Ted Langdell writes:
Are you [Jim Wheeler] saying that you doubt any future technology would improve on Donald's BetaSP copies?
Or did you mean that—when doing future migration—you doubt that any future 2" or 1" playback technology would make any noticeable improvement over what was at the audio and video outputs of the play decks during the mentioned migration?
I got a sense that Jim meant the latter - that there's a theoretical limit to how much picture and sound information you can squeeze out of one of these tapes, and that if you made the initial transfer to a superior format using equipment in optimal condition, you've reached that limit the first time and aren't going to be able to exceed it later.
I'm no expert on video technology, but would suggest that it was this way of thinking that informed the 'nitrate won't wait' culture of copying and then discarding the original in the 1970s and '80s. Then optical printer technology improved and they could deal with more severe shrinkage, and faster and finer grained duplicating stocks came on the market, etc. etc. A colleague at the BFI was recently comparing continuous contact dupes of the same 1920s nitrate original made in the mid-70s and late '90s, and discovered that the difference between the two was very, very significant.
Of course this is all very well in theory, but in practice committing to migrating a large collection of 2" tapes to a current format and then keeping the originals effectively doubles your commitment to storage space provision, with significantly less likelihood that a subsequent migration from those originals will even be possible - let alone offer the prospect of a better transfer - several years down the line. Of course there MAY be a quantum leap in technology - someone discovers a way of reading the oxide particles on a tape optically without any need for complex helical scan head mechanisms, for example - which enables us to get a far stronger signal off legacy tape formats than has hitherto been possible with restored original equipment. But retaining the originals after a large-scale format migration programme on the offchance represents a big financial commitment.
Leo
Leo Enticknap
Lecturer in Cinema
Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds
Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK
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