Recently our production department has asked us for pictures of a specific event, we have discovered that we have the same event photographed in two of our collections. What's particularly interesting with this one is that in each of the pictures you can see the photographer of the other picture.

Both of these pictures were scanned from 35mm negatives by The Living Archive.

This is another example of our many collections coming together and completing the gaps and angles missing in the other. In many cases we have several photo, audio and video collections all of the same event.

The films just brought in, waiting to be opened.

This week, we've received and addition to our archive collection, 4 - 100 Foot 16mm B&W films, recorded in the early to mid 1950's by a (then) young student who was trying out some interesting and fancy technology he got a hold of, and after many years of sitting and collecting dust, he has agreed to let us take care and preserve these precious films.

What's fascinating about 16mm is that they can be transferred to HD, think about it, a video taken around sixty years ago, being viewed in HD.

When I saw this, I paused for a second - Wow!As with all our materials, the first thing we do when receiving something new, we inspect its physical condition, then we assign and tag to it a serial number which corresponds to a record in our database in which all its information -technical, as well as the recorded content- is entered.

In this video we present the great challenge we face with preserving our video collection:

Our video collection is comprised of many small collections mostly recorded by non-professionals. 

There are several aspects to the challenge 

1. All the formats are obsolete, which means finding the right people and equipment for this task is not easy.

2. Since we have many formats we need to spend time on every one researching and finding the right methods and people to preserve them.

3. Even the tapes that were professionally recorded were never done with long-term preservation in mind, so all our tapes are badly deteriorated.

4. Most of our recordings were made by non-professionals who cherished these moments and wanted to capture them but didn't have the resources (including knowledge) to make good quality recordings and therefore besides for having a shaky camera A. they used amateur formats like 8mm and VHS(horrible for long-term). B. they would use different techniques to save money like recording with SLP speeds.

Our Video collection includes:

8mm Film

Super-8 Film

16mm Film

1" Reels

1/2" open reel (EIAJ)

3/4" Umatic

Betacam 

VHS

SVHS

Digital Beta

Mini DV

HDV (on Mini DV)

DVCam

DVCPRO

Digital Files

Years recorded: 1940's - Present

This comparison demonstrates the reward of the hard work searching for the best methods to preserve our videos at optimum quality.

The Goldstein audio collection consists of over a thousand hours of audio, recorded and collected by Aharon Goldstein.  The collection ranges from the early 1950's until the mid ‘70's, all on quarter inch magnetic tape, spooled onto reels. 

A quarter inch tape being played on a Sony deck at the preservation department of The Living Archive

This collection also includes recordings made by Aharon's father Yossi, a man with a passion for recording audio, as well as video, and pioneering the concept of recording the Lubavitcher Rebbe. He managed to obtain recording equipment in the ‘50's, when it was still considered to be a break-through technology and very far-fetched to the average person.  Yossi's passion for recording was passed along to all his sons, who have continued the family legacy.

This collection consists of recordings done in a very unique method, therefore requiring a really skilled specialist with customized and modified equipment to digitize them.

The uniquness of these recordings are in the amount of tracks and the speed at which they were recorded: 4 tracks instead of the common 2, and at speeds of 15/16 and 1-7/8 IPS (inches per second) instead of the standard 3-3/4 or 7-1/2 IPS, this enabled to record over eight times the recording time which a standard recording on the same tape would allow.

Now that these 150 audio reels have been digitized and backed up, another chunk of history has been preserved. 

An LTO-5 tape used for long-term backup at The Living Archive, it has no delicate internal mechanical parts, therefore greatly reducing failing risks as compared to its counterpart the Hard Drive

The digitization of this collection is part of a greater project, the Preservation Project. The mission of this project is to digitize and preserve all media of the Living Archive.

The preservation department at the East New York Ave office.The Living Archive spends countless time, and exhausting effort in researching technology, new and old alike, ensuring that the whole collection of media is digitized and stored at the highest standards possible.

The Living Archive has an in-house quality control system, documenting and critically inspecting each piece of digitizide material that is returned from our various vendors, analyzing it from various technical perspectives, ensuring the integrity of its digitization.

