As someone who frequently researches obscure and obsolete topics (but in a different subject area), I very much appreciate the efforts of people like her. Especially for older topics, Google is often silent, archive.org has little, but going to a physical library will yield much better results.
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.
To me the article evokes the existential futility of trying to achieve anything everlasting. Living humans cannot carry the past history of all those gone before -- at best, there is a continuing process of loss and compression.
From the article:
> "Before he died, he told me: 'The collection is going on forever. It has to go on,'"
Then ought not we ask, are we contented with a selective reading and understanding of all those that have preceded us, especially those of small repute and those that had insignificant impact on that history?
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."
There's something to be said about how if you search google you get 10 things, just 10 things, usually 10 things tied to recent events, on the first page. Granted effort is required by the individual to know more, but really so many things seem homogenized or just misrepresented (not intentionally).
Seems like exactly the type of trove that the Smithsonian Institution would be interested in: "Termed 'the nation's attic' for its eclectic holdings of 154 million items, the Institution's nineteen museums, nine research centers, and zoo include historical and architectural landmarks,"
I’ve had this vision of being able to watch 90s cable as it aired (channel flipping). This would entail a project wherein people en masse would send in all their VHS and in return for free digitization we would be able to keep the archived video to recreate cable airtime. I know it’s impossible, for copyright/privacy issues, but stories like this make me think it’s technically feasible. The material is out there.
This is why copyright needs to die. Modern culture is locked behind it, making it inaccessible unless people pay in perpuity. Even then, access is limited and a lot of properties simply aren't sold legally anymore.
There's a website like this. You can only flip through a few channels, and there's no guide, but it was long format recordings including commurcials. Ah! Why can't I think of the name. Maybe keep looking? Sorry this isn't more helpful, but maybe just knowing it's there will help.
Yes, probably more. Glossy and strangely happy visuals as a list of side effects is being read. I don’t watch a lot but still have over the air tv, and it seems to be bankrolled by drug ads.
This brings back memories from my childhood when my father would spend his weekends drinking Michelob, gnawing on a massive stick of pepperoni, and watching sports on television.
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.
I loved watching golf, curling and bowling on the weekends as a kid. I’d read math and physics books with those programs running in the background. The announcing for curling was like holding the event in the reference section of the library.
As someone suggested, the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress can accept a donation for a tax deduction, so a person of wealth can buy it from her for $$ she can live on and they get the 40% or so deduction on the donation. Needs some appraisals by third parties to make it work, but it is doable and can be staged over a few years.
I did this kind of thing in college. It's more involved than you think. If you want good results, you're going to need at minimum a professional VCR (We used the Panasonic AG-7350), a timebase corrector, and a professional grade digitizer. Luckily, the equipment is much cheaper than it used to be. You'll probably need a food dehydrator to bake sticky tapes for one last playback. And since tape that old is probably falling apart, you'll need to get good at cleaning heads with cotton tech wipes and ethanol.
I've done it for a hundred or so old tapes. It is not so involved. I used thrift store VCRs and an Amazon USB video capture device. Almost all the old tapes play just fine. If the tape has gone bad, it's gone bad. Just toss it and move to the next one.
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.
Most of the cheap ways of capturing analog video will end up dropping half the image data before the process even starts.
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.
I recently spent 200-300 hours of my life digitizing, editing, and tagging about 60 VHS tapes of family home movies. It's harder than you think...
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.
It's nice you were willing to go to that effort and expense for your family, I hope they appreciate it. But it isn't necessary to go that far if it means throwing the tapes away because it is too expensive.
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 :-)
As I understand it, the cost of digitization is often regarded by archivists/special collections curators as a substantially more expensive than traditional methods of "store it in humidity controlled vault". In the frame of university archives/special collections considerations like, costs of specialized staff (or retraining staff to deal with digitized collections), software that allows for public access and upholds existing copyright restrictions, and future-proofing file formats can add up.
I've digitized family letters, pictures, and home movies, and it doesn't take specialized skills to do it. Quite adequate results can be had with consumer equipment - even a phone camera is very good and fast at capturing documents.
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.)
8,000 2hr tapes equate to nearly two years of running time. For the transferred footage to be of any use, it needs to be tagged and catalogued. You'd be looking at around $100,000 in labour costs, assuming that the tapes are in good condition and don't need significant restoration.
Sure, it's 2 years of running time. It's not 2 years of labor time, though. Put the tape in, push "play" on the VCR, "record" on the app running on the computer, go spend some quality time with your friends, come back in 2 hours, push "finish", and stick in another tape. Then, simply scan or photograph her index card for it.
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.
A RAID array full of unlabelled .MP4s of borderline-unwatchable VHS transfers isn't much use to anyone. Good VCRs and timebase correctors aren't cheap; keeping those VCRs running well is a major challenge due to age and the lack of spare parts. Getting a good transfer from an old tape is a lot more complicated than just pressing record. Anyone who works with video will tell you that metadata is both essential and enormously time-consuming.
There's a world of difference between getting some sort of video off the tape and producing a useful archive.
> Ah yes, cheap second hand VHS players, definetly not famed for chewing up cassettes.
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).
I've bought second hand ones, and never had one chew up a tape. They'll sometimes need the heads cleaned, which you can do with a qtip and alcohol or just get one of those head cleaner tapes.
(Putting a tape in with a broken case, however, will get you what you expect.)
What resolution did you use to capture? What deinterlacing algorithm did you use to process the footage? Did you run the VCRs output through a quality TBC?
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.
In Portland, the Hollywood Theatre recently bought out Movie Madness, a classic SE video store boasting a wide collection of film media.
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.
I've always wondered if in future an archive like this can be used to train a machine learning powered cyborg boxer or even a robot boxer. This could be one of the incentives for preserving this archive. Surely with AI set to replace a lot of workers, boxers will also be affected
Youtube has lots of unboxing videos. Maybe one could just play these backwards, and then the robot/cyborg will learn how to properly box stuff instead of unboxing it. Google's ML division could do it very easily since they basically own the video archive already.
My thought too. :) Another use (which is perhaps not as far-fetched) is to train a neural network on the collection to detect connected punches. Then we could fire all shitty, corrupt boxing judges and rely on tech instead.
Makes me wonder if there is some value in converting these to digital, then running each scenario through some kind of Machine Learning setup. Learn what makes for successful v. unsuccessful from a tactics perspective.
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithsonian_Institution
https://archive.org/details/tv
They also have a detailed archive of September 11 programming:
https://archive.org/details/911
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.
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 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 :-)
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.
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.
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).
(Putting a tape in with a broken case, however, will get you what you expect.)
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.
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.
[1] https://museum.tv/donate%20an%20artifact.htm
The content should probably be put on the Internet archive
Or... maybe that's just my paranoia acting up again.