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Preserving VHS Recordings For Another 20 Years?
efedora asks: "I have about 650 hours of VHS tape going back about 20 years (no, not my porn collection) and the tape is starting to deteriorate. What are the best options for preserving the contents? Quality is important but not critical, so long as it's close to the original. Very low labor cost/time and simple operation. are important. Is there an easy way to do this?"
"Some of the ideas I've had so far are:
- VHS to VHS tape with an analog 'clean up' box between the VHS machines. This would give me the same number of tapes but should last another 20 years. Quality will degrade.
- Burn DVD's direct from VHS tape. I have software that will do this. Expensive and the DVD's won't even hold a VHS tape if it's 2 hours long. Good quality with no degradation.
- Burn VCD's. I don't know of any simple direct-to-VCD software that will do this so there would be a large labor overhead. Good quality with some degradation. Cheap.
- VHS direct to cheap IDE drives. Good quality with no degradation. Relatively cheap. Probably could use the same technique as burn-to-dvd."
Quality is important but not critical, so long as it's close to the original. Very low labor cost/time and simple operation. are important. Is there an easy way to do this?"
No. There is no way that you can copy 650 hours of VHS video simply, inexpensively, and with little labor. It's going to be time-consuming, expensive, and labor-intensive.
That said, making more VHS copies seems like a poor idea as they, too, will degrade and machines to play them will cease to be available long before 20 years is up (remember Beta, 8-track, U-matic, and Elcassette?)
You need to get them into the digital domain and, once there, moving them from format to format is relatively easy.
true, but neither will most storage media.
they can store the player software and codecs on the same hard drives, and when the next leap is required at least they'll be ready.
But, what *will* last 20 years?
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Chances are DivX won't last 20 years.
I can run binaries for the PDP-11 and play old Atari and Commodore 64 games, and old Amiga tunes on XMMS. But all the geeks who have hours and hours of anime and TV shows and porn in DivX are going to be unable to port the DivX codec to whatever system were running in 20 years, and not even be able to run xine under a x86 emulator? I regard that as very unlikely.
Better question is "why 20 years ?" ...
VHS has been great in the absence of options that are easier to move forward.
Now that you're thinking digital, why not think about 2-5 years and, since it's digital you can batch-convert everything to the next best thing.
Cheers
To follow up on what someone earlier said, make SURE you run the output from your VCR through a good professional (or at least semi-pro) external time base corrector.
If you have a high end consumer video deck, it may have a built-in TBC -- disable it. These consumer TBCs work great on good-quality tapes but can actually mess up your image pretty badly on degraded tapes. Use a real, adjustable professional TBC.
Not only will it give you a stable signal for capture (preferably with a pro capture card rather than a consumer one), but it will actually make your videos look better when you view them!
Umm... 8-Track never caught on.
You're kidding, right?
For about 5 years, *everyone* had an 8-track. They were designed originally for cars, but lots of people had them in their houses. Like movies are now available on DVD and VHS, most music was available only on LP (33RPM record) or 8-track.
Smaller, more dubious record companies (K-Tel, Time-Life Records, etc) would advertise in TV commercials as recently as the mid-80s, "Available on LP, cassette or 8-track! Order now!". (In the mid-80s, there were still lots of 8-track equipped cars driving around.)
I can't give you exact statistics, but I can tell you that the machines and cartridges were everywhere. Now? Well, 8-track tapes were endless loop, and they tended to split at the splice. Not to mention the lubricated tape shedding due to poor binding, and the integal pinch rollers jamming or failing... the cartridges almost all got pitched, but the machines can still be found in many thrift shops and old cars.
The format was bad, too... in the middle of a song it would fade out, the machine would click (and knock its heads right out of alignment) and the song would fade back in. Signal to noise ratio, print-through, wow and flutter and frequency response were all atrocious.
This explains why so many older shows look like horse shit compared to the quality they originally aired at.
Uhhh... Well, you can't expect *no* degredation. But a well-stored tape running on a properly aligned Quad or 3/4" machine will perform pretty close to the picture quality limits of NTSC. These things were built for TV stations, not for Joe Sixpack.
I think you might be confusing a few things.
1. Kinescope. This was before the popularization of videotape. A film was exposed from a video feed on a picture tube. A similar technique ("flying spot kinescope") was used to scan film for showing on television. This is the way that I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners were done, for example.
2. Image Orthicon camera tubes. These produced the black halos around performers. They were low-light cameras in their day, making them preferable to the absolutely punitive surface-of-the-sun lighting used to make a good image from an early plumbicon or vidicon camera tube.
3. Poor film. In the early days, there were no re-runs and most stuff was live; the only reason to film or videotape a TV show was for the producers to do a "debriefing" after the performance.
4. Poor TV. Are you remembering stuff you saw on a 1950s TV set and wondering why it looks so crappy on your new TV set? We look back with rose-colored glasses, you know. With my collection of restored 1950s TV sets, I can assure you that even with all new capacitors, good tubes and properly aligned, TV sets were cutting edge technology in the 1950s, and they were pretty bad compared to the picture quality from even a cheap modern TV.
5. Are you comparing video to still photos? Keep in mind that those still photos probably aren't frame grabs; the technology to do that in video certainly didn't exist, and with film mostly being for analysis rather than archive, they were probably using studio photographers for publicity stills.
6. Re-runs of more recent stuff. The original air of a sitcom, for example, will leave the network head-end by satellite and be run from that feed by all affiliates in the time zone. The tape playing will be some uber-quality format; as recently as 10 years ago it was some offshoot of Quad. When stations later syndicate that same episode, it's often provided in the format of the station's choice. Any station with syndication rights can order a broadcast quality copy of Seinfeld on 3/4", Betacam, Quad, hell - even Betamax and SVHS are still covered by some syndicates. Of course, all of these copies are several generations old.
Hollywood is currently in a panic because so many older films are falling apart. Compare how Vertigo looked before and after restoration to see just how much they have degraded.
This is true, but
Fire and Meat. Yummy.