Archiving DVC Pro: best method?
 

I work at a TV station that used DVC Pro for everything from ENG to regular programming from 1997 till maybe 2009. In that time, they amassed maybe somewhere around 2500 DVC Pro tapes, give or take a couple hundred. I began wondering what treasures might be lurking on those old tapes (we DID strike gold a couple of decades ago with a story about a certain little leprechaun sighting that went viral!). Still, that's a LOT of tapes!

I've gathered that the best option is to go digital to digital, rather than the usual analog route. I guess my question is whether there are any recommended PCI firewire cards that aren't terribly expensive that can handle at least a good portion of the workload that's coming. I'm using a smaller portable DVC vtr to do the playback; it has 3 firewire ports on the back (only labeled as "DVC Pro"), as well as SVHS in/out, and BNC (one labeled "monitor", 2 others "video in/out" and "sync in"), and an RS 232C port. Dubbing 4-8 tapes a day, I figure I can be done in, oh, 2-4 years! :D

For that many tapes, your current player's heads will be worn, The best way to approach this is get as many players as you possibly can and as many cheap dell or HP laptops from the 90's with firewire and Windows 7 and rip away, One player one computer is not going to cut it.

Yes video head wear is a factor which may
intrude. Are the contents of each tape known? It might be more manageable to first transfer the footage considered of most historical value.

But never test gear with valuable tapes.

With that many tapes, I'm pretty sure he could spare one after being transferred.

We have 2 or 3 of the portable decks and two of the full sized left; I only know for sure that 1 of each works; I haven't tested the others.

The archive tapes are the 64 minute variety, and are filled with clips ranging from 30 second sound bites to 2-3 minute packages. There are anywhere from 30-70 clips on each. Many of the labels have faded completely, and many of the notes that do remain are illegible chicken scratch. Even though the majority of the contents are probably crap, it would be an even greater task to try to weed it out by fast-forwarding manually rather than just dubbing the full tapes.

As for testing, we have a library of Simpsons shows from when they ran in syndication I can use as sacrificial lambs for those "D'oh!" moments. ;)

Well, if there is TV commercials there I would love to have some, At least those tapes you don't have to transfer them, I can send you the digital files.

I don't think there are any commercials on any of the news archive tapes, unless they were part of a news story or something. There might be a few complete newscasts including commercials lurking on old aircheck tapes, but those generally got recorded over every week, and are scattered in the stacks. I'm in the process of uploading any of those I happen to find on my own youtube channel. ;)

I'm a little fuzzy on the particulars, but I believe the library of Simpsons episodes are from when we bought the local broadcast rights. None of the shows have any national ads in them, as they would become dated, and the local ads would be inserted/aired when the programs were replayed later. I'm not really sure why we still have the tapes, to be honest; as far as I know, they've long since been digitized and now sit on a server or harddrive somewhere to be accessed as needed. Maybe somebody wanted them for their personal collection? I'm not even sure what seasons we have on tape, but couldn't be any more recent than 2010 or so.

Interesting, educational. :congrats: