Get a hi-fi Panasonic because they're the most reliable, the picture quality is good, and they yank the tape only half as hard as normal (motors change RPM gradually). Panasonic used to make 70% of the world's VCRs, including RCA (they later switched to Hitachi), GE, and Magnavox, but now Funai does, and that's why the average VCR is now worse.
Don't assume an S-VHS machine will always give a superior picture, at least not with regular tape, and at EP speed S-VHS on my JVC 4600 (not their best S-VHS) looks no better than VHS EP on my Panasonic.
I agree that DVR's are superior for short-term storage/retrieval, editing, and master control in a broadcast studio. What about archival storage? Properly stored, magnetic tape is good for decades. Polyester film should be stable for at least a century. I doubt that any hard drive will last that long. Though the digital format ensures that you can copy (almost) without degradation, hard drives would have to be copied (and recopied, and recopied, and ...) every few years. What is the next-generation archive storage medium for DVR's? Optical disk? Or will tape continue to be used, but just as a backup/restore medium, not for real-time recording and playback?
As I noted in the part you snipped, we're currently doing archival storage by burning DVDs. That media is currently cheaper than tape, and it certainly takes up less storage space than tape.
Long term archival storage of video of any sort is problematic because the equipment to read the media format you use is likely to be long gone in a few years. For example, we had archives using 2 inch quad tape, U-Matic tape, 1 inch type A tape, 1 inch type C tape, standard Betacam tape, Betacam SP tape, DV-Cam tape, etc. But we no longer have the obsolete quad machines, U-Matics, Betacam, or Betacam SP. We do have one type C 1 inch machine, but it hasn't been turned on in several years. It'll probably find its way to the dumpster too when we need the rack space.
All true. I should clarify that when I used the term "archival," I meant media that could be played back (at least in principle) decades, or even centuries, into the future. Now that we have error detecting/correcting storage schemes, with potential indefinite lifetimes, it seems all the more important to make good physical media choices for their storage. Do we have a good idea yet what is the likely shelf-life of DVD's (either burned or pressed)? As with any future unknown, there seems to be a high amount of variability in the estimates. Failure modes include breakage (obviously), degradation of the plastic, oxidation and/or shrinkage of the metal layer, and scratching. DVD's seem particularly vulnerable to physical damage due to their exposed format and high storage densities. I understand that the NIST recommends that they be stored vertically instead of horizontally, possibly due to concerns about bending/deformation. I am certainly not trying to characterize tape as invulnerable, just that we might be trading off one vulnerability for another.
The situation with tape that you described above looks pretty dismal, with the ironic outcome that the physical media has outlived the machinery to play it back. Do those archives still exist at your station? If so, when you need archival footage, do you send the tapes out to a service bureau to be dubbed into a readable format? Will service bureaus like that be able to maintain suitable equipment for playback and dubbing? What is the long-term solution to be enable future generations to watch things like, for example, the Nixon/Khrushchev "Kitchen Debate?"
--Provided you can find one you want to get your hands on a Panasonic AG-1960 or failing that the newer AG-1980, which lacks a few refinements of the earlier machine. Occasionally these turn up at high-end camera and video stores; expect to pay close to what they fetched new; i.e. around $800 to $1,000, but they're worth it. They're "commercial grade" and parts can still be found...
I suspect that DVDs will last long enough to outlive the machinery used to write and read them. At least that's been the case for all the different media formats we've used so far.
No. We tossed them when we tossed the machines that could play them. We did transfer anything we thought worth saving to the newer media, but who knows if we made the right choices.
Unlikely. The only place I know which retained 2 inch quad tape capability shut down that part of their operation recently because it had become prohibitively expensive to get the parts to maintain the machines any longer. I don't doubt the same will happen with the newer media in turn.
The one storage medium with some permanence is 16mm B&W film. There are still a number of houses which maintain flying spot scanners for the purpose of transferring film images to more modern media. It isn't a technology that gets prohibitively expensive to maintain. Film is also *write once*, so there is no incentive to reuse it.
But in general, I think that most "historically significant" material isn't being kept in original form. Archivists are transferring it to newer and newer media, much the way monks copied manuscripts in the Middle Ages.
This is a more attractive option today since there is no generation loss when copying digital media. The other attractive thing about digital media is that each new generation has offered increased information density which makes storing archives *much* less space consuming than the previous generation. This means that throwing out "junk" video periodically isn't quite as great a temptation. So the chance of something which might one day be historically significant being tossed is less than in the past.
Let me give an example. In the past, we'd edit stories from the raw field tapes to edit master tapes. Then we'd reuse the field tapes. Anything we didn't choose to use in that day's story was irretrievably lost. Edit masters were typically kept for 3 years, then reused. So history was continually being erased. We'd make an attempt to copy what we considered "significant" material from the stories to long term archives, but that was very labor intensive, and who's to say we made the right choices.
Today, we input the raw images into a computer system. The final edit is just a list of time codes called an edit decision list. When ready to air, the computer assembles the story on the fly from the raw images. There is no edit master. Weekly, we dump the EDLs *and* the raw images in the computer to DVD. So now we throw *nothing* away.
Every bit of raw footage we've shot since we started using this system is still available for retrieval. This is only possible because the cost and volume of archival storage is manageble thanks to the high storage densities available today.
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