{"id":5881,"title":"Media Formats Update Panel","kind":"book","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/node/5881","version":"b2f5b6663cf038b9881ed2969f3e05ac337b379da490e2408037f7243a8c0324","modified":"2026-09-15T19:02:09.0513366+00:00","credits":[],"authorKeys":[],"subjects":[],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication type","value":"Web Article","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Media Formats Update Panel.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/node/5881.","publication":"Media Formats Update Panel.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5881.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Looking Back/Looking Forward: A Symposium on Electronic Media Preservation","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/looking-backlooking-forward","relationship":"record body link","contentType":null}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":33366},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":613}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Looking Back/Looking Forward: A Symposium on Electronic Media Preservation: contents Presenters: Mona Jimenez and Steina Vasulka Mona Jimenes and Steina Vaulkka Steina and Mona JIMINEZ: When I first was starting preparing for this, I thought of doing a definitive format discussion: what the sizes are, their composite, component, and all the technical details. I turned myself around, because that is now something that drives me a little crazy about media formats and I can only take it for so long. If you go to AMIA, the Association of Moving Image Archivists conference or events like that, there are a lot of projections about what will happen and the details about various formats. What I wanted to do, actually, is come up with five areas I think might be useful to look at when considering media formats, and then look at the various media formats and apply this to see what happens. I will mainly talk about analog to analog, and analog to digital. The digital to digital is another day; I will mention it, but I feel that is a big can of worms, and what we are really talking about is older work that is not being moved forward. That is my main emphasis. I won\u2019t have much to say about audio, but hopefully somebody in the audience will. Tape is storage medium for the signal; that is what it is, whether it\u2019s a digital signal coming out of a tape, or whether it\u2019s the analog signal. As far as I\u2019m concerned, that is the bottom line. I came up with these five things to consider, and they are the things that I have come upon. Though I do not claim to be an archivist or a conservator in the traditional sense, I have listened to a lot of them so this is informed by folks who have brought these things to my attention. In terms of a format, traditionally one would think of a format - an archival format - as lasting for over a hundred years, but obviously that is not where we are at. It is a process of reformatting; we don\u2019t know how long, maybe every ten, fifteen, or twenty years. The first thing I will mention is tape durability: in terms of the material the tape is made out of, the size of the tape and the amount of information that can fit on the tape. That is the way I would think of tape durability, size of the material. For instance, format like Beta SP or a larger format is usually made out of a better, more durable material, a thicker substrate. You have your base, you have some kind of binder, and you have the coating--the oxide-- that the information is stored on. We have not spoken yet about degradation, what happens to tapes. The problem is the binder breaks down and the information falls off, or gets gummed; the binder basically gets \u201Cgummed up\u201D. This is much of the problem. When you have a smaller tape, it is more likely to stretch. It is not made out of the same material. If you remember, the metal evaporate was a real big problem with high-8 tapes. That has to do with the actual corrosion of the binder. So this stuff is one place to look at. I was interested to read recently that they say there\u2019s no binder with mini-DV, and that the information is embedded in the base film. Or rather, the medium that takes the information is embedded in the base film. That is actually a shift. That is the thing about some of these materials; they keep changing, and people who want to get into the study of that material [have trouble] because things are changing and it happens so fast. The second thought I had was of the deck durability or the construction of the deck: the heads, the electronics of the deck, and how all of this stuff holds up. Some people feel that there\u2019s more that can go wrong with the smaller tape paths, that they are basically less stable and there are fewer people who will work on them; that\u2019s a problem with smaller ones. There is obviously a lot of expertise as to which of the decks really hold up well and which require a lot of maintenance. Luke helped me a lot in the last few days, humoring me by talking through all of this stuff. One of the things he was saying was that the digital Beta decks, at least in the beginning of when BAVC had them, required something like a five thousand dollar head change each year. In addition to the cost of the decks, which are anywhere from, used, I guess, in the thirties to fifty thousand dollars, you have an additional huge repair bill. That may have changed as the decks have been out for a while, but it is an issue. COMMENT: It\u2019s gone up, Mona. JIMINEZ: Oh! It\u2019s gone up\u2026 So the issue is which ones are reliable? How can they handle the stuff on the tapes, the orange peel or whatever it is Kim was talking about? How do they handle the dirt they come across? Do tapes get stuck in them? Questions like these. Then the characteristics of the signal, and the ability to carry the signal forward; the archivists and conservators say you want to carry forward the maximum amount of information. Obviously, with some of the digital formats, there are issues around compression and the compression rate: how much information might be \u201Clost\u201D in the transfer, the sampling rate of that particular format. I want to mention the difference between tape and data, because I think there is a lot of confusion. You can\u2019t really just come off a tape and go straight to a hard drive without a conversion process. What you have on a tape is not data that is on a hard drive; there\u2019s a difference. If you come out of a tape deck and it\u2019s converted to data, the data goes out and the other deck reconverts it and then puts it back on the tape. Sometimes there is confusion when we talk about analog to digital stuff; \u201CCan\u2019t we just put everything on hard drives?