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Videotapes Are Becoming Unwatchable As Archivists Work To Save Them (npr.org)
Most videotapes were recorded in the 1980s and '90s, when video cameras first became widely available to Americans. Most of those VHS cassettes have become unwatchable, and others are quickly dying, too. Research suggests that tapes like this aren't going to live beyond 15 to 20 years. NPR has a story about a group of archivists and preservationists who are increasingly scrambling through racks of tape decks, oscilloscopes, vector scopes and wave-form monitors to ensure a quality transfer from analog to digital. From the article: Here's how magnetic tapes work: Sounds and images are magnetized onto strips of tape, using the same principle as when you rub a piece of metal with a magnet and it retains that magnetism. But when you take the magnet away, the piece of metal slowly loses its magnetism -- and in the same way, the tape slowly loses its magnetic properties. "Once that magnetic field that's been imprinted into that tape has kind of faded too much, you won't be able to recover it back off the tape after a long period of time," says Howard Lukk, director of standards at the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. Lukk estimates there are billions of tapes sitting around. There are plenty of services out there to digitize tapes -- local stores, online services, even public libraries and universities. Some services are free; some cost a lot of money. The thing is, many people don't realize their tapes are degrading. And some who do know -- even members of the XFR Collective (the aforementioned group), like Mary Kidd -- haven't even gotten around to their own tapes. Digitizing also takes a lot of troubleshooting. Each transfer the Collective does requires them to play the entire tape through while they sit there and watch it.
Most movies from the 80's and 90's were unwatchable to begin with.
Just a scare to get you to spend money on something you don't need. I just watched some VHS tapes I recorded (EP Mode) in the summer of 1994, and they're fine, I've got audio cassettes recorded a decade earlier that sound the same as the day I recorded them (and in at least one case, better than the digital download of the same radio show via iTunes).
my sports pet peeve
VHS is unwatchable once you are accustomed to HD
in the garage from '63. Went to play it and nothing. Zero. About died. Probably should have been shot.
Here's how magnetic tapes work: Sounds and images are magnetized onto strips of tape, using the same principle as when you rub a piece of metal with a magnet and it retains that magnetism. But when you take the magnet away, the piece of metal slowly loses its magnetism -- and in the same way, the tape slowly loses its magnetic properties.
Sounds like we just need to put a magnet next to these so they refresh their magnetic fields.
I doubt the world will come to an end if Uncle Bud's videos of the Grand Canyon are lost. The really important work is being done on the Quad and Ampex-C tapes made in the 1950s through 1990s. Add to the EIA-J and Umatic formats, even Beta-SP, and there is an awful lot of important video to digitize.
Wouldn't this be a decent project for a machine learning solution? It sound like a tedious job that requires a comparison between two inputs and correction based on what was observed.
Also to echo some skepticism, I've listened to music reels from the 60s and they don't seem significantly degraded. Is video more fragile?
Be sure to periodically clean the entire tape path, lubricate capstan and roller bearings, and demagnetize your tape heads! It's often forgotten, and very, very important .. especially when moving lots of tapes (especially those of dubious origins) through the machine.
>> Videotapes Are Becoming Unwatchable
I have Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition on VHS. That was nearly unwatchable the first time through after the Lucasizing it got...so nothing lost, right?
Will be lost, in time. Like tears in the rain...
Crappy old VHS tapes are becomming unwatchable (giving us more time to stream 4k content that is actually current).
That's the best news I've heard all day.
Jean-Michel Jarre was a visionary and predicted this problem. That's why one of his early work will never fade. The protection is built-in into the title itself!
#DeleteFacebook
Let it die. We are terrified of letting the archive filter itself out, but really it is ok to let a billion VHS tapes go.
I think one of the real dangers of the digital age is that we are so worried about losing memories, we are afraid to make them.
Painstakingly archiving every detail of life really makes for a shitty life.
I know I sound like a curmudgeon, but there it is.
Oh no, we might lose some or all of "The Police Academy" movies.
Does this mean that Weekend at Bernie's gets to die forever (made in 1989, DVDs came out in 1995)? Oh shit, I've that on DVD!
At least vinyl records from the 70's and prior continue on, my mom has both an original with Rocket Man by Elton John as well as a perfect Tommy by the Who. I got her a record player for Christmas last year and she's been busy cleaning all of her albums.
