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Rough Guide to Preservation

Getting help

What can you expect from a professional video- or restoration company?

Professional video company
A professional video company has an extensive collection of equipment to play and transfer video. They have specialists and all the equipment at hand for a professional, high-quality transfer of analogue video tapes or cassettes to a new digital media.

Optimal playback is the first key to high-quality conversion. First, the tape is cleaned in a cleaning machine. Often these machines will give an indication of tape problems like drop-outs. Then the tape is played back via a time base corrector, digital noise reduction, and possibly a simple digital video processor. This makes it possible to monitor and correct in real time drop-outs, noise, colour shifts, and fluttering or trembling that may occur when playing old video tapes. They also use the finest audio apuipment for the soundtracks from the video tape or cassette to ensure a good reproduction. After all adjustments are made the most optimal video and audio signals can be transferred to any new digital media, whether it is a cassette or a hard disk system.

Video restoration company
A video restoration company has more experience than a video production company as they specialise in restoration of video tapes and cassettes. Beside all the playback equipment in a large scale of formats, often they use special restoration equipment such as the digital restoration unit Archangel from Snell & Wilcox.
This computerised film and video restoration unit can correct the most common video errors and failures.

How it works
First the film or videotape is cleaned in a special designed video tape cleaning machine (RTI), and then transferred to Digital Betacam or a hard disk. The Archangel specialist will assess the condition of the images by studying each shot or even each individual image. On the basis of his assessment he can decide whether or not the restoration is possible using the Archangel unit.

The Archangel specialist will enter a code for the restoration method for a particular image or shot. This is related to the SMPTE time code of the Digital Betacam tape. The Archangel can stabilise images, reduce noise, correct colour shifts, drop-outs, scratches and strands, replace stains with bits of another image, or substitute (part of ) a damaged image with another one. The Archangel will perform the corrections completely automated from the Digital Betacam or from a film scanner. Via the Archangel software the most optimal video and audio signals can be transferred to any new digital media, whether it is a cassette or a hard disk system.

The standard of the equipment used, the skill of the operators / technicians and the quality of the video tapes all play an important role in the final result of your new digital master.

Video Restoration Company
Video restoration room

Computer graphics
If there are still video errors which not can restored by automatic restoration they must restored by a computer graphics specialist. Fields and/or frames can be restored in the same way as restoring photographs by using fragments of nearby images.

The cost of advanced restoration by equipment or/and a computer graphics specialist is very high but the final result will recreate a new digital master as close as possible to the old analogue video tape.

Which of the problems one wants to see corrected is ultimately a matter of choice and available budget, but when errors and effects of- tape deterioration interfere with access and reuse, a fully restored copy may be required. This will be fairly expensive, but for material of great historical value it may be worthwhile to create a high-quality digital master with viewing copies instead of a jittery, fluttering original.
We strongly advise both the original analogue tape and the first corrected digital safety master are stored permanently to allow for better digitisation in the future with new techniques.