Video Preservation: A Report from the Trenches (1996)

It is safe to say that you will outlive your videotapes three or four times over. Ten years after the widespread use of home recorders, our memories are beyond the fading of old Kodachromes; some are totally unplayable. Even before the mass logging of personal memories onto videotape, there were the early users of portable beginning in the mid-to-late 1960s, whose recordings are now significant cultural artifacts because they provide alternative documents of one of the stormiest American decades. Attitudes about videotape have shifted in the independent media field as well; once valued as a highly ephemeral material and a non-object, producers now worry about the life span of their tapes. describes the physical refurbishing of tapes as well as the ethical and aesthetic decisions about what images will become part of history. Re-mastering is a means to achieve an historical record, the content of which is at the heart of current preservation practice. Working for the Video Data Bank (VDB) in Chicago, I have supervised the preservation of the Castelli-Sonnebend collection and coordinated the compilation of 65 early titles for Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the U.S. I am encouraged by the increased interest in preservation, yet awareness of the compelling need for preservation needs to grow if we are to save a vital piece of our cultural history. General Practices There are as yet no agreed-upon guidelines for preservation but that hasn't stopped distributors and collectors from going ahead and doing it.(1) Nor should it, since cleaning methods have been tested and verified, and prices have come down. What follows are some basic principles of preservation: 1) Transfers (Re-Recording). The material to be preserved, often a tape on an obsolete format like 1/2 [inches] open reel or 1 [inch] type IVC, is played back and re-recorded onto another format that uses available technology and is considered more archivally stable.(2) (By conservator's standards, is not an archival medium because it has not been proven to last for 100 years. So, to conservators, video is something of an oxymoron.) Digital tape shows some promise as a preservation medium, especially considering the fact that no information is lost in successive generations (copies from the master tape). Yet, since the technology is so new, and is constantly developing, it is impossible to predict how long even digital tape will last.(3) Formats once considered standard and relatively stable, like 3/4 [inches] U-matic, are finding their days numbered. Ampex has stopped making 3/4 [inches] machines, so in five or 10 years decks and repair parts will be hard to come by. Re-mastering onto progressively better formats will continue until a permanent storage medium is found. 2) Cleaning. Tapes are usually cleaned before transferring to remove dust and dirt. There are many methods of cleaning - current practices include baking or heating tapes, dry or wet wiping, scraping and chemical or water baths. The technology is adapted from that used to clean computer tapes. The concerns are consistency and safety - it is important that the process does not damage the tape.(4) 3) Reference Copies. Before transferring cleaned tapes to the new master, it is a good idea to watch a VHS copy of the tape first. This allows one to check its condition and avoid making an expensive new master of a tape that is unusable because of severe drop-out or skew problems. If there are other working copies of the tape, the images are compared and checked for improvement. 4) Two Masters. The need for a dedicated master that is never played and only rewound periodically is clear. In the past, one master was struck from the source, and was then sent out for dubs or used as a viewing copy. Now, 10 years later, those masters are badly degraded from excessive use and exposure to changing environmental conditions. …