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.

Blog Growth Pains

As this blog has grown, it has become clear that the original organization of the pages needs to be improved. I have added a new page "Photos of Shows", and the index to the photos has been moved there from the "History" page. I will also be modifying the "Video and Audio" page so that I don't have to keep repeating the same information for each listing. There are now nine videos from the 1981 "Yeomen of the Guard" up on YouTube, and a couple more will soon be added so as to complete Act I of that show. Re the still pictures: I have been posting the photos that Mark Lawrence sent to me, but after the 1970 Ruddigore, there is a large gap in coverage until the 1979 Pinafore. Fortunately we have photos from some of the intervening shows buried away in drawers, cupboards and cardboard boxes around our home, so my next project will be to scan a representative sample of these and add them to the display.

     A word about the program for the 1981 "Yeomen" that can be seen on the "Memorabilia" page. Rather than post the actual scan of the program, I decided to try processing the scan with a modern OCR (optical character recognition) application. The rendition was remarkably accurate - I saw only two errors in the raw text: TIM WELLS became TTM WELLS, and the OCR application was not able to interpret correctly the original Old English font that was used to spell out "The Savoyards". OCR has clearly come a long way since I last tried it! (And yes, the original program did misspell "YOEMEN" in the heading to Production Staff!)     

More Videos from Yeomen, 1981

I seem to have slowed down on posting the still pictures from the old shows, but then I have been working on editing videos of individual songs from the 1981 "Yeomen of the Guard". Earlier today I put up on YouTube "When our gallant Norman foes" sung by Anne Hering as Dame Carruthers, and "Is life a boon" sung by myself as Colonel Fairfax. One is reminded by the (inappropriate?) giggles during the former song that the videos of this show were recorded (by Jim Novack) at the pickup rehearsal on Thursday November 12th, 1981. Apparently there were some of Anne's friends in the audience. Re the second item, I think it was often known to the other cast members as the "Fa'boom" song.
     Waiting in the wings is the rest of Act I, and I hope to be able to post this, and index it here, before I have to start really paying attention to the upcoming semester. Talking of which, it always seemed right that I should play an alchemist, since my chosen profession is chemistry.
                                    - DAU

Making Progress

     A couple of weeks into the new blog and it seems to be taking shape. By now I have posted the photos of ten of the earlier shows, together with the captions they sported on the former Cornell Savoyards website. If you have any information that could lead to the identification of presently unidentified players I would be grateful if you would pass it along.

     I have also begun to post more video from the 1981 Yeomen. So right now we have "Strange Adventure" (which has been up on YouTube for a while) and "When Maiden Loves" as sung beautifully by Heidi Merritt playing Phoebe Meryll. There will be more of Yeomen posted soon, so this may be a good moment to give more details of the cast and crew:

"The Yeomen of the Guard", Friday November 6 and 13, Saturday November 7 and 14, all at 8:15 pm, and Sunday November 8 and 15 at 2 pm, in Alice Statler Auditorium. 1981.

The video is from a pickup rehearsal  on November 12th, 1981.

Phoebe          Miss Heidi Merritt
Dame Carruthers     Miss Anne Hering
Kate             Ms. Laurajane Fletcher
Colonel Fairfax     David Usher
Sergeant Meryll     David Wyatt
Jack Point         Fred Ahl
Elsie Maynard     Ms. Diane Duke
Wilfred Shadbolt     Robert T. Farrell
Sir Richard Cholmondely    Michael Johnson
Leonard Meryll    David Shefsiek (Tim Wells on Nov 14th)

Dramatic direction by Victoria Kummer
Musical direction by David Van Leer
Sets and lighting by Jim Novack
Costume Design by Charlotte Mueller and Alene Wyatt
Choreography by Bernadette Fiocca

Leonard Meryll = David Shefsiek, except Tim Wells on Saturday 14th November, and Jim Mueller sang 1st and 2nd yeomen in the opening chorus.

Photographs from Earlier Shows

A couple of days ago I received a zipped file from Mark Lawrence that unzipped to reveal four hundred and one items that had been on the now-deleted earlier Cornell Savoyards website. These are mostly photographs from previous shows. I will be posting these photos, and adding links to them on the sidebar, and on the page "History of Cornell Savoyards". Many thanks to Mark for his foresight in saving this material.

Iolanthe in New Zealand in 1953

In the course of writing the article "In Search of Miss Violet" I began to mistrust my memory of events from the 1950s, when I was at school in New Zealand. Specifically, when did Wanganui Girl's College put on a production of Iolanthe? I was fortunate to be able to contact Judy Armstrong, who not only confirmed the date, but also sent me a couple of B&W photos from that show. All of the parts were played by the girls of the college; Judy herself played the part of a peer. The full cast is shown in a photo in the Still Photographs page.

Lists of Cornell Savoyards Shows

I have made a start on the History page by posting scans of a couple of overlapping lists. One is the list of Cornell Savoyard Productions that appeared in David Wyatt's "Tower Worder" #14 from October 1981. This list goes back to 1953, and brings us up to March 1981 (Ruddigore). The other list is the Savoyards Video Archive that was typed up by Scott Miller. A copy of this list was placed in each of the five cardboard boxes that hold the entire video archive. It goes back to the Yeomen of 1976 and forward as far as The Zoo/A Revue of 2000.

Any more modern additions, or corrections to these lists, would be most welcome.     -  DAU

The Cornell Savoyards

Welcome to the Cornell Savoyards Blog. The motivation for this endeavor came partly from the fact that the original website was taken down (although the content was probably saved, and if so, will be reproduced here), partly from a wish to post an article that I finished writing a short while ago, and partly from the hope that others will contribute their memories, photographs and news to this site. The article is entitled "In Search of Miss Violet", and details my 58-year quest to identify the young lady to whom Sir Arthur Sullivan proposed marriage. At the time, he was 54 and she had just turned 22. As you can read, I found this quite moving - and still do.

In the near future I will be posting links to a number of video and audio recordings that were made of Cornell Savoyard productions, and which I have digitized.

I also intend to scan-in as many of the old programs as I can find, along with copies of David Wyatt's "Tower Worder".

            - David Usher, November 29, 2012