I'm assuming cassette tapes have the same problem, so some of the 1980's craptastic "we have a keyboard!!!" stuff will rot. Good riddance.
Now where is the CD-destrucinator, for all of the pop in the last 20 years??? If Doofenshmirtz made the inator, it would surely have such a setting (if the reference eludes you, check out Phineas and Ferb, a great cartoon for all ages).
BlameBillCosby.com
So ummm, how many of those tapes are pr0n and that's the real reason no one's brought them in to the library for scanning...
Each transfer the Collective does requires them to play the entire tape through while they sit there and watch it.
While I understand people's reluctance to let things like this go, I have to say: if it is so difficult to find time to watch the tape now, why do you think you're going to want to watch it in the future?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
The primary concern is not old VHS copies of studio movies, the biggest issue is home movies taken during that era - If not converted, the footage is lost
I suppose this means I have to give up on that Ann Coulter/Sarah Palin sex tape floating around here somewhere.
This is a great small start. Much more needs to be done along the lines of Google's original idea of digitizing all books. I spent a lot of time getting all my old hi 8 tapes transferred to disk, and can attest to it not being easy if the tapes are old. The metal particle hi 8 tapes were particularly bad as some of the oxide would slough off during playback and gum up the play head. Sometimes had to clean and retry multiple times just to get 5 min converted. The metal evaporated tapes were much better. I can't imagine how bad some of the older oxide tapes are faring now.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Videotapes are becoming unwatchable as archivists work to save them? We need to stop those archivists from working to save them before more videotapes become unwatchable!
Something like 90% of films from the silent era have been lost. That is a huge chunk of history and art lost to time.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Seems many here don't quite understand the sheer volume of content released on VHS all the way into the 2000s. Not just home videos, but endless amounts of direct to video content, films, etc... Tons of which are not available on any other medium. Some of this got crowd "archived" just due to torrent sites and Youtube, but some VHS content hasn't been digitized to this day may be lost forever if not done soon.
However, the idea of tapes not lasting past 15 to 20 years I think is incorrect. It may depend more on the quality and conditions they were kept but I've had tapes well over 20+ years that played perfectly. There are still tons of old tapes from 80s and 90s you can purchase off Amazon or eBay which all play fine. Tapes in clamshell cases seem to be in the best shape leading me to believe not exposing the tape to the elements is the most important factor.
The high quality transfer of crappy tapes. LOL
Actually yes. I happened to find this video just yesterday and it explains why VHS video signals would be very fragile compared to typical audio recordings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfuARMCyTvg
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
This is why I invested in a deck that can transfer over to disc. Don't even have to babysit it.
Rake fight scene. Maybe I should be glad I didn't have to live through THAT..
I had a flat screen Trinitron. Giant CRT monitor. It was just as sharp as the flat panel LCDs sold these days.
Somewhat counter-intuitively, I've noticed that my OLDEST (mid/late-80s) VHS tapes are in MUCH better shape than the tapes I made between 1995 and 2004. My theory: in the 80s, a VCR & its tapes were expensive, well-made precision hardware. By the late 90s, they were just cheap shit -- recorders AND tapes. I think my early-80s tapes weigh as much as 3 or 4 late-90s tapes.
"Here's how magnetic tapes work: Sounds and images are magnetized onto strips of tape, using the same principle as when you rub a piece of metal with a magnet and it retains that magnetism"
Geez, I thought that as the tape moved past an induction coil, tiny fluctuations in the coil induced a magnetic flux in the tape, which was coated in a magnetizable material.
How will I save my copy of Shazaam!?
I stole this Sig
Here's the thing - we don't know what data archeologists, or anthropologists, are going to find interesting or useful in a few hundred years' time. They threw away the kinescope films of the first NFL Superbowl, which is clearly of historical interest. Ditto many of the original Playhouse 90 broadcasts, where many of the initial TV screenwriters, and quite a few big name movie directors, got their start. The DuMont network, one of the original national TV networks, basically lost all of its programming other than a few series that the actors themselves had copies of, The Honeymooners being one of them. I would think recordings of the very first TV broadcasts would be pretty important from an anthropological standpoint, but when Paramount bought them they scrapped DuMont's entire film library to reclaim the silver nitrate.
