Ultimate VHS transfer project: 35 years of TV news?

[NJRoadfan]

http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/22/5...ars-of-tv-news
http://www.fastcompany.com/3022022/t...ars-of-tv-news

The Internet Archive is going to burn though a few VCRs with this one. Sounds like all the tapes are in EP too. Does anyone here have any idea what their capture setup is like? I talked to Jason Scott about tape transfers a few years ago, but he didn't know the details at the time. I did learn that they basically archive everything you donate to them, even home movies.

[msgohan]

Oh my god.

140,000 tapes = $xxx,000?

"He recalled how Stokes had a habit of watching two televisions at once, and her son says she could pay attention to both at the same time."

cropped-watchmen_world_ozymandias_cctv_television_adrian_veidt_ozymandis_watching_the_desktop_19.jpg

[Jarvis]

Wow, insane. DigitalFAQ, are you up to the job? Haha

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jarvis

Wow, insane. DigitalFAQ, are you up to the job? Haha

Only if they're willing to pay for it.

Too many government agencies look for the lowest price transfer work, and end up with extremely low quality work from the likes of YesVideo. Too many "archivists" are completely unaware of what quality video should look like. They're "paper people" for the most part. They'd scream bloody murder over 1% acid content in paper, but are completely oblivious to serious video flaws like timebase errors or chroma noise -- and the fact that these things can be removed with the right hardware.

This has long been a gripe of mine: People in a position on power, controlling the video quality that others must deal with, are very often unqualified. Whether it's in-house government training videos (VHS transitioned to DVD), or the recent Inspector Gadget box set that was $100 and had nasty deinterlacing on S3 (broadcast masters to DVD), somebody somewhere didn't know their @ss from their elbow, and the mess was approved (QC) and released.

To date, we've never landed a government contract, because they want $5/tape work. I'm sorry, but that's insane. That's quite literally slave wages. Like being a waiter or waitress, but without the tips!

So for example, if you've ever wonder why the video on archive.org looks lousy -- that's why.

The private sector -- studios, individuals -- understands quality, and is willing to pay a fair rate for it.


* Much of this has to do with government's pathetic budgeting for "unimportant" programs (not!), and gutting those budgets instead of raising taxes on the obscenely wealthy and closing tax loopholes on corporations. But I digress...

[NJRoadfan]

Bumping this a decade later because this video popped up in my feed today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwRx7EeCDu4

Here we are 12 years later and they still aren't done digitizing it!

The documentary is available for free on the Internet Archive.

https://archive.org/details/recorder...stokes-project

[Aya_Rei]

Yeah the documentary is a nice watch, but after uploading a couple of her recordings the IA stopped.

I remember that they also grabbed 20k tapes or so from other user, some redditors were calling them out by saying something along the lines of "so you're going to donate the Internet Archive 20 thousand more tapes when they haven't even gotten done less than 5 percent of Marion's collection"

I need to find the post again but I just found out of another time were a user donated thousands of television recordings to the IA, that dubbed the "Oakley Tapes"

Do know the decode guy foaming out the mouth over how it must be preserved their way and their way only, but that didn't happen. I don't think, all I found out was Jason Scott personally blocked decode's promoter so take that for what you will.

Ah hah here it is, people on the VHS sub were calling IA out

Then you have me where I only do TV recordings that interest me, and even then the only content I keep are the commercials and network promos, why would I care to preserve the episode of The X-Files airing on a certain day in 1999? If it's the news or a TV special then sure I understand that.

Edit - here's another thread with some redditors questioning IA's reliability.

Edit #2 So I found out in comparison, the Oakley Tapes are fairing better because that stuff is actually still getting done.

[Haunted_TBC]

What’s even crazier is this:
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/...-tape-archives
UK Police are going to spend an obscene amount of money to digitize all of their analog tape evidence, and one to two decades after the entire VHS ecosystem died? I feel like this could cause a modern PAL deck shortage, at least in that market…

[latreche34]

Given the fact that Stokes' tapes are most likely recorded in the lowest speed possible with consumer VCRs, so quality is not the greatest, I don't think these worth capturing in lossless let alone a lengthy process like vhsdecode, The ideal process would be to record into MPEG-2 directly, a DVD recorder with an internal HDD or a D-VHS player with firewire connected to a firewire MPEG-2 recorder or a computer. And yes, only news and commercials should be archived, It makes no sense to archive movies, TV shows and documentaries unless they are lost or very rare.

