Final Cut Video

Can your old videotape be transferred?

Why do some shops say there may be problems with transferring your old videotape? I'll use the professional format, 3/4 U-matic as an example, but it applies to VHS as well.

* The oxide falls off. The oxide, the metallic coating that contains the magnetic signal, usually loses some of the material, and so, loses some of the signal.
That's on top of the fact that the earlier formats were, of course, lower resolution in the first place (noisy looking). So today, they tend to look worse and are worse because of the loss of material. In other words, over time, you will lose more and more of the image quality.

* The cassette may not play or might "freeze" or seize up. The hubs sit on silicon pads to make the rotation smooth or slippery enough to rotate freely. Heat, cold, bad storage, bad cases, and the tape hubs, that hold the tape, can hit rough spots, rotate poorly or not rotate at all. When that happens, the tape can play poorly or just break while trying to play in the deck. Also, we have seen the splice, the adhesive tape holding the leader and the videotape together, just pop off. Then the tape will no longer play in this cassette.

* Bad tape. Some tape has little folds from being damaged years ago. Some tape has ripples from bad storage, that cause ripples during a "bad" playback. Too much moisture in a basement storage spot? You could have mold on the tape, the inside of the housing. This won't let the little video head play the video without getting clogged or stop the signal all together.

So when a facility says your cassette may or may not "play", they need to look at all these factors and decide if transporting your moldy videotape will cause damage to their video machine as well. Remember, the repair people trained on these old machines are retiring and getting more difficult to find. So are the parts for the decks - so are the machines themselves.

Later we'll talk about ways to store your precious movies and videos to keep them for a very long time - safely.

citing sources-
Admin. (January 23, 2013). 6 Bad Things that Can Happen to Your VHS Tape
http://playitagainvideo.com/1398/6-bad-things-that-can-happen-to-your-vhs-tape/

Tkacik, C (2017, September). 'We're running out of time:' One woman's quest to save Baltimore television history. The Baltimore Sun,
https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-saving-baltimore-archives-20170919-story.html

Concerts. Remember those? And remember scalpers who buy up front rows and charge local people hundreds of dollars more to get a ticket? Eric Church and his team were doing something about it. They had the "pit" close to Eric only sold via their fan site - they had to already know you. And their ticket coordinator had a computer algorithm to decide if you were a scalper, say buying 20 tickets from New Jersey instead of Indianapolis. Church's team said they seemed to be suppressing national scalpers off the on line ticket sales. Soooo, why doesn't that happen with the other large on line ticket sales? This is Eric Church being interviewed by our team; CBS (I was running audio) back in 2017 - haha, when we used to have safe, live concerts. BTW, they let us go on stage and shoot some B-roll during the concert!

Older equipment - it's fun to see, right? This was a documentary about "Some Like It Hot", with Tony Curtis, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, director/writer Billy Wilder. Look at that "wind sock" for the boom microphone at the beach scene! A canvas bag of sorts! Wow.

This makes sense, right?
‘What Day Is It?’: Comcast Sees New TV Watching Behaviors During Pandemic

Days are blurring together for viewers, causing a shift in normal viewing habits.

--from TV Technology newsletter May 11, 202

BTW, on this day: In 1997, computer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess.

Encourage better treatment with your wallet - I read in Alignable, a small business, networking site: Decades-long relationships with JP Morgan Chase didn't seem to matter. Some digging by our Co-Founder Eric Groves uncovered how the bank showered big businesses with CARES loans, while leaving its loyal small business clients out in the cold.
I know we have a bank account with PNC and they said they could not fill out an application and were busy with other applicants! Ouch.
It may be necessary to re-consider where we bank, where we do various business, if loans are to be made to very small businesses, and "encourage" banks to not always cater to their large corporations. It's sad, but we all realized it, and it really hurts us when we are hurting the most. We just weren't "big enough" clients - unless, perhaps, if we take action together.