Welcome

The Alarm

Time has run out for videotape archives. My goal is to offer advice and help facilitate the best decisions for preserving old videotapes. Well, at least those that can still be preserved. To be sure, there are both horror stories and stories of joy. There are archives that have been successfully preserved through professional conservation, digitization, and curation. There are also archives destined for the dumpster. If a videotape archive can be preserved for future generations, my passion is to help facilitate that. Like the song says: "... you don't know what you've got till it's gone." Listen here:  Joni Mitchell - Big Yellow Taxi

I've had many discussions over the years about getting old videotape formats digitized and preserved. Those discussions have now become a prescient warning. It must be done now but it is complicated to decide the best way to make it happen. Should the work be done in-house or should it be outsourced? Should equipment be rented? If it is outsourced, where is the best place to have the work done? How much will it cost? Are there opportunities to amortize the cost through licensing the content through a stock supplier? What level of quality is appropriate?

For some who have chosen a do-it-yourself approach, accidents have happened where tapes have become unplayable. For others, a supplier was a hassle to deal with, mistakes were made, and the results were substandard. Those are obstacles I'd like to help prevent with this blog and meaningful consultation where appropriate. A videotape archive that's been stored for decades has value and sometimes that value is not apparent. I hope that I can help with the decision-making regarding what can and should be done. Perhaps the best place to start is an introduction.

About Mr. Green 
(he's called Greg, Gregory, Al, or Almont  and yes there is a story)

Gregory Almont Green is the founder and owner of the Laserdisc Recording Center and DVD Recording Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he transferred thousands of videotapes to laserdisc and DVD from nearly every video format.* He was an early pioneer offering NTSC and PAL video digitization to MJPEG, DV, HDV, MPEG1, MPEG2, TruMotion-S, and AVC or H.264 (MPEG4) digital formats. His experience includes using, tweaking, and becoming an expert at encoding analog and digital videotape formats to digital files and has provided consulting services to Corning, BASF, Raytheon, Smith+Nephew, The Smithsonian, Viacom, The National Parks Service and an extensive list of others.

The National Parks Service at Harper's Ferry commented "...the video off the DVD looks better than the original tape." He was one of the first to experiment with transgressed motion artifacts that are the bane of NTSC interlaced video. Spending hours undoing random inverse telecine video clip edits his passion was and is about preserving and making video look the best that it can. The consummate inventor, he developed a computer-based videotape dropout correction solution for those times when a TBC just didn't "fix" it. He experimented with Faroudja color notch filtering and all sorts of methods to streamline the improvement of color and dynamic range.

* from 1990 - 2004

The Blog

Videotapes are often poorly converted to digital files using substandard compression encoding methods. Quantization errors, temporal smoothing, and color artifacts should not be acceptable. New technology is available and should be used to create the best digital files possible. There is more to the story than just getting videotapes digitized. It's about achieving the highest quality digitization possible whether by doing it in-house or by hiring a highly recommended professional. I would prefer to get a call early in the process to provide the information that avoids unnecessary mistakes. At the very least, I hope this blog helps to make a difference by providing enough information so that people can ask the right questions.

Next, I'll be writing about why videotape archives need to immediately be digitized and how that process doesn't have to be as expensive as you think. It could even be a new source of revenue and free storage space for a new purpose.

-G.