All about... videotape

Did video kill the radio star? Maybe not completely, but its influence extended far beyond the music industry. Videotape changed the world profoundly, in ways that often go unrecognised. It left its mark on industry and economy, art and aesthetics, politics and society, and paved the way to the world we now live in: a world suffused with screens, with the old duopoly of cinema and television effectively dead. 

But let’s rewind. Video on tape is older than you might realise – well preceding the first home VCRs. The age of the videotape kicked off at the tail end of the 1950s, and lasted to around the end of the 2000s – roughly 50 years. In that time, video really did fuel a revolution.

But not all at once. First to feel its transformative touch was television. Within a few years of Ampex launching its quadruplex video recording system in 1956, the two-inch reels spread through television production in the UK. Videotape couldn’t match film for picture quality (but then, in an era of 405-line images, most viewers would barely notice), but it easily won out on price and flexibility, and with no film processing required it saved time too. Before long, most studio-based programming, if it wasn’t transmitted live, would be shot on tape (though exteriors were still shot on film). 

Not everyone was thrilled. Some creative programme-makers bristled at the inability to edit tape. It was technically possible (to a point) but crude, and strongly discouraged by managers because of the cost of the tapes. Crucially, once cut, the tapes lost what, for broadcasters, was one of their most appealing properties – their capacity for repeated use. 

Broadcasters were so hooked on the financial benefits of reusing videotapes that they valued the tapes more than their contents. And even when programmes weren’t recorded over, if schedulers couldn’t imagine repeating them, then why pay the costs of long-term storage (and, for the BBC, the risk of criticism for wasting public money)? The result was one of the great cultural tragedies of the 20th century. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, as much as two-thirds of broadcast programming, along with the histories and memories it might have preserved, may have been wiped. Some of that lost heritage has since been recovered thanks to an army of amateur sleuths – often, ironically, because programmes were transferred from video to 16mm film for international distribution. But most are probably gone forever. 

Still, video brought huge benefits to television. In a medium that prized its sense of liveness, videotape was a godsend. Flexible, quick and simple to use, it encouraged spontaneity (even pre-recorded programmes could ‘feel’ live). Once technology advanced, a new craft of ‘vision mixing’ allowed producers to create compelling cross-cuts on the fly – just one in a growing arsenal of creative tools and visual effects. From children’s TV to current affairs, documentary to cookery shows and – perhaps especially – pop music shows, much of the television schedule was given new life by video’s capabilities.

Meanwhile, for artists, video opened up vast new territory for often subversive creative experimentation. Following the lead of Korean-American artist Nam June Paik, from the 1960s artists warped, distorted and reassembled the video image in ways that by turns questioned, challenged, satirised and attacked the conventions of mainstream film and TV. Others, meanwhile, busied themselves exploring videotape’s aesthetic and material properties to their limits. 

As the 60s wore on, experimentation in music and video grew ever more entwined. The BBC’s Top of the Pops quickly came to depend on an array of video effects – solarising, inverting colours, multiplying and overlaying images – to spice up its ‘live’ studio performances. But inevitably, as pop music became more visual, bands (or their record companies) wanted to control their own images, rather than rely on the whims of Top of the Pops vision mixers. By the early 1980s, pop video had become an industry in its own right, with such a prodigious output that it would soon need its own TV channels to contain it – and so MTV was born. The pop video led to a new aestheticisation of the music industry, in which the music itself sometimes seemed secondary to the slick, stylised, heavily marketed images.

Beyond broadcasting, videotape opened up new possibilities for the use of moving image as a communication tool: for education and training, corporate promotion, politics and activism. It made the production and distribution of, say, educational or industrial films, infinitely easier (and it didn’t require special skills to play back), and whole new sectors of production emerged to exploit its potential (sadly, the survival rate for their output is even more dismal than for videotaped TV).

