March 29, 1996, Morning
MORRIE WARSHAWSKI: If you want to get up and stretch, please do
that now. And can I get Bruce to come up here and stay with me? My
talk today is entitled, "What I Learned on the Way to the Cleaners."
Let me give a brief introduction. Recently I had a problem for
which I needed expert assistance. My favorite silk Giorgio Armani
tie had a spot on it. I'd acquired the tie on a business trip to
Portland, Oregon, and it cost me an arm an a leg. The tie was
perfect in every way, just the right length and width. Its
beautiful burgundy and navy blue pattern complemented almost
everything in my wardrobe. However, I couldn't buy a replacement
since the tie was no longer available from Armani, and I couldn't
afford to fly back to Portland anyway. So I decided to consult with
a few professional dry cleaners in my neighborhood, and got the
following answers to my dilemma. The first person I called said he
would not give me any advice about cleaning the tie, because he was
afraid that I might do what he suggested, and then ruin the tie and
come back to sue him. His advice was to take more care in the
future and to avoid getting my tie dirty in the first place.
"Scotchgard your tie before wearing it," he said. He also suggested
that I wear a bib when eating, or at least turn the tie backwards,
or better yet, tuck it into my shirt and completely out of harm's
way. I went to visit another cleaner in person. She looked at the
tie, checked its label to see if it was 100% silk, asked me what had
caused the stain, and then said with confidence, "No problem. I can
make it look good as new." Wanting a second opinion, I tried
someone else who said, "Well, I can work on the stain, but to be
honest, your tie will never look the same. You'll always notice a
slight difference in color where we have done our work." Still one
more expert examined my cravat and had the following news: "Forget
this tie. Cleaning it will ruin it forever. Let me make a new one
for you with some material I have in the shop." I sent a
questionnaire out to experts in the field via mail, fax and EMail,
and I picked up the phone and talked directly to companies and
individuals who worked with tape on a daily basis, many of whom are
here at the conference today, and whose brains you should pick if
you can. What follows is a layman's thumbnail sketch of what I
learned while on the way to the video cleaners. The truth is that
there is good news and bad news when it comes to cleaning and
remastering. The bad news is, that few people want to openly
discuss their methods in detail. Either from fear of being sued for
bad advice, or because they prefer to maintain a business advantage
over business competitors. The area of videotape cleaning is also
an incredibly complicated one, with only a very tiny bit of
reliable, independent research that has been done and published. No
one I talked to was willing to give the video equivalent of a
definitive Hints from Heloise on how to clean videotapes. One lucid
and succinct document is the paper by John Van Bogart of the
National Media Laboratory, "Recovery of Damaged Magnetic Tape and
Optical Disk Media," which is in all of your handout packets, and
I'd like to thank BAVC for taking the time and energy to Xerox it.
It's full of diagrams and pictures and good advice. I highly
recommend it. In fact, Van Bogart is now my hero of cleaning and
remastering. The good news is that all the secrecy and complexity
does not seem to matter all that much. Cleaning may not be a fully
codified science, but it is a fine art that has many reputable
professional practitioners throughout the country. If you have a
dirty tape, chances are incredibly good that you can find a company
to restore it at a reasonable price. Tapes beyond any possible
recovery and remastering constitute, at least with the people I talk
to a very small and probably statistically insignificant minority of
the population. Although, to be honest, there is little or no data
on this as well. The culprits. Videotape may look like a simple
medium, but placed under even a low-powered microscope, it becomes a
complicated sandwich. In fact, I wish I'd heard the analogy earlier
to coconut cream pie, but I'm afraid I might have been tempted then
to tell a joke that Soupy Sales once told on television and got
kicked off TV for a year for telling it. I'll probably get kicked
out of the conference. So, let's stay with the sandwich. I hope I
don't get you too hungry. A complicated sandwich made up of a top
coat, substrate and backing, and you can find a picture of this in
Van Bogart's handout. Into that mix throw a mayonnaise of binder,
magnetic particles, lubricants, polyester to taste. Not all
videotape sandwiches are made the same. Every manufacturer varies
the recipe, and keeps these under lock and key. To complicate
things further, keep in mind that with the rapidly changing
technologies of video, have come a mind-boggling variety of
videotape sizes and formats, from the relatively gargantuan two inch
to the tiny Hi8 and everything in between. And for each of these
formats, there may be a half dozen or more manufacturers with very
different formulas and disparate ingredients. As I thought about
videotape, I was reminded of the hilarious episode from the Jerry
Seinfeld show, where Jerry and his friends become addicted to the
soup made by a very temperamental and secretive chef, known only as
"The Soup Nazi." Jerry's friend Elaine gets evicted from the
restaurant and thus denied access to the city's most exquisite
soups. It's one of my favorite episodes - I've seen it three times.
