In the States, VHS won out as the popular format, and Betamax is lamented as the great whatcouldhavebeen of video freex everywhere… everywhere here. However, in other places, Betamax had a much stronger hold and is looked back on as the format of 80s nostalgia. To wit:

(Rough translation of the title lyrics: “Back then there was only Betamax” [i.e., things were much simpler back in the day])

Wala pa nung, indeed, my friends. Wala. pa. nung.

— Joshua Ranger

I tend to favor the latter evaluation because, outside of a thesis on the socio-aesthetics of online catalogs, I haven’t had much chance to apply all that book-learnin’. Perhaps that’s why I was excited to read Virginia Heffernan’s recent Sunday Times Magazine piece, “How HDTV Scrambles Beauty Standards”. The problem of HDTV exposing every line, splotch, make-up-covered-blemish, facial hair, and — especially — plastic surgery scar is nothing new. What I found novel in Ms. Heffernan’s article was the discussion of how cultural beauty standards may be shaped in part by available image-producing technology. She suggests that stars such as Katharine Hepburn and Harry Belafonte who were admired for more angular looks (high cheekbones, regal noses) would not have become as well established in an HD world as they were when their star image was viewed in the realm of more contrast-y black and white shot by cinematographers well-versed in established lighting and capture techniques that simultaneously highlighted and softened. She also points out that people with contrasting coloring (dark hair, pale skin, ruddy cheeks) do not look good in HD. Stars like Montgomery Clift and Ava Gardner looked dreamy in Technicolor — their extreme coloring playing to the heightened unreal reality of the color process — but those same features can look garishly unreal in the so-real-it-hurts reflection of HD.

So what does look good in HD? Heffernan’s argument is that the format favors the monochromatic, pointing out Jessica Alba as a potential ideal. The article suggests a positive aspect of this (Alba comes from an extremely mixed cultural heritage; the ‘browning’ of America is becoming an accepted norm) but there is also a subtextual negative in her use of language: the general even-ing out of visual / artistic culture to a middle-of-the-road banality where contrast and originality are subsumed by an overwhelming sameness.

Admittedly, from the ground, that point of view sometimes seems to be the case. They don’t make stars / movies like they used to… The culture is growing dumb and lazy… Nobody cares about skill and quality… These concerns are well known. More well known than one might know. The same complaints about backsliding, the weakening of our character and culture, and the continuing downward spiral of America have been repeatedly expressed since the colonial period, most likely since the second colonizing ship hit shore. (And I won’t even get into the long-standing theories of degeneration from the purity of Native cultures or Buffonian generational decay engendered by the atmosphere of the Americas.)

I’m afeared that I’m starting to sound like a rambling old fuddy-duddy, discontented that they just don’t make ‘em like they used to. However, I run at the mouth so because I feel it’s important to be aware of these historical trends and cognizant of technological and aesthetic shifts in modes of expression. Reformatting is a fact of audiovisual preservation, and within that process is the demand to maintain the highest possible fidelity to the originating image / signal / object / etc.

The desire in this process is to keep that original looksound, the aesthetic quality tied to the historical development of the medium and related creative processes. The problem is that, first, these fidelicious attempts have a certain reliance upon human memory and human perception as part of determining the success of reformatting. This fact is what it is. Second to consider is the problem that started this whole post (remember a few paragraphs back?): the fact that technologies change and it is not always possible to capture the same intangible quality from generation to generation.

This is why we at AVPS always recommend that important originals be maintained after a preservation reformatting project — a better technology for image / signal capture may come along later; it is necessary to quality check originals versus new derivatives; etc. — but it is also why we recommend maintaining or achieving the ability, where feasible, to play back original assets. Without being able to see and assess how a particular format from a particular time period presented itself, we lose the cultural knowledge of how that content originally looked and why it was considered of aesthetic value. This isn’t to say that all people must only watch films or videos in their original format, but rather, that that original display be available so that later caretakers reformatting to new presentation technologies can develop means to emulate older styles… Or so that later content creators can learn from and artistically emulate the skills of the past. We see this in the development of .mp3 where the ultimate goal is to revise the format to the point that it can reproduce instrumental music and lower range tones as well as analog formats can. HD is here, and we need to demand that display devices be able to recreate the sharpness, contrast, and range of tones (or limits thereon) that older formats / displays produced, and we also need to expect that creators will become equally skilled with using the new medium.

Things are never the same. They never will be. Until they are, we all have the responsibility to make sure that the way things were remains an accessible knowledge source.

