[HN Gopher] Martin Scorsese's secret life as an obsessive VHS ar...
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Martin Scorsese's secret life as an obsessive VHS archivist
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-03-25 13:20 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| bell-cot wrote:
| Worth noting, for crusaders against administrative overhead at
| colleges & universities:
|
| > In the basement of the University of Colorado Boulder's main
| library, an 85-year-old stone fortress built in the Italian rural
| style, the archives of the school's Rare and Distinctive
| Collections occupy rows of shelves as far as the eye can see.
| Here, amid yellowed books, historical maps and medieval
| manuscripts, Martin Scorsese has quietly made public a very
| private preoccupation. More than 50 storage boxes hold thousands
| of VHS tapes that contain films and television programs Scorsese
| recorded directly from broadcast television. The renowned
| director and film preservationist, it turns out, was also, for
| decades, a prolific guerrilla archivist.
|
| > For the archivists at the Rare and Distinct Collections, the
| most pressing issue at the moment is the preservation of the
| Scorsese collection. Magnetic media degrades as it ages. It is
| believed that a VHS tape begins to progressively lose image
| quality after only 10 years. Some of Scorsese's tapes are more
| than 40 years old. And so the entire archive must be digitized -
| a major undertaking. Converting thousands of hours of analog
| recordings is slow, tedious work.
|
| In a perfect world, there might be plenty of well-run and -funded
| museums, which could do such work. In the world we've got...yeah.
| Big, prestige-hungry universities probably bear 90% or more of
| this burden.
|
| In a far-from-perfect world, it would still be lovely if
| universities provided detailed, honest financial statements -
| which clearly distinguished this kind of "preserve history"
| technical work...from the all the myriad sorts of education-
| irrelevant crap that they squander fortunes on these days.
|
| In the world we've got...I'm sure that top-of-market
| administrator salaries and hand-carved jade ceilings in the shiny
| new student amenities are higher priorities.
| nxobject wrote:
| For what it's worth, I'm sure that, if you asked every direct
| report why they created a position below them, they'd give a
| perfectly cromulent justification. That doesn't explain away
| the inefficiencies of college in general, but I do think there
| are root causes of that that are worth going in depth into.
|
| For example, presidents have large offices because they would
| say they hold many hats these days, more than they did in the
| past when higher ed institutions recieved more state money:
| fundraising on the road and glad-handing big donors for that
| personal touch, going to policymakers for more money and for
| advocacy, working with big donors to plan large investments
| that open entire research units, dealing with internal
| governance of the college and with faculty. No one person can
| handle all of these responsibilities.
|
| Or you could look at student services: some administrator saw a
| need to support certain student populations to increase
| retention (more college completion = more alumni $$$$, more
| good press about alums), so you now have people that create
| programming to engage first-generation college students, Black
| students, students with disabilities. That's a huge set of
| communities to engage (especially in large institutions), and
| no one person can do all of that as well.
|
| The question is: are colleges doing work that should rightly be
| done elsewhere, and why isn't society making that happen? For
| example, colleges are developing integrated safety nets and
| free services (people who disburse emergency funds, mental
| health care, people that help students navigate this internal
| system, for example), because American society and government
| doesn't offer such an integrated system, at least to the
| standards that colleges are now aspiring to.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Tbh, regarding the preservation and digitization of the
| collection of concern in this thread, plenty of institutions,
| private individuals, companies, and organizations would love
| to take that work from the university. The uni, otoh, has no
| incentive to let the asset out of their hands.
| nxobject wrote:
| It's always fascinating to see how accomplished artists work to
| be in conversation with others in their medium. How do people use
| the past to form their current goals, and how do people use their
| current goals to guide their research into the past? How do they
| deconstruct what they think works, what doesn't? And how do they
| organize all of this thinking?
|
| These are really analytical guiding questions. Although I won't
| have an artistic career, I'd love to learn to think analytically
| like these artists do.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> The entire archive must be digitized - a major undertaking.
| Converting thousands of hours of analog recordings is slow,
| tedious work. For the moment, the university requires the person
| requesting materials to pay for the digitization of any tape that
| hasn't already been converted._
|
| Canada spent a small fortune to digitize thousands of hours of
| analog Canadian TV shows, published them on YouTube, then...
