Took four years, but the digitization is all done.*

Colored People’s Time came on the air over 40 years ago, became Detroit Black Journal, and is now American Black Journal. Still in production! Need a show from 1978? We’ve got it. Need one from 1988? Got it. Need from… right – almost the entire collection of analog tape has now been digitized in our lab*, here at Matrix – took us four years! Thanks to generous support from IMLS and NEH, we’ve digitized the collection and are in the process of making the entire history of ABJ available online here http://abj.matrix.msu.edu. Hundreds of hours of the once a week TV show are already online, with hundreds more to come.

When we transferred the tape to Matrix, instead of swapping tapes back and forth with DPTV, I took a couple of shots just as we were beginning to move into the 1″ tapes.  The tapes, and the machine.

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About 22TB digitized video in the end. We’re currently storing to DLT-S4 (migrating to next-gen LTO when it’s released) cartridges from a 2TB RAID system we use for captures. But we don’t want to access the uncompressed if we don’t need to do so. Turns out, H.264 at 720×480 is good enough for most in-house uses, and certainly more than enough for online. We’ll be distributing Flash anyway. I didn’t track the hours it took (ugh! should have…) to compress the entire collection to H.264, but it comes in at just a little under 1.5TB – it fits on two DLT-S4 tapes. Compression? HAH – I got your compression!

</geeky part>

22 TB smushed

Canon Rebel ISO 100 f/5 at 1/5 and 28mm

*OK, so there’s still some 2″ Quad we can’t digitize (no playback ability) but we’re outsourcing that and getting it done.