— Joshua Ranger

What I stumbled upon next was a video by the same performer, one which brought back a flood of memories:

Thing is, you see, “Thunderstruck” was my graduating class song in high school. I’m not quite sure how that came to pass. It was not a new song at the time, nor had it been incredibly popular like the class songs from preceding years. I’m not saying I disliked the song, but I think my submissions for consideration at that time included some Pink Floyd song, “Staying Alive” arranged for kazoos, and then probably something like Mozart’s Requiem or some such. All I’m saying is, there must have been an arranged effort to nominate an old AC/DC song to commemorate the greatest years of our lives.

It’s true that the past is a foreign country, but so, it sometimes seems now, is my hometown.

Or maybe not. I started looking around for other videos related to “Thunderstruck” and, judging from the number I viewed, found that it’s quite the touchstone for expressing one’s emotions and one’s virtuosity (that is one hell of a guitar riff). I found some fun stuff:

But things quickly degenerated from there:

(Oh, PBS, you have the greatest power to disappoint!)

And then it just started to hurt:

So all in all I had an accelerated ride over the smooth-to-pot-holed road through the neighborhoods of nostalgia, ironic appropriation, kitsch, and detritus. What I learned on my evening vacation was, really, you’ve got to hold onto the night, hold onto the memories, because, although we’ve come to the end of the road, these are days we’ll remember.

Oh — I also learned that, in spite of everything, bagpipes still kinda rock.

— Joshua Ranger

He even says “videos” instead of “movies”! [swoon]

A follow up column on the experience of migrating his MiniDV content (“Moving Taped Past to Hard-Drive Future”) takes a more technical than emotional bent on the process (though it does end with a stirring call-to-arms for everyone to start similar projects). I hope you read the article, but, in short, Pogue ran into some roadblocks with his first plan and had to go back and revise his strategy. I think it’s telling about the challenges involved in audiovisual preservation, especially as we move more into the digital realm, that what seems like a simple process (stick the tape in and let the machines do their work) brought some consternation to a tech expert (and one who gets personal emails from Steve Jobs, none the less). Yes, people should start working on reformatting their personal media collections, but there are a number of avenues, and branches of options off of those avenues, in deciding how to best do it, and not everyone has the resources at hand to help in those decisions.

I guess this is the point, then, where I should bring up some resources for people to consult about the reformatting of DVCam and MiniDV tape. They are touchy formats due to their small size and the makeup of the tape and binder, and it’s true that the formats are trending towards obsolescence, but there’s a lot of unique content out there shot on DV that’s going to need taking care of. David Rice has written a great piece about the ins and outs of migrating DV tapes, expressing the importance of capturing it as a data stream rather than as a video signal (“Digital Tape Preservation Strategy: Preserving Data or Video?”). Additionally, our free and open source DV Analyzer application is a simple tool that anyone can use to review the metadata in the DV data stream that’s carried over during a Firewire migration of DVCam or MiniDV.

(Allow me one geek moment here in response to Pogue’s article: Final Cut Pro can carry over the date and time metadata, but only if the captured stream is not re-transcoded during within the process. This may be accomplished by selecting File>Export or pulling the file from the Capture Scratch directory instead of using the Export>Using Quicktime Conversion option.)

The DV Analyzer tool also identifies and lists error codes in the DV stream that occur during playback. The garbbled video that Pogue mentions is likely a result of error concealment performed by the playback device — most typically misread data in frame being patched up with data from the previous frame — and DV Analyzer would provide the error detection code for those sections that could then be analyzed to see if it can be determined what the cause of the error was. Sometimes this is due to degradation, but often enough these errors are caused by the touchy nature of DV tapes. Many times the same errors will not appear if played through the deck again or run through another deck. Further information can be found at http://www.avpreserve.com/dvanalyzer/what-does-it-analyze/ or under the Case Studies section on the DV Analyzer main page http://www.avpreserve.com/dvanalyzer/.

A final important point from the article is how Pogue’s experience underscores how much we have to monitor and advocate for the tech companies to better understand and maintain the capabilities that enable preservation and access. The idea that professional film and television editors don’t need to know the date of when something was shot is fairly ludicrous. I doubt a news program would feel all right using footage for a story they can’t properly identify, or that film editors wouldn’t want to be able to find content from a certain date of shooting. Outside of this, the date stamp, timecode, and other metadata are absolutely necessary for the authenticity of archival materials, especially in matters of research or, increasingly, in legal matters (see this Times article about metadata as evidence). It’s maybe a tad idealistic to think we can always have an effect on corporate decisions, but a positive point is that a little vocal activity did do some good in getting Firewire ports back after Apple decided to remove them. Sure Firewire dependent devices were severely decreasing in manufacture, but there is so much out there that has been produced on those devices, and the future ability to access or capture that content for preservation extends well beyond the end of manufacturing.

— Joshua Ranger

Images related to the story Lucy from Radiolab on Vimeo.