But Elaine exacts her revenge in the end - she discovers the chef's
handwritten recipes in an old dresser drawer bequeathed to her by
Kramer. Now Elaine can let the world have access to the chef's fine
soups without his bad manners. Would that this were true in the
video world. Ampex, Sony, BASF, et al. may not have bad manners,
but they do have secret recipes. So until we gain access to their
dresser drawers, we just have to use our taste buds and make
educated guesses about some of the ingredients in many tape formats.
Mona Smith's Round Table paper on Analysis and Evaluation, which you
just heard, and I have to tell you that I called Mona two days ago
and asked her if there was going to be any overlap between our
talks. She assured me there wouldn't, so if I ever meet Mona, she's
in trouble. ...has already detailed the kinds of things that can go
wrong with videotape that cause it to need cleaning and remastering.
Briefly, the catalogue includes damage caused by temperature
extremes, exposure to water, high humidity, mold, dust and dirt,
improper handling, dirty or misaligned playback machines, inherent
reaction of the chemicals in the tapes' own makeup, that can cause
breakdown in any of its layers or migration between layers. So many
things can go wrong with tapes, and so much of it inexplicable, that
I would be tempted to add some other elements to the list of
culprits, including gremlins, bad vibes and the positions of the
stars. What to do? Once a tape has been damaged and needs
cleaning, there are a number of options available. Depending on the
type of damage inflicted, an expert could employ any one or a
combination of the following methods: baking - and in fact, I just
saw a diagram for a baking machine that was made from a cardboard
box, a meat thermometer, and a blow dryer with some racks on the
inside. In fact, blow dryers seem to be very popular in the
cleaning world. Scraping, burnishing, washing, rinsing with water
solutions, chemical treatment, relubrication, vacuuming, dry wiping,
and then there's been a rumor that some people are using sound waves
to do cleaning, although I haven't found anyone yet. So if there's
any information in here about sound waves, I'd love to hear it. In
my interviews, I found that these methods were accomplished either
by hand or through the use of homemade machines, a number of which
employ simple elements like Remington electric shavers and blow
dryers, and/or through machines that are mass produced and
commercially available. Which method should you use for your
particular problem? I would refer you to Van Bogart's paper, where
he gives general guidelines for the most common cleaning problems.
For instance, baking for sticky shed problems, vacuuming and wiping
for dust, rinsing in tap water for sea water contamination, winding
cleaning machine for mold, etc. But, with each of these methods, I
would add the following disclaimer, one that I have heard from
professionals and read in dozens of reports, and it goes like this:
"XYZ method is not a universal panacea for the ABC problem. XYZ
will only work with very specific types of ABC problems, and if not
applied properly, may actually cause more damage than help. Expert
advice is recommended." In some, don't try these methods by
yourself at home. Go consult a professional, and leave the cleaning
to them. Remastering: once your tape has been cleaned, you may want
to remaster it in order to insure a playable preservation copy. In
fact, in the instance of half-inch reel-to-reel tapes that have been
recovered through a baking process, most experts recommend
remastering immediately within a week or two after cleaning, before
the effects of baking get reversed. Let me say something at the
outset. Remastering is just a fancy word for copying. Luckily, the
act of copying a tape is a relatively simple matter devoid of all
the wild complexities we encounter during the cleaning process.
