With funding from the Knight Foundation, BAVC will expand QCTools to help media organisations, filmmakers and academic institutions preserve analogue video footage
The Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), a non-profit organisation based in San Francisco, started 40 years ago as a centre for artists and activists in the community to share portable video equipment.
Since then, BAVC has expanded and has become a community hub and resource for media makers in the Bay Area and across the country, acting as a post-production facility while providing media training and services for job-seekers, freelancers, film-makers, activists, as well as after-school programmes for underserved children.
Video preservation became part of BAVC's core offering some two decades ago, and the organisation has since secured various types of funding to support individuals in transferring analogue video tapes to digital files and develop tools and platforms to make the process more efficient.
One of the tools BAVC launched in 2013 is QCTools, a free and open-source software that allows people to run tests on their digital video files after they have been transferred from tapes, to flag problems that might have occurred during the conversion, such as loss of image or a change in the quality of the footage.
BAVC has since been working on the tool in collaboration with developer and archivist Dave Rice, building it off the back of an existing software called FFmpeg, and the project has been supported through two rounds of funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
"The first [analogue video] format was the two-inch quadruplex in 1956 and from then until relatively recently, there were tons of different video formats available, so the goal of archivists is to save the content but not so much to save the tape," explained Ben Turkus, preservation project manager at BAVC.
"That's done by playing back the tape on an old VCR and creating a digital file from it, but there can be a lot of problems in the process: issues with tapes that are degrading, machines that are breaking down and the parts are hard to come by, or even problems caused by the person who is creating the digital file."
This is where QCTools comes into play, allowing the individual to run the resulting digital video files through the tool, see if there are any issues with the footage and take measures to fix them.
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