By Virginia Wright

Jim Wheeler is betting you haven’t watched your videotaped home movies lately. Unless you make digital copies of them soon, the audio and visual specialist warns, you may never see them again.
    Wheeler, a consultant for the Library of Congress and the National Archives, among others, is sounding the alarm about videotape collections shelved in homes, archives, and other institutions. The short life expectancy of magnetic tapes and the increasing obsolescence of the machines required to play them have combined to create a technology emergency. “Video playback machines are no longer being made and finding people to service the old ones is growing more and more difficult,” Wheeler says. “Everyone with important old videotapes must convert them to a digital medium soon or risk losing them forever.”
    If it seems to you that we’ve been here before, you’re right. Film archives exist, after all, to save movies that have been forgotten or abandoned due in part to changes in formats and viewing equipment. Their preservation strategies have been shaped by an urgent need to act before nitrate film combusts (unlikely but possible) or acetate stock suffers vinegar syndrome.     The difference now is that videotape, which is much less durable than film, poses not just one new preservation challenge, but several.
    “Eight millimeter film was introduced in 1932, and Super 8 didn’t come along until 1965. That’s nearly forty years with just one change,” NHF executive director David Weiss explains. “With videotape, the pace of technological changes accelerated. There were eight or ten different formats, and the life of a format was just six, maybe ten, years. Each of those formats requires its own piece of machinery just to see it, unlike film whose pictures can be seen with a light bulb and a lens.”

Tupa Family Collection, home movies and video from the 1970s and 1980s. Shot and donated by Myron Tupa of Brookline, Mass. Parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, 1984, frame enlargement from Super 8mm sound film.

Digital’s Dizzying Pace
Unfortunately, this preservation crisis will not be resolved by a one-time transfer to a digital format. That barely offers a breather.
    Digital video comes with its own concerns and complications, not least being that the hardware and software for safeguarding and accessing images become obsolete even faster than analog video technologies did. Jim Wheeler recommends storing digital video on hard disk drives and keeping pace with software and hardware upgrades by migrating (copying) every five years. DVDs are fine for routine viewing, Wheeler says, but not for long-term storage of valued works because they tend to degrade and because they compress data, which removes fine details.

The Role of Archives
Home cinematographers may regard this shifting technological target as a nuisance. Gadget geeks may find it fun. Archivists, however, are presented with a uniquely daunting task that includes letting supporters and the public know that digitizing is neither simple nor cheap. In fact, digital media, with their notoriously perishable data and ever-changing formats, are estimated to be eleven times more expensive to store than film, which will be safe, untended, in cold storage for hundreds of years, according to an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences report, The Digital Dilemma: Strategic Issues in Archiving and Accessing Digital Motion Picture Materials.
    The labor expense of continually migrating movies from one format to another is just the beginning. “This whole digital phenomenon took over so fast that everyone expects you to have your collection online,” says Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, whose collection of media materials is the second largest in the United States. “What few people understand is what a huge investment that is. Most archives can’t do it themselves because they can’t afford the equipment. A digital scanner can cost $1 million. Even if you can afford that, you can’t run that machine enough to amortize the cost. And once the material is digitized, getting it online is another huge investment. You can’t just have one server because if that server crashes, you’re toast. You’ve lost everything. People see YouTube and think it’s so easy, but YouTube’s IT infrastructure represents an investment of tens of millions of dollars.”
    Meanwhile, the laboratories that we use for film-to-film preservation – that is, the creation of long-lived film copies of films that are still being discovered in basements, attics and libraries – are themselves endangered. “With all the film studios switching over to digital, the labs are calling us, looking for work,” Horak says. The UCLA Film & Television Archive is so concerned about the future of film labs, he says, that it is advocating for a “wet lab” with full photochemical capabilities in its new facility, slated for construction within the next four years.

Cold Storage Buys Time
We have hundreds of videotapes in our collections at NHF, including original television news tapes, independent art works, home movies and access copies of films. “Like film, videotape benefits from low temperatures and humidity and we can slow down deterioration by storage in our vault,” Weiss says. “Beyond that, we have to start writing grants to preserve the collections most at risk.”
    The challenge is bigger than any one archives’ holdings, and we and our colleagues in the Association of Moving Image Archivists are putting our heads together to address this common problem. Some intriguing strategies, such as the creation of digitizing cooperatives, have been discussed.
    The news is not all gloomy. “Experts are beginning to settle on digital preservation standards for audio, which is a decade or so ahead of film,” Weiss says. “Film is more complicated – there is a lot more information – but it’s heading that way and it will eventually get there. For all the problems the digital revolution creates in terms of preservation, it also offers incredible benefits in terms of access. We can put a moving image on the Internet so that people all over the world can see it. The most important thing that people understand for now is that the transition to digital media, while a good thing, isn’t the end of the story.”