A side gig with my college!
This month after the Brockton Rox season ended, I got me another part-time side job, this time with my college! From now until hopefully by the time the fall semester ends, I'm helping out the college TV studio in digitizing their old master tape library!
This is the console I am using. We have a U-Matic cassette deck, an S-VHS player and MiniDV deck all set up, with the U-Matic currently hooked up to a Wolverine Data TransMedia analog-to-digital video converter set up to transcode footage from the U-Matic tapes onto an SD card!
Unfortunately, we have a big problem. Many of the U-Matic tapes in our media library are made by Ampex, a company whose tapes were notorious for developing Sticky Shed Syndrome over time. This is when the glue binding the magnetic tape material to the plastic base becomes sticky and separates, making the tapes very unstable. This can cause problems when trying to play back the tapes; there's a greater deal of video noise and fluttering in the image, the mechanism will squeak, and this can also prevent the tapes from playing and fast-forwarding and rewinding!
Fortunately, there's a way to work around that. The tapes can be "baked" - i.e. heated up at a fairly low temperature (like around 150 degrees farenheight), and then after being cooled, the tapes become stable enough for at least a week to be played again, allowing the opportunity to digitize the footage and preserve it forever. We haven't tried this yet, but we plan to very soon, as we want to save those tapes!
Fortunately, I was able to get some U-Matic tapes digitized! These tapes were made by Sony, along with a Fuji cassette, and so they did not have Sticky Shed Syndrome. One such program was one of the college's "Radio Classics Live" shows, something they've been doing since 1990 where they perform live old-timey radio dramas just as they would in a studio back then, with actors reading the parts from a script, musicians, and a sound effects artist making the foley sounds! (They have some pretty cool stuff for live sound effects, including a miniature door with full-size knob for door sounds, an old rotary telephone with a pushbutton to ring it, a panel with three different vintage doorbells, a short staircase to create the sound of walking up and down stairs, a starting gun to make gunshot sounds with (and they can be amplified to sound like rifles or something), and of course two halves of a coconut shell to make the sound of horse hooves with!) In this particular performance, one of the actresses was my old drama teacher there! Since this program was recorded in 1992, she looked somewhat different since I last saw her, but I recognized her voice.
Here I am stitching the footage from the tapes together; since each U-Matic cassette generally only holds an hour's worth of video, a long program would be broken up into separate tapes, and so after they've been digitized, I'd load the SD card into one of the iMacs, import the footage into Adobe Premiere Pro, and edit the footage back together into a full-length program! A few bits did need to be re-captured from the master tapes, but I'm pleased with how my first two such program archiving attempts came out.
As I said, the computers seen here are 21.5" Retina iMacs the college got in the summer of 2017, the then-recent refresh where the 21.5" Retina iMac models finally had dedicated graphics cards! (They originally planned to get 27" Retina iMacs for that reason, until Apple refreshed the iMac line and the school saw they now make 21.5" iMacs with discrete graphics and got those instead.) These models have AMD Radeon Pro 560 graphics cards with 4 GB of dedicated VRAM, along with 3.4 GHz quad-core i7 processors, 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB SSDs. But this fall we're going to replace them with 24" M3 iMacs, and we're getting the high-end model with 10-core graphics and 512 GB SSDs and the RAM maxed out to 24 GB, so it should definitely be a significant boost. (With the Intel to Apple Silicon transition, something like this was inevitable.)
These U-Matic cassettes are definitely bigger than VHS tapes!
The college TV studio switched from U-Matic to DVCPro around 1997, a professional take on the DV (Digital Video) format. Unfortunately, the DVCPro decks we currently have are broken, and we need to get another deck; we're hoping to get one with a FireWire port, enabling us to directly import the tapes into a Mac, with the appropriate adapters and software, of course!
So I'm glad they found my knowledge in analog-to-digital conversion useful in a case like this, along with my deducting the Ampex U-Matic cassettes having the Sticky Shed Syndrome problem and how we can fix that. Working this job alongside my day job with the electronics recycling/reselling company will definitely help build my funds up, especially since Furpocalypse is almost two months away and I have a big cosplay surprise in store for that!