As part of the quality-control process, Motti Hazan is doing an in-depth analysis on newly digitized audio, determining its accuracy.

For more details regarding the content of this collection refer to this post

http://thelivingarchiveblog.squarespace.com/journal/2010/8/24/massive-tape-collection-donated-to-jem.html

The ScanScience Fluid-Scanning Kit For 35 MM Film With Nikon Scanners

ScanScience's signature product the "LUMINA"

Problems With Black and White Negatives

One of our main issues - which fluid-scanning addresses - is a particular one we encounter with B&W film: For colored film, Digital ICE technology does wonders with getting rid of the dust and scratches, it is a completely different story with B&W - which isn’t supported by Digital ICE technology. Because of this all of our scanned B&W negatives had undesirable results. Even worse, the Nikon scanners  we use - and for that matter most high-end dedicated film scanners - use LED lighting which exaggerate the dust and scratches even more.

The Nikon Coolscan 4000, the scanner we will be using for this project

A Great Discovery

When we discovered that fluid scanning is made available for CCD (digital) scanners and can considerably, if not completely, remove the dust and scratches from the scans, we got excited and thought this might be the solution we were looking for.

 The Nikon adaptor we needed to obtain for making the scanner compatible with the kit

Additional Benefits

Besides for Fluid-Scanning possibly being the answer to our main issue there are additional benefits it provides, for the same reason that many seem to consider Digital-ICE technology as being an amateur approach because

1. It degrades sharpness of the image as compared to scanning without it

2. It fills-in the scratches and dust areas with non-original data

Therefore with fluid-scanningb even for our colored-films can be tremendously beneficia, plus it is claimed to have some other advantages such as Broadening the depth of field – Sharper image, greater contrast, a wider dynamic range, greater color saturation and smoothens the grain.

With all these promising expectations we intend on putting this to the test and hopefully by next week we will present our findings here.

This video presents the first batch leaving our facilities for digitization including the preliminary stage to our 3-stage video preservation process, plus a glimpse of our visit to the digitization firm in Cranberry Pennsylvania where we got to see our first batch being digitized.

Video Preservation Stages

Preliminary stage - Entry of tape info into project database.

Stage 1 - Digitization

Stage 2 - Quality Control

Stage 3 - Storage and Backup 

Preliminary stage

Entering the required technical info of the tape into the project’s database and confirming that a corresponding label is tagged to it.

Info entered-

Tape ID

Tape format

Tape length

Recorded speed

Externaly visible tape condition

With this screen we enter basic media info into the project's database

Once that’s done we safely package all the tapes into totes and notify the digitizing firm which tapes (ID’s and formats) are included in the shipment and they should expect, once they receive the shipment they confirm that the shipment indeed matches the description we’ve sent them and all the tapes were received, now they can go on to starting the digitization process.

In future posts we will present the 3 stages in detail

Two white cardboard boxes each almost the size of a tissue box filled with Medium-format negatives, WOW! was the response of everyone around Medium-Format? We haven’t seen much of those around here.

 Opening the box of Medium-Format negatives on it's arrivalThe photo's quality and condition being inspected by an archivist

The negatives relocated to archival-grade polypropylene sleeves

We all knew what this meant, if it’s close to four times the size of a 35-MM film photo then it must have 4 times the amount of detail.

 The Benefit of having these professionally-taken photos does not only express itself in megapixels but also in the quality of the shot.

when we release a video, from our various collections we will choose the recording with the best image quality and the recording with the best audio quality and combine them together to creat the best possible quality video of that event. In this case the video we chose was of 1/2 inch open reel recorded by a Professional crew hired by Rabbi Krinsky in honor of the event and the audio of 1/4 inch audio tape reel recorded by Rabbi Aharon Goldstein, after many hours spent on the preservations side restoring both sources and many hours spent by the editors syncing them together the results are magnificant.

 This was transfered from a 1/2 " open reel tape into an 8 bit uncompressed file.   

A classic example of our hard work paying off: lots of research travel, and testing on our part, and hours of sweat piled on top of decades of experience on the part of David Crosthwait and his team at DC Video.
 
G-d willing, we’ll all be enjoying the results for years to come.

As soon as the transfer arrives some members of our team (and a couple of visitors) view the results