Video lowered the old barriers to entry, too. Those once marginalised or excluded were suddenly able to produce and distribute moving image work. Even quite small groups could afford the relatively modest costs, and the equipment was portable and easy to learn. Video put production in the hands of local and community groups, and became a potent tool for political activists. Armed with the 1982 ‘Workshop Declaration’ and a deal with the new Channel 4, fresh voices – Black and Asian collectives, feminist co-operatives, campaign groups – could break into and exploit the once ‘closed shop’ of broadcast television and reach new audiences. 

Decades would pass before the arrival of high-definition digital formats made video an acceptable replacement for celluloid in most feature film production. Even so, the rise of paradigm-changing ‘non-linear’ tools from the late-1980s would soon begin to transform the practice of film editing. And videotape worked its spell on the industry in other, equally powerful ways. The first domestic VCRs (video cassette recorders) appearing in the 1970s signalled a whole new market for film studios. Or rather two: the ‘sell-through’ or buy-to-own market and the rental market that subsequently sprang up through a new rash of video rental shops on almost every high street. 

Suddenly, contemporary releases could follow the end of their theatrical run with a second release window, with the promise of still greater profits from hits, and a second chance for box office flops. And though retailers took their cut, this was far smaller than the share demanded by exhibitors. Even better, neglected back-catalogue titles could be pulled from the vaults and returned to public life, to often surprisingly lucrative effect, as they satisfied a previously hidden public appetite for film collecting.

That appetite fed a sudden new threat: piracy. Easy duplication wasn’t just for the studios; it was in reach of anybody who could connect two or more VCRs together. And the VCR in the living room could easily be used (and very often was) to build a personal library of film classics recorded straight off the TV. Yes, the quality was suboptimal, but it was good enough for most. And so, video made pirates of us all, bedding in a public tolerance for copyright theft – illegal, but little enforced except when at industrial scale – that would ultimately run rampant in the era of downloads and file sharing. 

But for most ordinary people the thrill of videotape wasn’t low-level criminality, it was freedom: from the all-too brief cinema window for movies (and the cost of the popcorn) and from the tyranny of the TV scheduler, now that viewers could ‘timeshift’ programmes (that is, record them to watch later). And it wasn’t just VCRs; as video cameras got cheaper, more and more people could capture and keep their personal and family memories, fuelling a new, altogether more democratic explosion in moving image production.

Videotape set the controls to the 21st-century future: albeit one turbocharged by digital technology and the internet. We watch more (and are watched more, thanks to video-enabled surveillance on our streets) and create more moving images than any generation before us. Today, video, even at professional quality, can be made easily at next to no cost by anybody, for any purpose and any audience (or none!). And with a swipe and a click we can scan through millions of viewing options without even turning on our TV, let alone entering a cinema. 

Long after most of us have consigned to the attic or the jumble sale our obsolete VCRs and our VHS tapes (if we’re old enough to have owned such things), it’s worth looking up from our screens for a moment to wonder at how much this apparently humble technology so completely reshaped the world around us.

– Mark Duguid, Senior Curator Archive Projects

For those of us working in moving image archives, the day-to-day use of linear magnetic storage media – in other words, tapes – remains a constant. In fact, long after home use of VCRs became a thing of the past for most people, the urgency to maintain the craft of videotape has never been more acute for archivists. With all equipment manufacture now stopped, and spare parts limited to what we have on our shelves or might be tracked down through internet auction sites, the pressure is on to digitise collections and preserve them in data forms which are both sustainable and readily accessible.

Through the Unlocking Film Heritage programme (running 2012 to 2017), the BFI worked in partnership with the UK’s leading regional and national film and television archives across the UK to devise methodologies, technical standards and working practices, contracting with a framework of commercial suppliers to achieve mass digitisation for 10,000 film titles.

The main outcome from this National Lottery-funded initiative was to provide unprecedented free-to-view public access to curated works hitherto locked within the physical materials of film and tape through the online BFI Player, including Britain on Film, to interact with our shared moving image heritage. Representing communities and geographic locations across the length and breadth of the UK, the phenomenal success of Britain on Film can be measured through the level of public engagement with these digitised films, with over 70 million video views online to date.

