The Joys of Digitizing Old Video Tapes

On the "History" page there are three, well four, lists of productions. The second of these (Savoyards Video Archive) for the years 1976 through 2000, has a column noting the video format. Over the years Jim Novack made use of most of the available pre-digital recording methods: 1/2" videotape reels, 3/4"-Umatic, Beta, VHS, S-VHS and Hi-8. Finding players for some of these has become quite a challenge. Several of the shows that I wanted to digitize were recorded on 3/4"-Umatic tape, and I was very fortunate to make contact with Prof Jim Maas just before he left Ithaca. He very kindly let me use a couple of his Umatic machines to digitize around five productions. However, the machines had not seen much use in several years, and they did not always behave properly. This posting concerns the digitizing of the first Act of the 1981 "Yeomen of the Guard". If you access the posting on YouTube: "How say you maiden" and listen carefully, you may notice a glitch just after Jack Point says "It is for Elsie to say". Then there is another glitch during the music, just after the Lieutenant sings "A headless bridegroom why refuse".

     What happened at those places is a bit embarrassing to relate, but here goes anyway. I was playing back the precious master tape, using a Sony Umatic VO-5850 machine, and all of a sudden the machine  completely stopped, and with it the tape. If you have ever looked inside a Umatic player, you will probably agree that the tape, while it is playing, follows a rather tortuous path. When the machine stopped, I had no idea why. Later I found that a rubber drive belt on the bottom of the unit had snapped, but at the time I just wanted to extract the tape and its cassette from the VO-5850. This I now know how to accomplish with minimum risk to the tape, but back then I just did as best I could, and the result was a damaged section of the master tape. I was not happy.

Fortunately I owned a VHS (analog) copy of a digitized version of the master tape that had been made earlier by Dan Booth, and I was able to use Final Cut Pro to patch the appropriate bit from the VHS tape to complete the digitization. However, I was not out of the woods yet, for when I played back the digitized Act I, I discovered that the audio of the VHS copy was playing back nearly a semitone different from that of the master Umatic tape. A quick visit to an audio program (Peak 5) soon fixed this, and with a bit of tweaking of colour balance, you can scarcely notice the join.