For Sale: A Massive, Obsessive and Probably Obsolete VHS Boxing Archive
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I wonder if the Internet Archive would be interested... but then again, it usually takes donations and doesn't purchase material.
Just about every fight was available online
...but is it really? That's the good thing with specialist collections like this: they're very thorough.
It might be, and it probably won’t be in 5 years whenever some copyright troll purchases the license and locks it away. Then 25 years from now someone will come across this article and wish, in vain, that someone had saved this collection.
I don’t have any interest in boxing, but there’s a special place in my heart for amateur archivists. It makes me sad to think this work will eventually be lost to history because of shortsightedness.
Would love for the Internet Archive to digitize and hold on to them.
From the article:
> "Before he died, he told me: 'The collection is going on forever. It has to go on,'"
How cruel.
And following from that, the factors that contributed to that insignificance in the first place - things like scant media exposure, lack of coverage by mainstream outlets being just two of a whole slew of other factors we may never fully capture or fully grasp.
I guess in the end we are posed with the question, are we okay with that "process of loss and compression."
Like having a computer voice read you a poem.
https://archive.org/details/tv
They also have a detailed archive of September 11 programming:
Boxing, bowling, and several other sports that were mainstream then and available all the time on free, normal, mainstream TV that are only niche online or pay cable things now.
Lengthy, yes, expensive, no. All you need is one of those video capture USB devices from Amazon, a computer, and a VCR.
8000 2 hr tapes will fit on a couple of 10T drives, and storage will no longer be a problem.
Sometimes I suspect professional archivists would rather lose the material than use simple consumer equipment and techniques. (Not that there is any "technique" to using those Amazon video capture devices.)
To reduce the calendar time, get more VCRs (often going for $5 each at the thrift store), more cheap computers, and more capture devices, and do them in parallel.
Some of the tapes will be unplayable, sure. Toss 'em in the trash.
(Putting a tape in with a broken case, however, will get you what you expect.)
IIRC most of the best VCRs for digitization have been worn out from years and years of use in other digitization efforts (like home movie digitization businesses).
But hey, I've digitized a hundred or so home movie tapes for my extended family. I'm sure I've got it all wrong.
If the answers to those questions are "I don't know" or "I don't care", then you got it wrong. If you ended up with a 29.97fps or 30fps file, or if you ended up with a 320x240 (or 352x240) file, then you got it wrong.
There's a world of difference between getting some sort of video off the tape and producing a useful archive.
I said: "scan or photograph her index card for it"
> There's a world of difference between getting some sort of video off the tape and producing a useful archive.
With 8000 tapes (and for most people), the choice isn't a consumer grade copy or a professional grade copy. It's a consumer grade copy or no copy.
The stuff you can buy on Amazon is cheap and captures with the audio and video out of sync. It also loses parts of the video frame. I ended up going through three different capture cards and bought two different VCRs, one of them a high-end S-VHS player with S-Video out for around $200. I could never get the quality to where I wanted it and finally surrendered and sent the tapes to a pro digitization shop for ~$600. But that was just for the capture part of it. I still spent ~150 hours cutting the long files into clips and tagging them.
I never bothered to do it, but the audio/video sync can be addressed with a video editor. The point was to capture the information on disk and toss the tape. Anyone can sync it, cut it into clips, etc., later as there would no longer be any urgency. Many TVs also cut off the edges of the signal, and nobody notices. I've even seen many movies on TV with the edges cut off, such as everything above the eyebrows. No, I don't think it was filmed that way :-)
Yes, you have to clean the heads now and then with a qtip and ethanol. No skill required. Usually just running one of those head cleaner special tapes does the trick just fine. I never had a sticky tape. I have had broken cassettes, but the fix was just taking it apart and moving the reels to an unbroken cassette. Once I had the tape itself break, and a bit of scotch tape got that working again :-)
The results are plenty good enough. My relatives were quite happy to be able to see their old home movies again by clicking a button on their Roku rather than wrestling with their long lost VCR or 8mm camera.
Seriously, this isn't rocket science. It's much easier than recording LPs onto cassettes.
The result will be converting 8000 tapes and their storage problems to two 10T drives, which aren't a burden to store. Though you should copy them to new drives every year or so.
Saying one doesn't have $100,000 to do a 2% better studio job, so throw all the tapes in the trash, is a choice I don't understand.
At a minimum, full SD-resolution capture is necessary. 480 lines and whatever seems reasonable (for VHS, doubt there's much of a difference between 640 and 704/720).
Capture such material at 240 lines and you might as well not be capturing it at all.
It's somewhat involved to make archival-quality digitizations.
The purchase was made using a very successful kickstarter campaign. There was some talk at the time of the actual value of the physical collection, though.
But interesting point nonetheless.
The content should probably be put on the Internet archive
Or... maybe that's just my paranoia acting up again.