| deleted the channel without advance notice before the videos
| could be publicly archived,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35716982
| bscphil wrote:
| Chasing through the links, it looks like someone did manage to
| upload a significant portion of the channel to archive.org:
| https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Encore%20%2B%2...
| the_af wrote:
| Wow. Why did they delete it after all that effort?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I dunno exactly why but the idea of being some university student
| in some back room, watching and digitizing what Scorsese thought
| was interesting decades ago, ideally at 1am, seems incredibly
| cozy to me.
|
| I hope the room is filled with other ancient technology such as
| reel to reel, filmstrips, and microfiche so that it smells
| _incredible_.
| speedylight wrote:
| Seems like a great idea for a date!
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Martin Scorsese should sponsor https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-
| decode :-)
|
| It's the ultimate in VHS preservation.
|
| I'm sure the Venn diagram between HN and Hollywood could make
| this happen!
| kouru225 wrote:
| I'm sorry what is this? Is this a software capture card? I'm so
| confused.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| It appears to be software designed to use an SDR or (and?) a
| DTV capture card to capture the output of a VCR playing a VHS
| at the RF level, and then transcode and store it. Pretty
| cool, if I'm understanding it correctly!
| Solvency wrote:
| How lossy is transcoding at the RF level of an already
| lossy medium?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| It's much better than any other existing technology to
| capture VHS.
|
| It bypasses all analog processing of the signal by the
| VHS player and captures the video signal directly from
| the tape head.
|
| All further processing is then done in software. If any
| improvements in software processing is made, the "raw"
| capture can then be reprocessed with better results.
| bitwize wrote:
| So it's like a Kryoflux for VHS tapes? That _is_ cool.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Ha, adding that to my parlance! It's _exactly_ like
| Kryoflux for VHS tapes.
|
| An example - S-VHS tapes can not be played back in
| regular VHS players. They can't handle the format.
|
| But with vhs-decode, it doesn't matter. A regular cheap
| VHS player can "rip" an S-VHS tape.
|
| And decode the HiFi FM-stereo signal, too.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Mr Scorsese should consider donating his collection to the film
| experts at the VFA. https://vfa.expert/
| CurrentB wrote:
| I was hoping to see this exact recommendation.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| From the _website_ I can 't exactly tell why sending all the
| tapes there would be a great idea. But you guys seem to know
| something I don't, care to elaborate? :)
| lapetitejort wrote:
| I'm honestly surprised when I see On Cinema references in the
| wild, mainly because I'm still amazed that they survived
| cancellation by Adult Swim only to create their own hyper-niche
| streaming service that has survived for going on three years.
| kouru225 wrote:
| I work for someone who has a very large collection of old video
| tape. You think these people would be interested?
| georgespencer wrote:
| Context: https://www.vulture.com/article/tim-heidecker-and-
| gregg-turk...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The Internet Archive will likely take them. Happy to
| facilitate and cover logistics costs.
| Solvency wrote:
| > Long before YouTube and Netflix gave the world instant access
| to a deep repository of media, Scorsese began the project of
| amassing his own private on-demand video library. In each week's
| TV Guide, he would note the movies and shows that caught his
| interest. A full-time video archivist in Scorsese's New York
| office would then record the telecasts from a kind of audiovisual
| hub made up of multiple VCRs and monitors, which could often be
| active at all hours. The tapes were meticulously labeled,
| cataloged initially using a library-like card system and later a
| computer, and filed away for Scorsese's personal viewing and
| research.
|
| Wait so let me get this straight. Scorsese, an incredibly busy
| and prolific director, paid a full-time team to record TV
| content, around-the-clock, all based on him whimsically
| highlighting programs of interest from a weekly TV guide?
|
| And then he'd periodically book a flight to NY to randomly pluck
| these VHS tapes from storage and watch them?
|
| Was this just an ultimate wealth flex? Could someone like
| Scorsese really not simply gain access to virtually any content
| he wants directly from studio sources for research work?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| If you have (much) more money than time, it seems like a TiVo
| with concierge user interface.
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