However, remastering does have its own set of issues. For instance,
there is the technical and practical question of which format you
should use. There are also the ethical and aesthetic questions
surrounding the enhancement or lack of enhancement of a tape signal
during the act of copying from one machine and format to another.
For instance, do I tweak a color here, brighten a sound level there
to make the tape look better or more like what I remember? Luckily,
this topic is being handled by at least two other working groups at
this conference. In terms of formats, there are two broad
categories of choices: analog and digital. Analog and digital wars.
Within these categories, my response - the people I talk to,
currently tend to prefer either Betacam SP in the analog domain, and
D2 or Digital Betacam in the digital domain. Are either of these
formats any more stable or permanent than the tapes they are
replacing? We don't know. Does that mean you may have to be
prepared to remaster your tapes yet again in another ten or twenty
years? And then again, ad infinitum? Well, yes, I'm afraid so. And
when you go to make the copy twenty years from now, will there still
be a machine available that can play back your tape? Or will that
technology have become obsolete and assigned to a junkyard? Welcome
to a curator's nightmare. During one of my interviews, I asked a
technician what he would advise a librarian to do with a large video
collection. His response was: transfer everything to D2 and buy two
or three D2 machines for insurance. An excellent solution for those
of us with deep pockets. Another professional confided to me that
in his experience, the most durable medium for storage was the
now-ancient two-inch tape format. Unfortunately, there are very few
two-inch machines left in the world, and even fewer people who know
how to repair them. As to our two main avenues, analog and digital,
each has its defenders and detractors, and in fact, I need to warn
you that this is a highly contentious field in both the areas of
cleaning and remastering, and a lot of arguments either way that do
sound logical. Digital has many proponents, because every time it
is copied there is no degradation of recording quality. Each copy
should be identical to the source, no matter how many generations
separated from the original. However, digital formats are
relatively expensive. Also, and this is the complaint I heard from
some people, digital tapes show little sign of degradation up to the
point when they do fail, and at that time, large sections of the
recorded information could be lost. Something known as the cliff
effect. Analog tapes are more economical to purchase and play back.
Where analog suffers, is in its addition of some level of tape
noise, both image and sound, every time a copy is made. Every new
analog copy will acquire an additional layer of noise, so that a
tenth generation copy might look and sound quite different from, and
probably inferior to, the original source tape. On the other hand,
the deterioration of analog tapes is both gradual and discernible,
so that careful oversight can forestall a total disaster long before
it becomes irreversible. Pressing issues. Now that I've totally
complicated your cleaning and remastering lives, I'd like to end
with a catalogue of questions and issues that will complicate things
even more. I asked all my respondents to tell me what still needs
to be discovered or addressed in order to make their jobs easier,
and improve the professionalism of the field. Here is an edited
list of the major items they threw my way, to which I'm hoping
you'll add a longer catalogue at the end of my talk. Rapid changes
in video technology make it virtually impossible to choose a tape
medium recording technology for remastering that insures long-term
viability. In December 1995, a number of chemicals that could
safely be used to decontaminate videotape were banned from the
market. No suitable replacements are currently available. We need
a coordinated effort to insure that obsolete video hardware is
preserved and maintained. Could someone please tell me what that
white powder is that is often found on archival tape? What is its
exact chemical composition? We need an open discussion about
whether or not there is a need for information to be proprietary in
this field. Lack of understanding on the industry's part that
longevity one hundred years plus is the desired goal of archives,
libraries, museums and government for historic, artistic and legal
information and formats. And, in fact, I should give an aside, I
was rereading some of my material last night, and I noticed that one
archivist had recommended to another archivist that if they wanted
to really save their videotapes that they should transfer them to
black and white film, and put them in a cool environment for fifty
years. We need more published articles and research that could be
followed and understood on a consumer level. More money needs to be
spent on preservation research and preservation efforts. Study of
all tape cleaning methods on all formats and types of tapes to be
done by an independent organization. We need a low cost digital
format that is reliable. In conclusion, and in the interim, before I
send you to lunch, unlike film technology, which is static, codified
and fixed, video is a dynamic, fluid, ever-changing medium, a medium
fully attuned to our modern times. Unfortunately, we're now paying
the price with mountains of tapes in multiple formats, that exhibit
a high degree of impermanence and susceptibility to degradation.
