Surviving in the Format Jungle

This year is the 40th anniversary of the Ampex Quadraplex videotape recorder introduced in 1956. The quad format dominated for over 20 years, until it was finally replaced by the helical format. Now, thousands of Quad tapes are sitting on archive shelves, but only a few quad machines exist in a few special facilities. — Since the helical videotape recorder was first introduced in 1962, there have been an average of about two new videotape formats per year. About half of these obtained some degree of popularity and half ended up on the format floor. This abundance of old tape formats is a major problem for anyone with old videotapes with no machines to play them on. As a member of the engineering team that developed the Ampex VR-660 in 1962 and several other Ampex videotape recorders since then, I have closely followed the development of videotape formats. A chart of about 40 of the more popular videotape formats is presented. — The problem of equipment obsolescence is a major problem and is magnified at a large Archive, like the Library of Congress. Recently, the Library of Congress held hearings at three cities in the U.S., at which they heard from national archives, regional archives, production studios, broadcasters, educators, and technology experts on the topic of “The current status of American Television and Video preservation”. At these hearings, several people voiced their concern about the problem of dealing with the continual birth and death cycle of videotape formats. — SMPTE Study Group V16.09 “User Requirements for Automated Storage and Retrieval” was formed in December, and members have expressed their concern about the format problem and that something should be done about it. Possibly, this SMPTE Group could work with archivists to specify a universal archival format.

Published

1996-10

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/M00116

ISBN

978-1-61482-925-6