Bristol Archive Records.

Some information supplied by the label:

Black Roots were Bristol’s premier Reggae band throughout the eighties and having gone their separate ways in the nineties they reformed last year and will be rekindling the magic with an intimate hometown gig at the Fleece on Friday September 9th, the show coincides with the release of “Black Roots – The Reggae Singles Anthology”, released on Bristol Archive Records in collaboration with Nubian Records, this release showcases all of the band’s singles released during their first decade and as an extra bonus the CD issue comes coupled with a DVD of the band’s 1986 video release “Celebration” recorded at the long gone Studio nightclub in Bristol. This show will be something special and likely sell out so book your tickets early and don’t miss out.

www.thefleece.co.uk

We were very excited recently when Chris Bradfield from Soundscommercial uncovered a previously unseen batch of EIAJ half inch reel to reel video tapes. In the process of looking for 1976 footage for their event, Sprit of 76, we uncovered many other gems. One of these goals was the famous hat-trick scored by Kevin Mabbutt against Manchester United at Old Trafford in 1978. Mabbutt is one of only two players in Football League history even to have done this and this footage was never recorded anywhere else!

Unfortunately this large batch of valuable recordings had been stored in damp, unheated conditions and had suffered. The tape had deteriorated in several ways.

• Mould growth was evident on some tapes
• The oldest tapes from the early 1970′s were shedding oxide severely and had little lubrication left in the binder.
• Binder hydrolysis, often called sticky shed was evident on other tapes.

Each issue needed a different process to treat the tape. The common assumption that ‘tape baking‘ will restore all unplayable tape is not true. It is just one solution to one of these issues and can cause more problems if used incorrectly. Deteriorated video tape is much less forgiving than audio tape when attempting transfer and must always be handled and processed with extreme care. Crinkled, curled, edge damaged tapes are next to impossible to restore back to their original condition and it’s common that more damage can occur when owners are desperate to transfer footage.

We were able to restore all the tapes to a playable condition and make uncompressed quicktime files of these.

Below is a clip from a later recording. We are not able, unfortunately, to show the Kevin Mabbutt clip yet.