Preserve Media
Preservation Access Program 2018
We are excited to announce the participants in the upcoming round of BAVC Media’s Preservation Access Program! From video artists to unique regional collections, the group is representative of the wide variety of artists and institutions this unique program serves. The following is a brief overview of the clients we will be collaborating with to preserve their precious magnetic media over the coming months: Visual Studies Workshop is a non-profit educational and research organization located in Rochester, NY. Their mission is to support makers and interpreters of images through education, publications, exhibitions, and collections. The GLBT Historical Society collects, preserves, [...]
Meet Emmanuel Te: Preservation Intern
At BAVC Media Preservation, I gained experience in video conversion of older video formats. I learned the basics in how to maintain playback equipment and handle client's tapes, document conversion progress on SalesForce, work with time based correctors to set audiovisual levels to maintain original video quality, and spot errors during quality control. While at BAVC Media, I always felt like I was working and walking among “living history,” at times flavored with some San Franciscan culture. Though the physical tapes and the equipment used to transfer them are still playable now, they are slowly moving towards their eventual obsolescence. [...]
Preservation Access Program Client: CET Films
Written by: Hannah Franklin, Preservation Department Intern, Summer 2017 My summer internship with BAVC Media’s Preservation Access Program has been a challenging yet incredibly rewarding experience. My tasks have centered around the digitization of works from the Center for Educational Telecommunications (CET), a small cultural heritage institution based in Berkeley, California. Now known as CET Films, the Center is a non-profit organization responsible for producing and distributing educational films, focusing on Asian American history. PAP is made possible by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This year, CET Films has submitted [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Adam Haas
How did you first hear about BAVC Media? A friend of mine moved from Portland to become the Executive Director of BAVC Media. Tell us your BAVC Media story. I did a documentary in 8th Grade back in 1970 on an old black and white video format that is essentially dead. BAVC Media was able to resurrect the tape and get it transferredto a hard drive. Amazing! Mindy was a delight to work with. Now because of this, I have decided to revisit this documentary and shoot new interviews some 48 years later. Furthermore, Mindy provided me a number [...]
Matt Wolf
I heard about BAVC Media from the documentary filmmaker Sam Green who is doing preservation work with BAVC Media for the estate of Sarah Jacobson.
Preservation Access Program Recipients Summer/Fall 2016
The Preservation Access Program is about to end its third consecutive year of continuous support from the National Endowment for the Arts. We’ve been so busy capturing fantastic content from our participants we forgot to announce who they are! Some of our old friends are back, including Charles Woodman, Nancy Meli Walker, and the creators of the upcoming documentary on Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, and we’ve made some new ones, notably three filmmakers revisiting work they began years ago: Audrey Daniel, Jim Culp, and Susana Aikin. Interestingly, there are three collections that consist primarily of ½” open reel [...]
PAR, SAR, and DAR: Making Sense of Standard Definition (SD) video pixels
By Katherine Frances Nagels It’s well-known that while motion picture film has seen many different aspect ratios come and go over its history, video has been defined by just two key aspect ratios: 4:3 for analogue and standard definition (SD) video, and 16:9 for high definition (HD) video. Simple, right? Yes—but underlying this are some aspect ratios that are not so straightforward: those of the video pixels themselves. These days, we are very used to thinking of each pixel in an image or video being the same width and height, i.e., square—and this is indeed the case for the vast [...]
QCSchool: Embedding QCTools in an automated digitization workflow
By Peter Bubestinger As our open-source, video analyzation software, QCTools continues to evolve, we’ve been talking to users around the world about how they use the versatile application in their specialized workflows. Peter Bubestinger is a digital archivist who has worked with many cultural heritage institutions including Austrian Mediathek (Österreichische Mediathek), the country’s national audio/video archive. Peter is a notable contributor and user of QCTools and recently I asked him if he could describe for us how QCTools is used in conjunction with Mediathek’s innovative digitization workflow system, DVA-Profession, for which he also serves as a lead developer. - Kelly Haydon [...]
