Memories With an Expiration Date

You know that box of VHS tapes in your basement? The one you haven’t looked through in years? Well, you may want to dig it out because those memories may fade forever.

VHS tapes are slowly becoming unwatchable, as they have a 20-30 year life span. A group of archivists is racing against time to digitize the tapes. Researchers are calling this the “magnetic media crisis.”

Tapes are made through sounds and images being magnetized onto strips of tape, and using the same principle as when you rub a piece of metal with a magnet, it retains that magnetism. But when you take the magnet away, the piece of metal slowly loses its magnetism — and in the same way, the tape slowly loses its magnetic properties.

"Once that magnetic field that's been imprinted into that tape has kind of faded too much, you won't be able to recover it back off the tape after a long period of time," Howard Lukk, director of standards at the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, told NPR.

Most VHS tapes were recorded in the 1980s and '90s, when video cameras first became widely available to Americans. So, even the best quality and properly stored tapes will eventually be unwatchable.

Groups like XFR Collective are working to make these memories permanent. They hope to make the service more cost-effective, as some companies charge a large amount of money. The service is offered by many shops, some libraries, and online companies, but the cost deters many.

But it’s a tricky thing to master, and many people don’t know the switch is a matter of time – not just an update to outdated technology.

At XFR Collective, the staff is made up of volunteers, and the process is very time consuming. They often have to spend hours watching the entire tape from start to finish, and that doesn’t even account for troubleshooting like dropped frames and tracking issues.

The group works collaboratively to digitize tapes in order of importance. They see anything from wedding videos to public access TV archives that aren’t available in any other format. They put the transferred footage onto an online archive.

The volunteers are tasked with an important job. If they don’t convert this footage, it could be gone forever, thus losing bits and pieces of our history.

But what about your personal collection of home movies? Many drugstores will transfer them to DVD or Blu-Ray, and lots of websites will make DVDs for you as well. But time’s ticking!

Sources:

http://www.mipops.org/magnetic.php

http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/news/a44546/how-to-digitize-vhs-home-videos/

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/06/03/529155865/videotapes-are-becoming-unwatchable-as-archivists-work-to-save-them

https://archive.org/

https://xfrcollective.wordpress.com/