[aramkolt]

Agree with latreche34 that MPEG2 would be what I'd go for in this situation for what is likely the best quality to storage space ratio and for these, and those DVD/HDD recorders will also preserve digital closed captions. For specific tapes that are more historically important (not sure who'd determine that), you could always do a second pass with more lossless method.

The other thing would be needing a way to auto-stop recordings when the tapes are finished. It could actually be an extreme timesaver if the tapes are NOT rewound. You could then use lower quality VCRs to rewind them and note the end time of the tapes based on what the tape counter shows. Otherwise, you'd kind of have to fast forward first and note when the tape counter stops ticking up and then rewind them again, marking on the tape the duration and using that as an input on whatever capture program to stop after that many minutes I think.

The other idea I had a while back was to have a way to detect when the tape counter stopped moving for a certain number of seconds - say 10 seconds - and then stop the recording automatically without knowing how long the tape was when you started.

It's not too hard to imagine a bank of say 25 VCRs and 25 HDD/DVD recorders with their hard drives (converted to SSD) mounted on the outside. You'd then just start the tapes once a day and manually press play on the player and record on the recorder to start. If you had a way to auto stop, you could have the "stop" command sent via IR to each player and the VCR once the tape counter stopped going up or based on a pre-programmed amount of time as a countdown timer unique to the tape. You could easily do manual tape swaps of all at once 2-3 times per day. The SSD drives would probably fill up every two days or so and one of the shifts would then just be manually transferring the files off of the SSDs onto a computer. Keeping the files appropriately labeled would definitely be one of the more annoying parts.

After files are transferred off, you'd have to do a quick scrub through the video files to make sure there was no major tracking or playback issues to know if any tapes need to be redone or had issues at the time of capture - this is probably something that AI could be trained to figure out. You'd also think it'd be possible to have a relatively simple program that automatically transfers the files off of the SSDs when they are connected and then wipes the drive and then safely ejects the drive. You could automatically have the closed captioning data extracted (this is actually extremely fast on these DVD/HDD recorders, takes under 20 seconds per hour of video with CCextractor) and associate that with the video file as searchable metadata so you could pull up all videos with mention of specific words.

If you ran 2 rounds of tapes a day with 25 machines and externally mounted SSDs with the automations above as well as a head/tape path cleaning every 2-3 days, you should be able to get through 50 tapes a day. You'd obviously need to have backup machines ready to swap in if any are down for maintenance.

For organization, it'd be kind of a wish list item, but you could probably also come up with a way to add something to the beginning of each capture that identifies the tape itself being captured to automate naming and association with video files to the tapes they originally came from, possibly with the use of barcodes to tell a microcontroller how long the tape is (so it knows when to stop the player and recorder), and the ID number of the tape

Since you're starting all tapes at the same time, you really would only need to interact with the system for maybe one hour twice a day to swap tapes, drives, maintain machines etc.

Assuming all goes well, should be "relatively easy" to get through 1000 tapes per month. Would take a lot of initial setup, but once the system is working, should be fairly automated.

[vwestlife]

Quote:

Originally Posted by aramkolt

If you had a way to auto stop, you could have the "stop" command sent via IR to each player and the VCR once the tape counter stopped going up or based on a pre-programmed amount of time as a countdown timer unique to the tape.

I'm pretty sure VCR/DVD/HDD combo decks automatically stop recording when the VCR either encounters a few minutes of blank tape or the physical end of the tape.

These tapes would be a treasure trove of all the stuff that TV channels tried putting into their VBI over the years: not just closed captioning, but also teletext, XDS, program guides, InterCast (web pages!), etc. -- except that the EP recordings may not be stable enough to decode a lot of it.

Speaking of which, if you use a DVD recorder, that will preserve the original closed captions, including the correct positioning and colors:

Blue Planet VHS with original Closed Captions

-- merged --

FYI, that side-to-side wobble wasn't a fault of the capture -- the film was transferred that way!

Here's a sample of using a Sony DVD recorder to capture a VHS recording of over-the-air TV, with "live" captions preserved:

Analog broadcast TV with original Closed Captions