Preserve Media
Steve Dickison
The Poetry Center's video archive, based at San Francisco State University, began its active life in 1973 when then-Director Kathleen Fraser began to formalize Center's archival recordings — audiotapes had been made of nearly all original readings since 1954.
Deborah Slater
I remember going to BAVC Media’s first building, when they were on Potrero Hill, and the first classes they offered. This was when video was expanding from a recording medium to a storytelling medium and documentary format all its own.
Darcy McKinnon
I am the Executive Director of NOVAC (New Orleans Video Access Center), a media arts non-profit that serves the cities of New Orleans and Baton Rouge in Louisiana.  Under my term as leader, the preservation of our 43 year archive has become an organization priority.
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 [...]
Darryl Sapien
In 2010 I worked with BAVC Media’s Preservation team to convert some old half inch reel-to-reel videotapes to digital files. The tapes were video documentation of my 1975 performance art work Splitting the Axis at the Berkeley Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley.
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 [...]
