Geoffrey Hopkinson is, there can be little doubt, proud of his collection.

‘We have Fidel Castro, in the jungle before he became president of Cuba, saying ‘I am not a communist.’ We have Malcolm X. We just discovered footage of Glenn Gould performing that no one knew existed,’ he beams. ‘I mean, every network and every stock footage library has a unique collection, but we really have material that no one else has…and we keep finding more.’

Hopkinson is head of the English TV archives at CBC, and as such manages the sale of stock footage from the network to clients across Canada and the world. ‘We have 50 years worth of material that is available, from completed programming to B-roll footage that was shot for CBC but never made it to air.’ Previously ‘lost’ footage has been turning up, he says, since the network started cataloging and preserving its radio and TV archives back in 1995.

The national broadcaster, along with CTV and the National Film Board, is in a race against time to keep alive much of the most important footage ever produced in this country. Hopkinson’s staff is now partway through cleaning and transferring CBC’s two-inch video collection to digital tape. Assuming the tape machine doesn’t break down – it is very fragile and only two others are thought to exist in all of Canada – CBC will eventually digitize the remaining 3,875 two-inch tapes and then move on to tackle the 27,000 one-inchers. ‘It’s a huge project,’ says Hopkinson. Digitizing the entire library will take at least 10 years.

CBC has been selling stock shots since the 1970s and now employs 28 people to market and manage its voluminous film clips, which date back to the network’s earliest days and include assorted news, entertainment and sports footage. Need a clip from Front Page Challenge on digital Beta? The Iranian revolution on Sony SX? Flappers on PAL? Odds are good that CBC archivists can find and deliver something from down in the vaults – provided there are no third-party rights involved, such as with NHL games (see story, p. 31) or independently made shows such as This Hour Has 22 Minutes (call Salter Street).

The NFB is currently moving all its material onto digital tape and MPEGs, and at CTV, where the 3/4-inch tapes are in ‘serious trouble,’ according to archivist Carol Ashurst, an in-house preservation team will get to work in January.

CTV prides itself on its collection of news and sports footage, a good portion of which is threatening to fall apart. ‘News is our prime content. We pull material from our seven bureaus across the country, 10 foreign bureaus and another 10 special reporters,’ says Ashurst. ‘Our China collection is quite unique. We were the first bureau to open up in Beijing in 1979, so we have quite a lovely collection all through the ’80s and ’90s on China.’ That footage, however, was shot on 3/4-inch, which has turned out to have a distressingly short shelf life.

Saving the China video will take up to a year and a half. A small percentage of the footage will probably be lost, Ashurst guesses.

‘But we’ll make it,’ she says confidently, ‘Some of [the tapes] are still fine and so we’ll start with the most endangered.’

Obsolete machinery has been a problem at CTV as well. Companies are rapidly phasing out older equipment, forcing libraries to transfer material to more modern formats. ‘For now we still support one-inch equipment, but how long can that last?’ Ashurst asks. CTV transferred and then abandoned its two-inch tapes in the early ’90s.

But projects like these are hard to predict, cautions Sylvie Menard, manager of the NFB’s stock shot library. Tapes break, machines break, and a host of other technical fixes can slow things down. ‘It’s difficult to evaluate. It could take one hour to do something or…five hours,’ she says.

The NFB collection is probably the largest of the three, comprising of some 3,500 hours of shots dating back to the 1890s. For years the board did only sporadic trade in stock shots, but in the 1990s, hit by harsh budget cuts and in sudden need of extra revenue, the NFB put its collection on the market and has begun preservation efforts. Menard hopes that an all-digital library will someday allow the NFB – which already runs a remarkably info-rich database at www.nfb.ca/stockshots – to better market its footage on the Internet.

CBC had the same idea and will put a portion of its newly digitized stock online on Jan. 1, allowing clients to search and order selections at www.cbc.ca/archivesales. By April, the network hopes to provide streaming video from its collection and plans eventually, says Hopkinson, to add an online broadcast-quality delivery system.