Additionally, a sophisticated digital preservation infrastructure was created within the BFI National Archive to ensure accessibility and long-term preservation of digitised and digital-born content. Hot off the heels of Unlocking Film Heritage, we began the next programme of work – Heritage 2022.

A key priority of Heritage 2022 is to address the imminent risk of permanent loss of the UK’s video heritage, locked into all manner of tape formats no longer widely supported. This preservation-led imperative began with an audit of the videotape holdings of the BFI National Archive and partner regional and national archives across the UK, revealing over 1 million works. A process of significance assessment will lead to the digitisation of some 100,000 titles uniquely held on videotape. The results will be secured within the BFI digital preservation infrastructure, standardised as FFV1 open source files within Matroska, a combination of codec and container chosen as a non-proprietary format for archives. 

A strategic and economic necessity for such a large-scale digitisation project is to identify specialised technical capabilities and services to spread the sheer volume and diversity of work involved. Early in the project, a framework of six commercial suppliers was established to complement the BFI’s own extensive video conservation expertise. With the project fully structured and operational, first batches from across the UK’s significant screen heritage collections are now being digitised en masse by the BFI and its trusted commercial suppliers.

The combination of challenges such a project presents is all consuming. The tapes themselves come in a multitude of types and brands and each one can exhibit its own physical challenges. Some have been stored in perfect cool and dry conditions throughout their lives, which often results in trouble-free replay. Sadly when this has not been the case there are a multitude of threats, including moulds and fungi, moisture and mechanical damage. It takes many hours of specialised work to recover recordings from tapes which have suffered such perils, using specially designed equipment and processes for heat treating, cleaning and often repairing damage by hand.

The complexities of maintaining precision yet obsolete machinery, to reach high volumes of digitisation from such a wide range of possible formats, cannot be overstated. There simply aren’t any short cuts or modern solutions to make sense of the invisibly coded magnetic patterns held within what appear to the human eye as meaningless black and brown strips of plastic. The only way is for each tape to be safely reunited with an exact match of perfectly working machinery.

There is no alternative, and without this urgent action – performed through efficient, structured processes – our most important video heritage, spanning over half a century of artistic works, documentaries, animation, advertising, information and corporate productions, would face certain extinction.

– Charles Fairall, Videotape and Engineering Advisor

Our digital preservation file format for videotape digitisation is the FFV1 Matroska, a codec/container combination that is very popular in audiovisual archives because it is non-proprietary but delivers lossless compression. This means no data is lost, but the file size is smaller than some equivalent lossless formats.

There are many open-source tools developed by the archivist community to help manage FFV1 Matroska files, including a tool called MediaConch, developed by Media Area. MediaConch lets us check every file that we create from our own videotape digitisation or receive from external suppliers, to ensure the file is compliant with our very demanding specification. We run our automation scripts in Python, interacting with various open-source tools.

When we digitise videotapes, we aim to capture everything on the tape carrier, including the bars and tone and clock typically found at the start of videotapes. However, we preserve the content as individual TV programmes, not as a file containing many programmes. So we automate a workflow to split the file into those individual programmes, using timings information that was recorded by video engineers when they created the tape. The timing data is fed to the open-source tool FFmpeg, to divide into programme sections. Each section begins at the end of the previous programme and ends at the start of the next programme – this approach is designed to give sufficient leeway to ensure that no video content is lost in this high-volume automated splitting.

We also automate the creation of records for the FFV1 Matroska files in our Collections Information Database. The database has a RESTful API which lets us send metadata to create new records and update existing records, again using Python. Every file we preserve must have a record in our collections database, to ensure the digital collections are documented in line with our minimum requirements.

Once a record has been created in our database, the FFV1 Matroska file gets pushed through a set of digital preservation automations, starting with ingest to our data tape libraries – called the digital preservation infrastructure. Again this is orchestrated under Python scripts, again using the RESTful API of our data tape library management system.

