Ernest J. Dick is a corporate archivist at the cbc, Ottawa.

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Video innovations are a royal pain to those of us charged with the preservation of moving images. Archivists have grown tired of reinventing ourselves every time a new medium comes along. Hence, we now have invented the term, ‘moving images’ to refer to all manners of film, video, or other such media we are looking after.

We have seen enough film, magnetic tape, disc and data variations and improvements over the years that we tend to be less than enthusiastic about the new products and new technologies and all their promises. Some might say that we have become downright hostile.

So this will not be another peon of praise for video innovations. It will be a cautionary and skeptical tale, complicating your work. You may, therefore, want to stop reading at this point.

But if you ever make use of past footage for your productions; or if you ever hope to make use of your past footage for future productions; or if you want your productions to be seen by the next generation in your industry; or simply if you want your kids to see what you accomplished, you may also want to read on.

Video innovations invariably introduce new formats which make past formats obsolete. In the almost 40 years that we have had video amongst us we have created almost 40 formats to contend with in our archives. Most of these formats were specifically designed to be idiosyncratic without concern for compatibility with competing or succeeding technologies.

The vhs-beta dichotomy is only the best known of the consumer formats that were incompatible with each other. The fact that beta would have been a better archival format proved quite irrelevant in the eventual success of vhs.

We also have to factor in the ntsc, pal, and secam international video systems which further frustrate access to these formats.

Archives have the challenge of keeping this range of past technologies alive and working.

Moreover, we are expected to deliver moving images on all the range of contemporary formats that could be requested.

Maintaining this range of technology is not easy. Replacement parts and service are notoriously difficult to come by. Moreover, finding operators and technicians to maintain and operate past formats is an ongoing challenge. It costs big dollars to keep all of this running, and public funding for such enterprises was never sufficient and now is shrinking. Production invariably has limited budgets to help us in this enterprise.

Video innovations often truly do constitute real improvements and, therefore, past formats are expected to be inferior. This tends to become self-fulfilling. Even if past formats can still produce perfectly acceptable pictures and audio, the necessary effort is not made to generate the quality that they are capable of.

Past technologies required more adjustment and fine-tuning than the self-monitoring features of current technologies.

At the same time, past formats tend to be fairly robust because of their size. They can endure more physical damage and oxide shedding than contemporary formats and still produce surprisingly good quality. Admittedly, they may have to be cleaned, maybe ‘baked,’ and certainly handled with great care to produce all the information that they hold.

Rare skills

Expertise and patience in these exotic, though low-tech, skills are not common or highly valued in the video production world.

Archivists have to be able to anticipate which of the various formats and which products by which manufacturers will fall apart first and, therefore, warrant copying sooner rather than later.

Sometimes the moving image containers themselves actually cause deterioration, the most obvious example being rusted film cans.

Digital technology is invariably promised to be the salvation of all the archivist’s problems, and we are expected to be appropriately grateful for this innovations.

Yes, we know that digital virtually eliminates the inherent loss of analog copying from generation to generation. And, yes, digital makes retrieval and accessing of video extracts infinitely faster and easier. But, digital technology’s truly amazing advances in delivery of video and audio do not necessarily make it the archival solution.

For one thing, there’s the cost. The proportion of our libraries that anyone can afford to digitize in the foreseeable future makes an archivist weep.

Moreover, we are promised that digital formats will only change and ‘improve’ even more quickly than did past analog formats. To the archivist, this just means more incompatibility.

And even if digital theoretically allows high-speed copying from format to format, someone has to do the copying and exercise stringent quality control to ensure that information is not being lost or corrupted.

Digital promises such phenomenal compression of video and audio information that the perennial archivist request for more space should be silenced. But archivists have to ask the unwelcome question, what is being ‘compressed’ out?

Future technologies may well need the information that is now gleefully being ‘compressed’ away. And we also know that miniaturized formats make for more fragile objects in our care.

Loose particles of dust, stray oxide or other junk on narrower and narrower recording tracks can wreak havoc with faithful playback.

Digital is absolutely wonderful when equipment is calibrated and operated perfectly, but unfortunately, we often are dealing with less than top-of-the-line equipment in our archives.

Digital signals do not deteriorate because of the invention of ‘error correction.’ Again, for archivists this is a dubious virtue as the initial stages of deterioration act as an early warning signal to restore the information and to copy to new formats. With digital you get either a perfect playback or nothing, no intermediate stage. This is a scary prospect for an archivist.

Admittedly, non-contact playback technologies, such as laser beams, should provide less wear and tear on the media. However, disc technology has already shown evidence of delamination, laser rot and other ailments that collectors of cds are already aware of.

Grandiose plans

Multimedia publishing and the information highway have grandiose plans for what they would do with our archives. However, we do not have the resources to invest in such projects.

Moving image information requires prodigious amounts of digital memory and that scares many away. Then also we have to remind them of copyright limitations that must be respected. And when the apostles of the new media discover how incompletely our collections are catalogued, they quickly depart for other more exploitable domains.

In actual fact, the best immediate measure for preserving moving images on all formats is to improve the storage conditions: lowering temperature and humidity, improving air circulation, and limiting access. Not very sexy requests!

To make our moving image collections accessible we must first know what we have; that is, we have to view/audition and catalogue the material.

Again, substantial investments are required without immediate paybacks.

So forgive us for not waxing enthusiastic about the latest batch of video innovations. Archivists inherit the results of each round of new and improved formats and media and learn all of their weaknesses through painful experience.

We often perform miracles in keeping these formats and media alive and instantaneously accessible when producers need them.

It is a challenging and satisfying task and we will certainly make use of video innovations when they help us. But we may become a tad grouchy in the process.