Centerfield

Preservation Friday Band

I got paid. Finally. Aside from that an interesting week. I've got one client who has videotapes dating back to the early 70's. About 13,000 of them. A big problem is that moisture affects the binding and substrate so that when you try to play the tapes the heads get clogged with loose oxide. So we put them in a dry and cool environment, humidity about 20% and 60 degrees F. There are more details(see this pdf file on tape preservation) but that's a hint to all of you out there with videotapes of family and friends. Anyway it turns out that some of tapes that were unplayable even after spending 3 months of drying out were playable at 6 months. Today we played back a nice tape from 1973. Lousy camera work but the tape played back beautifully. As a comparison. my grandfather shot 16mm B/W in the 30's and after it was kept in a sometimes cool but dry closet it still looked good 60 years later when I had telecined and transferred to digibeta.

More on this in the extended entry.

The other odd item is a job listing as noted in WaPo's Gov't Inc. blog

Rock Lives -- even in the Defense Department.
In a contracting notice posted Jan. 10, the DoD said it wants to hire a "Professional Celebrity Rock Music Band" to tour in Kuwait and Afghanistan next month.

Wanna-be guitar heroes take note: the band needs to be able to play southern rock, pop rock, post-grunge and hard rock. It appears that whiny rock is out.

No faking on the rock star part. This military is serious about its fun, and they insist that at least one member of the bank be a recognizable "professional celebrity."

Oh, but don't worry about the war thing. "Protective military equipment, such as kevlar, body armour, eye and ear protection will be provided when the group is travelling on military rotary or fixed wing aircraft," the posting says.

Long live rock-and-roll procurement.

BTW in the above video preservation note that project is pretty expensive. The dubbing system I designed and built cost more than 100K. That doesn't include the tape holding facility with the temperature and humidity control, or the digibeta tape stock that we're recording to, or the salaries of the people doing the work. Not to mention my rare forays to the facility to troubleshoot and upgrade the training of the techs. Now some have opined that I transfer these tapes to hard drive instead, including Jim Wheeler who is the uber expert in the field. Well I could, but my client wants security and I, because I am a trained paranoid editor, insist on it. The nice thing about videotape is that you have record tabs that inhibit recording after they are pressed in. There are no record tabs on disk drives. One virus and irreplaceable material is lost forever. Not good. Also hard drives are be subject to failure. If I get a tape break in an hour program I still end up with 99% of it intact. Not that you're going to break a digibeta tape. Anyway we simultaneously xfer the video to DVD which is enough for the client's current needs regarding viewing and distribution. The masters and the originals are touched as little as possible. Proper storage and they could last for decades.
I consider this a stopgap measure until a more robust storage media comes into being. Something better than granite.