We send files in blocks of 2 terabytes, and the system stores them to two data tape libraries – identical clones of the data in different locations. When ingest completes, we get a notification, and we then confirm that the MD5 checksum of the file on the data tape is perfect (so no data loss during the ingest process), then we push the file into a transcode workflow to create a low bitrate copy for web access.

Again using FFmpeg, we transcode from the FFV1 Matroska to create an H264 MP4 file (one of the most common access formats for web use), and store it for serving to web applications including the Mediatheque on BFI Southbank. This MP4 is a much smaller file because our transcode reduces the video bitrate for easy delivery over the internet, allowing visitors to BFI Southbank to view the digital collections on dedicated terminals.

For those files that are needed for BFI Replay, our new free streaming service available exclusively in public lending libraries, our final workflow step is to upload the files to a cloud storage solution, where the file is prepared for playback. In parallel, the associated descriptive metadata is provided, to let Replay users search for title and content description and see the genre, subject and other descriptive information.

– Stephen McConnachie, Head of Data and Digital Preservation

As with many film and television archives, the BFI does not own the intellectual property rights to the vast majority of its collections, including its videotapes. Due to the relative newness of audiovisual works and the mind-boggling complexities of copyright duration for films in the UK, the size of its public domain (works where copyright has expired) is tiny, which makes mass rights-clearance for re-use following digitisation especially challenging. 

The BFI’s Heritage 2022 programme aims to digitise and digitally preserve 100,000 works from at-risk videotapes from the UK’s regions and nations archives and from the BFI National Archive’s own collections, and then to make thousands of these programmes available to the UK public on a new service, BFI Replay, for UK libraries.

The programmes digitised from the tapes are almost exclusively from the 1950s to 2010s and include everything from TV comedies, dramas and soaps, documentaries, adverts, news and current affairs, entertainment and quiz shows, educational and arts programmes, kids’ TV, amateur works and public information films. When navigating rights, each category of work brings its own complexities.

The single biggest challenge is information or, rather, the lack of information. 

Unfortunately, the BFI does not yet comprehensively collect, create, record or manage rights data for most of its archive collections. From a rights perspective this presents a huge challenge as it means researching works, companies and people to establish potential copyright holders before starting on the process of contacting and requesting permissions. 

There are ways to mitigate the ‘how long is a piece of string’ sense when clearing rights: preparation and communication being key. Due to the scale of the project, we cannot adopt bespoke approaches for every rights holder; we plan our approaches, taking into account the type of work(s) and type of rights holder(s), with the aim of securing a ‘yes’ with as little work as possible. We maintain an FAQ document to help us respond to queries from rights holders and, when necessary, work with colleagues to establish new processes to manage these.

To date we have identified over 800 rights holders across 33,000 videotapes and have secured permissions for over 10,000 works – making BFI Replay the largest and most successful rights clearance project ever undertaken by the BFI.

– Annabelle Shaw, Rights Database Manager

The following books are available to access in the BFI Reuben Library:

• From Betamax to Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video by Joshua M. Greenberg
• A History of Artists’ Film and Video in Britain by David Curtis
• A History of Video Art: The Development of Form and Function by Chris Meigh-Andrews
• Rewind, Replay: Britain and the Video Boom, 1978-92 by Johnny Walker
• Trash or Treasure?: Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties by Kate Egan
• Veni, vidi, video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR by Frederick Wasser
• Video and DVD Industries by Paul McDonald
• The Videomaker Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Making Video by Editors of Videomaker Magazine
• Video Production: Putting Theory into Practice by Steve Dawkins and Ian Wynd
• Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium by Michael Z. Newman

The following is a selection of books held by the BFI Reuben Library that can be requested in advance from off-site:

• Shooting Video by Frederic W. Rosen
• Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture by Sean Cubitt
• Video Recording: Record and Replay Systems by Gordon White
• Videotape Editing: A Postproduction Primer by Steven E. Browne
• Working with Video: A Comprehensive Guide to the World of Video Production by Brian Winston and Julia Keydel