Tales from the Tape

The history of video formats is a graveyard of dead media, with skeletons of obsolete playback machines, ghosts of old standards, and some loving necromancers trying to keep their favorite format alive in the 21st century. In this spooky world, audiovisual archivists like me are the crypt keepers of these decaying formats: documenting them all and lovingly maintaining their history so that new generations can enjoy and learn about them.

I recently received a request from a researcher to view some tapes in a format I was unfamiliar with: Hi8. Hi8 was first an analog, then digital magnetic tape format introduced by Sony to compete with a newer, more compact version of VHS called VHS-C. You recorded onto Hi8 tapes using camcorders, and that portability, plus the surprisingly high quality of the image you could capture, made them popular with both amateurs and television and film industry professionals.

With this format being so popular, it’s not surprising that we have a few in our archives here at the Institute. The tapes I worked with are from the papers of American chemist Robert Bruce Merrifield, who won the 1984 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering work in solid phase peptide synthesis, a new method of creating peptides for the medical and pharmaceutical industries that was much faster and easier to automate than previous processes.

Most of the audiovisual materials in Merrifield’s papers are related to a film he produced with the American Peptide Society in 2001 called (what else) Peptide and Protein Synthesis. This hour and a half film covers 100 years of peptide synthesis, from the first successful experiment at the turn of the 20th century to 21st-century biotechnology discoveries. The raw material of this documentary exists in a variety of formats—mostly audiocassettes, Betacam-SP, and MiniDV—including our format of the week, Hi8.

But how to play and digitize these tapes?

Some AV formats can be very tricky to digitize or even view because we’re trying to attach analog technology to a digital computer, and expecting the computer to make sense of this weird, old signal. But luckily for archivists and historians of science, there are ways to make this happen using intermediary bits of hardware and special software designed for archival-quality video digitization. For VHS tapes, for example, we have a refurbished VCR and the video signal from that VCR travel through a time-base corrector (TBC), which stabilizes the analog image to correct for errors inherent in the tape. The signal then feeds into a Blackmagic capture card that converts the analog magnetic data on the tape into digital electronic data, and that digital data can then be sent to a computer running video capture software, which saves the data as image and sound.

I was delighted to discover that the Hi8 format is really easy to plug into this process, provided you have a way to actually play the tapes. Hi8s are playable in a specialized deck or in the same camcorder you would use to record the tape in the first place. We have a Hi8 camcorder in our obsolete AV equipment here in the archives, but working with the Merrifield collection was the first time it’s actually been used. Using old playback devices is always a bit of a gamble, but this particular camera still functions perfectly!

I was able to slot the camcorder into the same chain of devices in place of the VCR, so the signal from the camcorder traveled through the TBC and capture card before hitting the computer and our capture software, vrecord. There is a lot of very good advice out there about digitizing this format specifically, but as with all digitization practices, you have to figure out the process that works for you (I’m not using the recommended FireWire cable, for example), and this is the process that works for us.

So with this 1990s camcorder, I was able to digitize some Hi8 tapes that probably haven’t been seen for 25 years—making more of Merrifield’s work accessible to our researchers and the world.

There are screenshots below from each tape I’ve worked with so far, but you can also view the full videos in our digital collections. All of these appear to be interviews or footage gathered during the making of Protein and Peptide Synthesis, so there’s a lot of history included in these tapes that didn’t make it into the final cut of the documentary.

This digitization project was possible because of my Uncle David, who passed away quite unexpectedly in 2022. Uncle Dave didn’t have children, so my siblings and I were asked to clean out his house and help get it ready for sale. As an AV archivist, I pounced on his camcorder when I discovered it in the coat closet, hoping that someday I would be able to use it to preserve a little bit of the history of science.

So, digitizing these Hi8s was especially satisfying for me because of my personal connection to the playback equipment. And it is a good reminder that legacy and memory don’t just live on in media or documents, but also in the work that goes into maintaining those things and preserving them for the future.

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Featured image: Five different audiovisual formats from the Merrifield Papers (left to right): BetacamSP (large size), VHS, BetacamSP (small size), Hi-8, and MiniDV.