BAVC News
Reflecting on the Preservation Access Program’s First Year
By Moriah Ulinskas In the Spring of 2013 BAVC Media launched the Preservation Access Program [INSERT LINK], a program funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.  The goal of this program is to connect individual artists and small to medium-sized arts and culture organizations to resources for audiovisual preservation planning and to subsidize (by as much as 70%) the cost of preservation migration (digitization) for participants accepted into the program. Our goal was to get artists and organizations to think about the future of their legacy recordings and to do the work of inspecting and inventorying their tapes and understanding how [...]
Return of the Open Mic Night
For the superstitious scheduling a live television show for Friday the 13th might seem like a bad idea. But for SF Commons Producers, the return of the Open Mic Night was all the more memorable precisely because it took place on 3/13/15. The free-form flow of the Open Mic Night is very much a part of the history of San Francisco Public Access television, and is a tradition that pre-dates SF Commons itself. Captured by a traditional three-camera studio setup, the Open Mic offers BAVC Media's diverse community of Producers a chance to share and celebrate their voices together.  Black Diva Media's Idell Wilson, known for her lively [...]
#SFCOMMONSENSE: FOURTH FRIDAYS WITH SF COMMONS
Free expression is at the heart of public access television. As many of the Public Access Producers are longtime City residents, their accounts and memories of San Francisco and the changes that have occurred in their tenure here provide rich material for their shows. This Spring, SF Commons staff launched #SFCommonSense a new live show that brings together members of the public access community to showcase their diversity of opinion. While topics vary each month, the spontaneous dialogue is intended to tap into concerns of San Francisco’s residents, old and new, alike. The first panel, held in March, tackled issues facing women today for [...]
Highlights from BAVC Media’s first Bridges Fellowship
The following reflections were provided by two peer mentors from the Bridges Fellowship program, which just completed two intensive week-long series of career workshops and trainings in June and July.
Watch: Dark Room – The Factory’s Summer Filmmaking Showcase
If you missed Dark Room, the summer screening by students in BAVC Media’s advanced video production program, The Factory, you can still watch the films online. What you won’t be able to experience was the amazing ambiance of the Roxie’s large theater, free slices donated by Goat Hill Pizza and the most delicious juices and smoothies donated by Voila! Juice Co., and the voices of the filmmakers themselves reflecting on their work.
Read Now: BAVC Media Preservation on Jerome Caja’s Home Videos
Pop over to our Preservation program's Tumblr to read BAVC Media Preservation Fellow Lauren O’Connor's eloquent post about the significance gleaned from preserving the intimate home recordings of the late, great San Francisco visual artist, performer, and drag queen Jerome Caja. O'Connor writes: The great pleasure of preservation is to pop in an unassuming, archaic tape and, while digitizing, encounter a world or a person that one has never encountered before… and to play a small part in keeping that content alive for somebody else to encounter and be inspired by one day. Go read the whole thing! BAVC Media is digitizing Caja's tapes [...]
Capture Now! (in QCTools)
If you’ve digitized magnetic videotape, perhaps you’ve experienced the following situation: You just purchased an expensive new computer with all the bells and whistles, including professional capture software. You soon discover that your out-of-the-box capture software doesn’t, however, meet preservation standards. As a result, you fall back on old standbys, only to discover that old software doesn’t play nicely with new hardware. Now you don’t know where to turn. Here’s another ,not uncommon scenario: You’re at your computer, watching your content play in real-time as you capture a videotape through a particular software. In your peripheral vision, you notice something [...]
Intro to a Blog Series for QCTools
With the launch of QCTools 0.7.1, we tweeted, we updated the download links, aaaaand....that's it. What can I say? We've been busy. We've had a headache. Our dog ate our social network. The intern desk has been empty for so long old video decks attach themselves to it like barnacles. Thus, as QCTools creeps ever so stealthily to a full blown integer, we have fallen short on two fronts: (a) to convey, without hyperbole, that QCTools 0.7.1[INSERT LINK] is the greatest thing to happen to America since Jeff Goldblum’s bizarre chuckling in Jurassic Park; and (b) to show you why. Dave Rice, genius, wiseacre, lead [...]
QCSchool: All About TOUT
This post is written by former BAVC Media Presevationist Kelly Haydon Welcome to our very first how-to blog for QCSchool: A blog series for users of QCTools. Since I’m am the one driving, I get to choose the music, and I’ve decided we’ll start with the filter most analogous to the easy listening instrumentals of The John Tesh Project: TOUT, or, Temporal Outlier. So why is the TOUT filter so accessible and easy for the novice to grasp? Because unlike other some other filters that will remain unmentioned (for now), a high TOUT value will more often than not lead the user [...]
