Re: [AV Media Matters] analog cassettes

[lists.rlhess@mindspring.com]

Fred,

It's hard to decide what to do. Part of it is workflow, part of it is the
archival format.

In the broadcast industry, I'm seeing a faster death of reel-to-reel
machines in the US than I am of cassettes. I fear for long-term viability
of reel-to-reel analog archives because the machines and the technicians
who truly understand them will become more and more difficult to find.

We are seeing some positive opportunities in minidisk with the introduction
of the HHB pro machine this year. It addresses some of the objections that
people have had with the small format consumer machines. I think HHB makes
these machines in DAT and now minidisk.

A telltale sign of the falling-out-of-favor of the CC medium is the loss of
many of the high-end tapes, at least according to the distributors I
frequent on the Web.

If I were setting up a new archival oral history workflow (which isn't
really in the scope of my consultant activities so take it with whatever
many grains of salt you wish), I would do field recordings on MD and
transfer to CDR for the archives. Whether or not I'd use a computer for the
archives is up in the air.

MD and DAT are very useful portable formats. My limited oral history work
(with my family) has been to DAT (a Sony D8) and then I've made CC copies
for other family members. I intend to archive that to CDR some day, but my
CDR workflow involves the computer which is not as fast as an audio-only
machine.

MD appears more robust in some respects than DAT and it's quick access is a
positive feature, but you have to be even more careful about not erasing
something. I haven't yet seen a good field CDR recorder, but that would be
very interesting, especially for the faster-than-realtime ingest into a
computer. I've not seen any DAT or MD solutions that permit that (although
we are seeing that in news gathering scenarios with professional video tape
formats).

Anyway, a good question and one that we should all be thinking about.

One final "plug"--the permanent digital archive is a concept that needs
more discussion. It's permanent only as long as the funding commitment is
there to keep it permanent, but it refers to the plan to migrate digital
assets from one medium to another to follow the media life cycles. It's
more of an issue, in my humble opinion, with video than audio. In audio we
have the beauty of the CDR which, while not perfect, does have a lot of
appeal. Couple that with a mechanism that will permit cloning in 20-30
years to a new format (molecular level storage? who knows?) and you have
the beginnings of the permanent digital archive.

Good luck!

Cheers,

Richard