We are all watching as tape goes away, at least for current production work. However, what about that big pile of tapes sitting in your closet ? and on you shelves ? are they taking up a lot of space ?

At Practical Illusions we"ve taken the plunge and cleared the shelves bare of tape. They are GONE ! Over the last month we've been loading them all onto hard drive. Countless hours of Beta SP have run through the machine. We've also run a bunch of u-matic and even VHS tapes. We still need to dig up a working Hi8 machine for about 20 hrs in that format we'd like to save. There a few S-VHS tapes that simply can't be played, and thankfully there are copies of them on Beta SP.

Now before I get into this, you may be wondering why even bother with old tapes. Maybe you do corporate work and it seems that after a year or two, the material is dated and no longer relevant. A colleague of mine started work on a project for a company celebrating its 50th year in business. As you might now guess, they had a big celebration event around this. Part of that event was a video showing where the company had come from. 16mm from the 1960's and 3/4" from the 70's became key ingredients to the program. Thankfully some one had saved this material, or they would of had a much less interesting piece to show.

Even beyond just doing the event, the video piece could go onto their website for viewing by potential clients and investors as an image or PR piece.

The fact is, you never know when material that is going to suddenly have value. If its 10 years old its junk, if its 20 years old its gold. You may be sitting on shots of a current CEO of a big company when they were just starting out in the sales or marketing department. Since you can't know how this sort of material may be of value, saving and preserving it needs to be a consideration while you can still access it, not 20 years from now when some one needs it and you can't easily play it