Greetings. I wanted to have a special welcome for anyone who might be stopping by via my chapter in the book “The Routledge Handbook of Remix Studies and Digital Humanities.” That chapter is entitled “Curating, Remixing, And Migrating Archived “Muse Files.” When that chapter reached a critical mass I felt that a tangent about digitization and preservation would weigh the essay down, so it was cut but I’ll share that section here, below the video.
The most concise version of the video preservation story is a lightning talk I gave at the 2015 Personal Digital Archive Conference hosted by NYU. It was entitled “40 Years of Video Husbandry.” The videos of the presentations and the slides are available on Archive.org. My talk was on Saturday and for whatever reason the Archive audio is low and hissy. I was able to extract my part and help the audio, I then re-posted enhanced version on Vimeo which I share here.
Digital Migration Postscript to Remix Essay
As I prepared to move to a smaller apartment around 2007, I started to digitize my U-matic collection in anticipation of throwing out a wall full of originals. Digitization was accomplished in three ways; but after studying video preservation in graduate school circa 2016 I learned that two of these methods were flawed. That said, there is an element of triage to all this depending on one’s tools and resources. Items with the lowest priority that I still wanted to save were transferred in real time via a Pioneer video DVD burner (DVR-310). DVD-R discs burned at home might only last five or ten years, so while mileage may vary, one would want the preservation format to last considerably longer. For collection items of greater importance I transferred to DVCAM and DVCPRO tapes. While better than DVDs, these formats are effectively obsolete. However it is possible to ingest a data stream from such tapes into a computer and create a digital video file, such as Quicktime, without generation loss. So although the DV tapes are digital and have reasonably good quality, the miniature nature of the tape format means they are not robust physically. For items in the collection I prized most highly, I digitized analog footage using Avid Media Composer, a professional editing system I had for my editing business. This would result in high-quality Quicktime files; and I’d made multiple copies, since hard drives are prone to fail.
This isn’t the right setting to elaborate on video preservation best-practices but I can direct your attention to some valuable resources (below). Though it is not video-specific I’ll include a link here to web site about my consulting services for personal digital archiving. Finally, I’ll add that video preservation is never “one and done.” The process never ends, and requires constant stewardship.
Krogh, Peter. (2015). Backup Overview. Best Practices Workflow series, accessed December 31, 2019, https://www.dpbestflow.org/node/262
“AMIA Resources,” The Association of Moving Image Archivists, accessed December 31, 2019, https://amianet.org/resources/amia-resources/
“Preserve Media,” Bay Area Video Coalition, accessed December 31, 2019
https://www.bavc.org/preserve-media
Witness. (2013). Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video, accessed December 31, 2019,
https://library.witness.org/product/activists-guide-to-archiving-video/
Thank You’s
Since this will be the landing page following the publication of my remix chapter, there was another thing I could not include in the article, which was thank you’s. I made six remix works that required access to free post-production facilities since they were all personal “no budget” projects. These are some of the people who made the work possible by generously granting access to what was very expensive technology. Heartfelt thanks to the following people…
Lance Wisniewski, Bob Burns, Bobby Mariano, Frank Herald, Lori Friedman, Rob Ortiz, Nitza From, Henry Bornstein, M. Scott Cole, Alan Miller and Scott Greenberg. I’m sure I’m forgetting some people but will add them as I remember.
Finally thanks to those who helped me edit the article, my friend Andy Mosner and my partner Mary Strother. Thanks too to the official editors who were a pleasure to work with.
Video Culture 