AllTheVideoPeople77
Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC Media) receives $900,000 MacArthur grant
San Francisco, CA – Bay Area Video Coalition has been awarded $900,000 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to support the expansion of its National MediaMaker Fellowship program, which provides training, professional development, and funding to diverse social-issue documentary projects. For over forty years, BAVC Media has been providing emerging producers with the technology, training, and professional networking opportunities that are essential to successfully finishing and distributing a nonfiction film. Since its MediaMaker program was expanded nationally in 2011, BAVC Media has supported 8 documentary projects per year, and is looking to significantly expand that number over [...]
QCTools 0.9.0 Release
San Francisco, CA - Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC Media) and the QCTools development team are proud to announce the release of QCTools Version 0.9.0! QCTools is an open-source application developed to help media archivists in assess and analyze the quality of digitized video content. This version has a number of new features, usability updates, and bug fixes that help increase the overall utility of the application in quality control workflows. One of the many updates in the new release is the addition of a comments track, which allows users to place timestamped comments in the timeline. These comments are [...]
Next Gen Alumni Reflection with Sylvia Colt-Lacayo
Three years ago, I was a scrawny, disabled, 8th grader who was always envious of my artistic family. Art runs in my blood, like a torch passed down my family tree, and I always felt like it wasn’t given to me. That was until I stumbled upon BAVC Media, a community of activists who make social change through their art. After applying to the Next Gen Program, I embarked on a journey I didn’t realize would change my life. I found BAVC Media through my older sister’s friend. She had this awesome blue hair and glasses, and knowing her felt [...]
You want a job? Start acting like a baby.
People think about job search success in terms of the outcome—landing a job. At BAVC Media, we love when our clients get jobs, but we think their success is defined not by what happens at the end of the search but how clients get there. Anyone who has been through a job search knows the process rarely goes smoothly. In retrospect, the process can look haphazard and chaotic—a series of ups and downs that really only make sense when clients reflect back on the experience. But it can feel confounding and unnerving when they’re in it. The ups might look [...]
Report from the 2017 QCTools Tester Workshop
On April 21st, 2017, audiovisual preservationists from all over the United States - and Ireland - convened in sunny San Francisco to test the new features of QCTools and the upcoming SignalServer application. We asked participant Bleakley McDowell, Media Conservation & Digitization Specialist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture to write about his experiences (and show off our rooftop photoshoot). The workshop’s agenda and notes can be found here. Selection from "Guess the QCTools Filters" icebreaker game (answer: Bit Plane) Facing a large number of tape-to-file video transfers that need to be analyzed for errors before [...]
Always be learning
Meet Diane Presler. Visual Designer and BAVC Media Instructor, she brings passion, spirit, and her expert knowledge to courses ranging from InDesign to HTML, and our newest offering Sketch. Â What does teaching mean for your practice? Over the years, how have you navigated your place in the design world? Teaching is how I have navigated my place in the design world. Teaching helped me survive the constant change in the design world. I have embraced change by making my job to study it. And the social aspects of teaching empower me every day. I learn from my students every [...]
For Immediate Release: Summer 2017 Preservation Access Program Recipients
San Francisco, CA - The Preservation Access Program (PAP) is our popular, ongoing funding program for artists and small arts organizations seeking to preserve magnetic media in their collections. Thanks to a generous subsidy provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, BAVC Media is able to provide preservation services to successful applicants at heavily discounted rates. We have just completed selection for our Spring 2017 round of PAP. This, our eighth PAP, received the largest pool of applicants to date. Selection is a terribly difficult task, but we are thrilled to be able to offer our services to some [...]
QCSchool: Introducing qcli
With the release of QCTools 0.8.0 comes an exciting new satellite feature: qcli (pronounciation is currently under debate). We asked developer Ashley Blewer to walk us through the basics. For more about QCTools, check out our preservation tools page. You can also check out her qcli Recipes document developed for the 2017 QCTools Tester Workshop. QCTools reports can now be generated via the command line. This feature will allow for quick and easy generation of QCTools reports for larger-scale digitization projects through simple scripting, using bash or a programming language like Python. This task can be run in the background and loaded [...]
QCTools 0.8.0 Released with New Command Line Features
San Francisco, CA  - Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC Media) is excited to announce the launch of a brand new version of QCTools, the popular open-source quality control application used by media archivists around the globe. QCTools 0.8.0 includes a smorgasbord of new features that assist and educate media professionals as they analyze their tape-to-file transfers. A highlight of this release is qcli, a simple but effective program that allows users to generate QCTools reports directly from the command line. qcli is a precursor to the anticipated SignalServer web application, slated for release Summer 2017. Other 0.8.0 Features Include: Phasemeter filters [...]
Announcing the 2017 National MediaMaker Fellows
San Francisco, CA – Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC Media) is thrilled to announce the multiplatform documentary makers and projects that will receive the 2017 National MediaMaker Fellows award. The Fellows will receive professional support for their social issue media projects and meet for three immersive workshops in the Bay Area, at the Full Frame film festival in Durham, North Carolina, and at another national industry event in the Fall. A full list of recipients is below. The 2017 National MediaMaker Fellows are: Isabel Alcántara (Brooklyn, NY), The Age of Water; Laura Green (San Francisco, CA), Human Conditions; Nyjia July (Los Angeles, CA), Listen to My Heartbeat; [...]
