Unlike Wine, Tape Does Not Improve With Age

Tapes do not improve with age. Quite the opposite. Corporates, consumer and heritage clients have vast archives of magnetic tape that contain information that needs to be preserved.

70% of all audio-visual material is under the threat of deterioration, damage or obsolescence. From about 1950 through the 1990s, most of the world’s audio-visual was entrusted to analogue magnetic recording tape for archival storage.

Now that analogue magnetic tape has moved into a niche archival market, that we at Oxford Duplication Centre specialise in, it is time to reflect and realise that it is time to start worrying about the remaining lifetime of existing tapes.

Video tapes are fundamentally composed of three layers:

1. the binder layer – magnetic particles responsible for signal quality

2. the substrate – stability, strength and friction support

3. the backing – stability, strength and friction support

Corporate and consumer tapes all share one thing in common: they are magnetic media. There are many ways tape can deteriorate:

• Magnetic particles gradually lose their charge, in a process called remanence decay resulting in some colour shift toward weaker hues and loss of detail.

• Magnetic particles may accidentally demagnetise. This can be from storing too near a magnetic source or even from the playback machine itself.

• The lubricant in the binder layer is used up. With each playback it erodes, the binder layer itself takes on more wear, which can directly cause information loss.

• The binder layer can become a sticky and unplayable. The binder’s polymers will absorb water eventually delaminate. Typically called sticky-shed syndrome. Playing a tape in this condition will damage both tape and the playback machine.

• The backing and substrate can become stretched. Multiple rewinding’s and playback. This causes tracking errors that can dramatically reduce playback quality.

Conclusion

If the content is important and should not be lost, copy it now. Do not rely on old tape. Unlike wine, tape does not improve with age. Developing a logical plan and sticking with it is an important part of preserving the audio-visual assets in your collection. It is important to consider that equipment and related knowledge about how to play older tapes will not survive much longer.

Fortunately, at Oxford Duplication Centre we hold some of the rarest tape machines which are serviced and maintained by our experienced team.

Kind regards

Cheryl

Director

Oxford Duplication Centre

Corporate, Consumer and Heritage Digitisation

29 Banbury Road Kidlington Oxfordshire OX5 1AQ

Tel: 01865 457000

Current opening hours: Monday to Friday 10-3pm by appointment only

cheryl@oxfordduplicationcentre.com

www.oxfordduplicationcentre.com

ADDITIONAL TAGS: #ARCHIVE DUPLICATION #ARCHIVING #AUDIOVISUAL #BROADCAST TAPES #CONVERTING #DIGITISATION #DUPLICATION #FAMILYTAPES #HERITAGE DUPLICATION #TAPES TO PRO-RES #VIDEOTAPES

Oxford Duplication Centre Corporate, Heritage and Consumer Digitisation Services within Audio Video Film Image and Text. Oxford duplication Centre

The Repair Shop - How To Spot A Ferrotype Camera 1855-1940s

After watching The Repair Shop on BBC1 restore a beautiful and rather rare ferrotype camera I thought a blog on the process would be interesting. Not only did they repair but they managed to have the camera working, taking photographs. This was very inspirational given the age of the camera. ABOUT FERROTYPE PROCESS Ferrotypes first appeared in America in the 1850s, but didn’t become popular in Britain until the 1870s. They were still being made by while-you-wait street photographers as late as the 1950s. The ferrotype process was a variation of the collodion positive, and used a similar process to wet plate photography . A very underexposed negative image was produced on a thin iron plate. It was blackened by painting, lacquering or enamelling, and coated with a collodion photographic emulsion. The dark background gave the resulting image the appearance of a positive. Unlike collodion positives, ferrotypes did not need mounting in a case to produce a positi...

Preserving Family Memories - caring for your heritage

Memories are an important part of all our lives. Old letters, photographs, scrapbooks, slides and negatives, glass plates, cine film, audio-visual tapes and many other things help us to recall our past and the history of our family and communities. All of these things, however, are subject to decay and eventual destruction if they are not cared for properly. Oxford Duplication Centre in Kidlington can support all our clients with digitisation of all consumers, corporate and heritage scanning and digitisation. Please do email cheryl@oxfordduplicationcentre.com or contact us 01865 457000 to discuss your project. Letters, Diaries, Books and Documents. Many families preserve letters, diaries, or other written documents in which family members discuss their life and times. World War II remembrances have led many families to look for a relative's carefully stored letters. Other families have saved newspaper clippings of important family events, such as the announcemen...

Onion Skin Archive Book Scanning - What is this and how do we process the pages?

CURRENT BOOK SCANNNING PROJECT. We are currently working on a very large archive of old books that require HQ scanning to Archival TIFF images. Once processed, these images will be prepared to PDF with OCR (optical character recognition) for a complete searchable output. The difficulty in this order, is the books are prepared using a medium called Onion Skin Paper. Whilst we are very confident in preparing this type of medium, it is very important to be aware that there are risks with scanning, given the sometimes-fragile nature of the paper. Tears and rips can occur, so a very gentle white glove approach is required. Equally, with the nature of onion skin, the paper is very translucent which requires a sheet of white paper to be placed under each page before scanning. This then grants a very good HQ image that we can work with. WHAT IS ONION SKIN PAPER? Onion skin paper is a type of very light weight, almost translucent paper that ...

Oxford Duplication Centre Ltd

Search This Blog