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Justfolk

Justfolk club

Posted: 02 Jul 2015

Taken: 02 Jul 2015

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Jake watching his dead grandfather sing

Jake watching his dead grandfather sing
I met Jake almost a year ago and, after chatting a bit, I realised
that I had seen 42-year-old videotapes of his grandfather, Matt,
singing old songs in the town they grew up in, about 700 km from here.
Matt is long dead now and Jake had never seen the tapes, though he had
often heard his grandfather sing. I can't always make such
arrangements, but in this case I had a bit of an inside track, so I
looked into getting Jake a copy. It took ten or eleven months for me
to get everything clear and to get the tapes copied to DVDs. A couple
of weeks ago I brought them by his apartment and he immediately put
one in his computer to watch and listen. And I took a picture of him
watching his grandfather sing. Matt was the same age then, when he
was recorded, as Jake is now.

I had a roll of Kodak Porta 400 VC in my Olympus XA; that's what this
picture was taken on. The Portra was part of a batch of film a friend
gave me earlier this year. He didn't know how old it was, but it
couldn't have been older than 1998 which is when I think Kodak started
up production on the Portra films. But the film shows signs of
having been an old and deteriorated film -- all that grain!
Comments
 Justfolk
Justfolk club
Yep. These tapes were half-inch, open-reel Sony tapes almost all of which today suffer "sticky shed syndrome." That means they needed "baking" before being played. Archivists and studio technicians all have different techniques to bake, but mine is to leave my audio amplifier on and to leave the tape lying on top of the amp over the weekend. That heat is just enough to de-hydrolyze the goo and make them playable. Works simply and perfectly.
9 years ago.
 Justfolk
Justfolk club
Yeah, there are problems. I've worked with all manner of magnetic audio & video for 35+ years. The majority of problems with them today are mechanical rather than being inherent ones in the magnetic signal. Sticky shed is the nastiest one because of the mess it makes, but it is also the easiest to fix, at least temporarily, and long enough to make a (usually digital) copy. Drop-out is commonly a matter of flaking-off of the magnetic medium from the plastic (or paper!) backing. Probably the most commonly noticed problem with old tapes is really one of tracking: if someone is playing a stereo-encoded cassette on a player without adjustable heads, the tracking can get really jumbled; with proper adjustment the signal may be nearly perfect.

With video it gets more complicated. These old Sony tapes were recorded with a helical scan (the most common technique, I think, in analogue video) and any bit of speed flutter in the tape will cause the frames to jump. I've never seen out-of-sync effects with this kind of recording because the audio and the video signals are immediately adjacent to one another on the tape; if the two heads are locked in relation to one another, the signals will stay in sync. Out-of-sync often happens, though, when people digitise the tapes and try to deal with the two things separately or the digitisation software takes over automatically and stalls one or the other! :)

Of course the biggest problem in analogue tape playback today is getting analogue tape players that work!
9 years ago.
 Justfolk
Justfolk club
If anything can go wrong, it will. If it's not one thing, it's another.
9 years ago.

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