The whole episode is, as usual, quite good, but there is a poignant story at the end of the program, starting about 45 minutes in.

There’s a lot of background to the story, but the gist is that one day, two investigators at the Great Ape Trust, a research center that has raised a bonobo named Kanzi to communicate through various means, were arguing. Kanzi saw the argument and afterwards communicated with the director of research that, as the alpha male, he should go and bite the one investigator that had been arguing rather vehemently in order to put him in his place. The director said he couldn’t do that, so Kanzi threatened that if the investigator didn’t go bite the other one, he (Kanzi) would bite him, the man he was commanding to act.

The director didn’t do as he was told and went about his business. 24 hours later, the bonobo was being transported to an outside area. At this point he escaped from his handler and ran to the director’s office, bursting in and then biting his hand. The man ended up almost dying during surgery because of an allergic reaction and ultimately lost a finger.

At this point in the story, most people wonder what exactly this argument was about that caused this befingering, this violent dedigitization. The answer? The two investigators were arguing about the proper video format for archiving documentation of their research.

!

And I thought audiovisual archivists were the only ones who got that heated up about choosing formats!

Of course, being who I am, at this point in the story my mind leaps not to pondering the consequences of a bonobo bite, but rather skips directly over to the question of what video formats they were arguing about and which one they ultimately decided upon. The program gives no clue either way, and I’m left with a gnawing worry in my stomach about the end result.

But seriously, and not to take this man’s pain lightly, I find this to be an almost heartening story. First, it’s kind of nice to hear that people outside our small circle take archival issues into consideration and treat them as an important matter. Maybe that means that some of our efforts to inform the public about preservation issues are having an effect.

Second, there is solace in the fact that, no matter how much we argue back and forth about formats and archival best practices, when all is said and done at least we don’t bite each other’s fingers off… Though I think from now on I’ll keep my metal mesh gloves on when I publish these missives — you know, just as a standard safety precaution.

— Joshua Ranger

One person can be an inspiration and symbolize much that is beyond his or her original reach, but history is built by the millions. Hopefully that singular inspiration will also create a desire to dig deeper and discover more that history has to offer. Happy researching, and Happy MLK Day!

— Joshua Ranger

I mean, Abe Lincoln and George Washington selling sheets and towels, that just makes sense — but could you imagine being bombarded with similar type ads featuring King all weekend?

— Joshua Ranger

Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’ Civilization

The scenario is ludicrous, but like good comedy (and horror) can do this piece from The Onion reflects an anxiety gnawing at the larger society. In this case, the fear that the digital world moves too fast for us to keep up, that we are always in danger of becoming culturally obsolete, and that whatever we are “in to” is actually a lame waste of time. I don’t really have a good argument in defense of the relative coolness of my own tastes, but I could argue that our fear of the speed of the digital age is somewhat misplaced.

Not scientifically but conceptually thinking, time moves at different rates. We can speak of watching a film as a short 2 1/2 hours or of a long day at work, or marvel at the quickness in the passing of a year. In the experience of the everyday, time does not seem to be on our side. It’s something we struggle against to slow down or speed up. Because we are in the midst of technological or cultural changes they seem to come at us furiously, constantly shifting the playing field and testing our skills at adaptation. Part of that adaptation is mocking what we left behind — that is, of course, until it shifts into an object of nostalgia.

History and memory, however, take a slower, more constant rate that looks at the bigger picture. History may or may not be concerned with the trends in communication and information sharing in the early 21st century, but it certainly will not care about who was the fastest to Tweet the news about Michael Jackson’s death.

This doesn’t mean we should trash content we currently find to be culturally insignificant. Preservation of the day-to-day record is what will enable the future to interpret the past — not necessarily through just its content but also through the fact of its existence and formulation. This is where our responsibilities as archivists lie, but it’s also where our anxiety over the speed of the digital age should be more focused and transformed into positive actions. There are an overwhelming number of issues surrounding the preservation of digital materials, but there are also a number of standards, guidelines, and recommendations being produced by organizations like The Library of Congress, IASA, PrestoSpace, and even little old us. Shifts in the digital landscape make us feel like we’re being left behind. That feeling is exacerbated by inaction, but, more importantly, it is mitigated by having a digital strategy in place that can transform those seismic seeming shifts into minor, day-to-day events that are easily addressed.

So if you haven’t already, start making a plan. For those of you that have planned out a digital preservation strategy, where did you start and what resources did you find helpful? The only thing I beg of you is please please please have good descriptive and contextual metadata. I don’t want some future generation finding something like the above video, and then not be able to tell that it’s satire and start to think that we were, like, totally lame. Embarrassing!

— Joshua Ranger

— Joshua Ranger

Tablet Magazine has Orrin Hatch write Hanukkah song…

— Joshua Ranger