Think of it this way - imagine how incredible it would be to have film of what life was like in the 1400's. Even if it was just film of one of their plays, or some chamber music. How did people talk? What did they wear? What were they interested in? If they produced a play about ancient Rome, what did THEY think ancient Rome looked like?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
"Wouldn't this be a decent project for a machine learning solution?"
No, because a machine-learning solution would realize that it should just bulk-erase the media more quickly than a human would.
That's what comes of buying/using crap tapes on crap machines and crap storage..
I'm another one with vhs tapes that go back to at least 1980 and they all are ok still,but then I always used pricey high quality tape in pricey machines..
I also have some Philips v2000 tapes and a deck,they are also perfect still.
I have audio cassettes going back to 1971 which are still perfect but the oldest is an old work tape of my mums,so used lots of times for recording interviews that is an original Philips cassette from 1967,the sound quality was bad then,so is still bad now,but the one music track I put on the very end in 1970.still sounds ok..
Good quality media and hardware pays dividends in many ways,you get what you pay for,cheap crap dies..
Han shot first.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
They quit making quality gear at the end of a technology's lifecycle.
It's just economics, and it is inescapable.
This is absolutely true. At my workplace we have a VHS archive of broadcast TV stretching from the 1980s up to 2005 and our archivist will confirm that the newer tapes are of vastly inferior quality. It's not news to us that these tapes "should" be digitised, but the cost of a mass digitisation program is pretty prohibitive. Just sourcing enough VHS players is a problem, then you have digitisation hardware, storage, and all the human costs of manual QA and metadata-generation. Also, how do you balance the costs/benefits of the digital format? Standard wisdom is that only lossless high-bitrate video-codecs are suitable for archives - but then you're talking about expensive hardware _and_ huge storage costs. And you can't really afford to get it wrong because some of the more sketchy tapes are probably in a "play once (max)" state.
Storage is cheap. If you're a business, it's almost irrelevant and nothing compared to a few hours of a skilled work, let alone anyone in senior management. You can archive data off drives onto longer term, and far cheaper tape storage too.
I've had the same issue with all my old floppy disks. All my stuff from the 80's works perfectly, but most stuff post '95 has some kind of problem.
The mechanisms in the later VCRs were much better than in the earlier ones... Just look at the size and weight of earlier VCRs compared to the last ones made - the later ones had much simpler and lighter mechanisms. It also depends on what model of VCR you bought, of course.
What free services are out there that do tape to digital conversion?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Later VCRs were lighter because they substituted plastic for metal, and substituted better DSPs more capable of tolerating slop than older models, which required fairly tight tolerances. The problem is, due to the way VHS geometry works, it's entirely possible to have two VCRs with sloppy alignment & operation that can play THEIR OWN sloppy recordings just fine, but choke on sloppy recordings made by OTHER VCRs. Even back around 1999-2001, people were noticing (and commenting in posts online) that tapes recorded on one VCR tended to play poorly on other people's VCRs, even though older tapes (and most pristine prerecorded tapes) played fine on both.
What archivists REALLY need is a playback device with enough tiny heads to read the tape in linear fashion, with enough oversampling to allow complete capture with a single pass, then post-capture analysis to find the original diagonal tracks and do "digital tracking". This is a huge problem with current archiving methods that depend on semi-manual tracking control... it makes capture *hugely* time and labor intensive. If we could confidently do "one pass now to preserve its current state onto some longterm-stable medium and stop the degeneration clock", with enough redundancy to let future generations restore the recordings they themselves care about, it would be much easier.
Tip: when archiving your own recordings, MAKE SURE the VERTICAL resolution is 480/525 or 540/625(?) -- VHS has shit horizontal resolution, but fairly good vertical resolution. Also, don't skimp on the bitrate or horizontal resolution if you ever want to do restoration on it... noise and blur requires WAY more bits to accurately encode than clean, crisp video. If you have enough room to store more than an hour of captured VHS on a DVD, you're "doing it wrong". Also, NEVER use dual-layer DVD+R/DL... the lower layer will decay & become unreadable LONG before the upper layer. And don't archive to hard drives for long-term cold storage... most of them won't work 20 years from now, and at least half won't work 10 years from now.
I live in hope of a cheap purpose built VHS to digital player / convertor. All I see are shitty old players where you have to connect up your own analogue to digital kit.