Couple this with the paucity of hard scientific data, and a lack of
funds to do extensive research. This might seem to be a recipe for
disaster. It might cause video archivists to have raised blood
sugar levels and frequent panic attacks. But, you have before you a
reformed cynic and a born-again optimist. Times are not so dark.
Where some see danger in change, I prefer to see opportunities.
Technology has surprised us countless times in the past decade
alone. So I have no doubt we can predict the same for the next
decade. It is just as reasonable to assume that the changes and
discoveries before us will bring stability and longevity to the
arena of video preservation, as it is to think that we will only
develop a more confusing variety of increasingly expensive and
equally unreliable formats. In the interim, happily, we have many
practical and affordable options that let us maintain an uneasy but
steady holding pattern in this gray zone between the pristine Holy
Grail of video permanence in the future and the muddy but manageable
uncertainty of the present. So, let me fast forward to your
comments, questions and suggestions, and thank you for being in this
dark room with me on a sunny San Francisco morning. Thank you. So
let's just take a few comments, suggestions, questions, things you'd
like me to add to my paper before it gets published, and please ask
the experts in the room your own cleaning problems. Or if you've
got cleaning/remastering stories you'd like to tell, now's the time
to do it. Yes?
Q: [Unintelligible]
MORRIE: What should be the main concern when you're doing remastering? Image, cost, any answers out there?
MAN: Like everything else in life, the answer is all the above. I'll talk more about this tomorrow, but every archive that I've been in contact with is doing the best they can with the resources they have available.
MORRIE: Thank you. That's a good answer. Yes?
Q: [Unintelligible]
MORRIE: How many people are transferring video to film to archive work? How many people are doing it secretly and don't want to talk about it?
JIM WHEELER: Don't transfer from one medium to another. Film stays with film, video stays with video.
MAN: [Unintelligible]
MORRIE: Does anyone in here have experience or knowledge about transfer to laser videodisc and its permanence?
MAN: [Unintelligible]
MORRIE: One more impermanent medium for you. Yes, way up there.
Q: [Unintelligible]
MORRIE: Do you know of any studies that show the longevity of different brands of tapes in different formats?
Q: [Unintelligible]
MORRIE: And some tapes have been tested by the National Media Laboratory as well, that has a web site that you can access very easily. That web site address is in the Van Bogart article. Yes, way up there.
Q: [Unintelligible]
MORRIE: I was surprised at how many technicians waxed eloquently over two-inch quad.
JIM LINDNER: I've written a lot and I've tried to get some articles in very broad circulation magazines, and so far the biggest success I've had was an article in the February/March issue of "Video" magazine. You have to realize that the companies, probably many of whom are not here, who manufacture these products are very big advertisers. On a consumer level, we're talking about multi-billion dollar companies. And although we'd like to think that in all the newspapers and all the magazines the editorial is totally separate from the advertising, the fact of the matter is, the manufacturers for the most part are not terribly excited about having [unintelligible]. And the editors, although they may say oh, yes, we're interested in having an article, by the time you submit an article - my last article was brutally edited to bits. So I had to make a very difficult choice - not to allow them to print it, or to allow them to print it including things that I didn't write - they wrote.
MORRIE: Thank you for coming today. One more thing, don't leave yet.
BARBARA LONDON: Thanks, Morrie, for a great presentation. You're off now for a half hour to get your sandwich. Please come back, because what you'll be able to see is the Video Data Bank survey of video history, Video Art and Alternative Media in the U.S., introduced by Chris Hill. Video Data Bank, Electronic Arts Intermix and Bay Area Video Coalition have been working on this, please come back. Thanks.