This is the console I am using. We have a U-Matic cassette deck, an S-VHS player and MiniDV deck all set up, with the U-Matic currently hooked up to a Wolverine Data TransMedia analog-to-digital video converter set up to transcode footage from the U-Matic tapes onto an SD card!
Unfortunately, we have a big problem. Many of the U-Matic tapes in our media library are made by Ampex, a company whose tapes were notorious for developing Sticky Shed Syndrome over time. This is when the glue binding the magnetic tape material to the plastic base becomes sticky and separates, making the tapes very unstable. This can cause problems when trying to play back the tapes; there's a greater deal of video noise and fluttering in the image, the mechanism will squeak, and this can also prevent the tapes from playing and fast-forwarding and rewinding!
Click to viewFortunately, there's a way to work around that. The tapes can be "baked" - i.e. heated up at a fairly low temperature (like around 150 degrees farenheight), and then after being cooled, the tapes become stable enough for at least a week to be played again, allowing the opportunity to digitize the footage and preserve it forever. We haven't tried this yet, but we plan to very soon, as we want to save those tapes!
Fortunately, I was able to get some U-Matic tapes digitized! These tapes were made by Sony, along with a Fuji cassette, and so they did not have Sticky Shed Syndrome. One such program was one of the college's "Radio Classics Live" shows, something they've been doing since 1990 where they perform live old-timey radio dramas just as they would in a studio back then, with actors reading the parts from a script, musicians, and a sound effects artist making the foley sounds! (They have some pretty cool stuff for live sound effects, including a miniature door with full-size knob for door sounds, an old rotary telephone with a pushbutton to ring it, a panel with three different vintage doorbells, a short staircase to create the sound of walking up and down stairs, a starting gun to make gunshot sounds with (and they can be amplified to sound like rifles or something), and of course two halves of a coconut shell to make the sound of horse hooves with!) In this particular performance, one of the actresses was my old drama teacher there! Since this program was recorded in 1992, she looked somewhat different since I last saw her, but I recognized her voice.
Here I am stitching the footage from the tapes together; since each U-Matic cassette generally only holds an hour's worth of video, a long program would be broken up into separate tapes, and so after they've been digitized, I'd load the SD card into one of the iMacs, import the footage into Adobe Premiere Pro, and edit the footage back together into a full-length program! A few bits did need to be re-captured from the master tapes, but I'm pleased with how my first two such program archiving attempts came out.
As I said, the computers seen here are 21.5" Retina iMacs the college got in the summer of 2017, the then-recent refresh where the 21.5" Retina iMac models finally had dedicated graphics cards! (They originally planned to get 27" Retina iMacs for that reason, until Apple refreshed the iMac line and the school saw they now make 21.5" iMacs with discrete graphics and got those instead.) These models have AMD Radeon Pro 560 graphics cards with 4 GB of dedicated VRAM, along with 3.4 GHz quad-core i7 processors, 16 GB of RAM and 256 GB SSDs. But this fall we're going to replace them with 24" M3 iMacs, and we're getting the high-end model with 10-core graphics and 512 GB SSDs and the RAM maxed out to 24 GB, so it should definitely be a significant boost. (With the Intel to Apple Silicon transition, something like this was inevitable.)
These U-Matic cassettes are definitely bigger than VHS tapes!
The college TV studio switched from U-Matic to DVCPro around 1997, a professional take on the DV (Digital Video) format. Unfortunately, the DVCPro decks we currently have are broken, and we need to get another deck; we're hoping to get one with a FireWire port, enabling us to directly import the tapes into a Mac, with the appropriate adapters and software, of course!
So I'm glad they found my knowledge in analog-to-digital conversion useful in a case like this, along with my deducting the Ampex U-Matic cassettes having the Sticky Shed Syndrome problem and how we can fix that. Working this job alongside my day job with the electronics recycling/reselling company will definitely help build my funds up, especially since Furpocalypse is almost two months away and I have a big cosplay surprise in store for that!