\u201D We can certainly discuss this, but it doesn\u2019t happen that simply. There are issues concerning standards, when the information comes off the tape and becomes data, and then goes from data back on to the tape, or goes from one digital tape to another digital tape. We can address these details later. That is another thing that people are looking at in terms of getting and moving that signal around. You also have the issues around error rates and the decoding. Yet another thing to look at is whether the signal is component or composite--component being the signal that is separated, the luminance from the chrominance. An SVHS deck or a Beta would be a component. There are some composite formats, three-quarter inch and others like some from the D family; I always have to look at my chart for that, but it\u2019s like D2, D3, D3, and D2. That is another thing to think about: what we want to do, and what we need to do to make it happen? Then there is the deck obsolescence. We don\u2019t have the 8650 anymore, so this relates to is the deck still being made? Is it still being serviced? Are there parts? Are there people that are knowledgeable that can fix the decks? There is all this stuff going on with Beta SP. Some cameras are going out-- they have stopped producing the cameras and certain decks. What they have said (I don\u2019t know if you can trust it) is that Sony will make service available for seven years after they drop a product. I don\u2019t know about Panasonic or JVC or what is happening with that. Traditionally, we\u2019ve been in this industrial or prosumer line, as opposed to the broadcast line. For instance, if you go outside San Francisco and other places like New York, there aren\u2019t too many media arts centers, libraries, or museums with digital BetaCam. In the media arts community we tend to be working in that industrial and prosumer line, as opposed to the highest quality broadcast. Obviously, these products are different, between what\u2019s available at the industrial and prosumer as opposed to what\u2019s available at the other levels. Broadcasters and large clients really drive the market, but this is nothing new and we\u2019ve known this twenty-five or thirty years. The three major manufacturers are Sony, Panasonic, and JVC. If you get into the newer prosumer gear, then you\u2019re dealing with companies like Canon, but mainly it\u2019s the big ones. We are in this changeover for broadcast, at least in the public television realm, from Beta to digital Beta. I don\u2019t really know what is happening with all these broadcasters; maybe other people do. But there does seem to be a changeover and a commitment to digital Beta, at least for a while. In terms of going from uncompressed to a server, I think only CNN and a couple places have started to think about going uncompressed to a server. It\u2019s really just for them to store information that they\u2019re going to dump back into an Avid and re-edit. It really is not for long term storage but for media use. It\u2019s like a network with the data; not the tape, the data. The data can get pulled back to go into the Avid and be re-edited. So in terms of \u201CCan\u2019t we just put it on a server somewhere?\u201D Again, I imagine broadcasters are moving towards being able to deliver and store digitally, but that\u2019s a totally different mindset from what we are trying to do. One of the positive aspects is backward compatibility and playback. I am aware of the Sony J series, that playbacks Beta, Beta SP, digital Beta, and the newer, compressed format that is around. We have been dealing with obsolescence for a while, and the cost relationship of resources to production. Can we afford to buy a deck? Can we afford to buy the tape? Is it more than two hundred dollars a tape if we go with this certain format? What will it really cost us? Again, in different regions there are different resources available for transfer. I remember being at Visual Studies Workshop, some years ago, and somebody offered me a Beta SP to shoot on, and I was like: \u201CI live in Rochester; I can\u2019t edit on Beta SP; just give me a good three-quarter Portapac or whatever!\u201D It is going to really differ, in terms of the resources that are available. We have talked about this relationship, at least with the media arts centers and individual producers, between production and preservation. This needs more exploration. I\u2019ve always imagined there being more preservation done in media arts centers and I think that it is at media arts centers in addition to our great BAVC. But it has been haphazard so far and I wonder about centers that are focused on production working on preservation or focused on distribution. Steina brought up the fact that using DvCam makes a lot of sense for a person who\u2019s producing and using these tools. This obviously has to be weighed out. What [available tools] do we have? I feel like we need to collaborate a lot more. There are some partners here that are not traditionally [linked] with media arts crowd, which is great; libraries, university media centers, museums, public television, municipal archives, and a whole host of people in the region. I was just at the Grand Rapids Community Media Center, which is going to become part of this municipal archive-- city, county, and the museum. In terms of storage I don\u2019t know, but in terms of duplication, I think it makes a lot of sense. When I was at Visual Studies Workshop in 1990, I first started to pull out those decks again. Just for me. Now it\u2019s 2002, twelve years later, and how many more opportunities are there for me to transfer that tape? If we go this slow, we\u2019re going to be in trouble! I think we have to be realistic about our resources. Now let\u2019s take a look at some of the formats and just sort of think. There\u2019s no one right way to do things, which is great, because heaven forbid! There will be a range of solutions in different places. I included SVHS as an analog format, because some people ask about it. I\u2019ll be answering questions about these, but first let\u2019s just consider what they mean. These (Beta SP and SVHS) are two component, or analog formats. Beta SP may be a stronger, more durable tape stock. There are plenty of decks, I would say, of both out there, probably more SVHS decks than anything because they\u2019re making a million a day or some outrageous number. I think we may have more expertise, in ","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":33366,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}