Audio Visual headaches

It seems that whatever I end up doing, audio and video follows me, and with it all the annoying niggles that come with it.

Audio and music have always been a part of my life since I was young. I've been a musician since the age of 4 and have become a multi-instrumentalist able to get a tune out of practically anything. Video came along a bit later along with photography and for the past 4 years I've been doing both audio and video for a variety of different things. One of the biggest undertakings I did was making a short film for a Uni project which, at the time, I thought would be really easy. How wrong was I!

Melting the macbook one video at a time.

However, despite working with them for a few years, there are still some headaches which can cause projects to become derailed. One of the most common, and coincidentally one which is plaguing the day job, is software issues. The software we currently use has a unique bug in that it will just stop recording after an undetermined length of time. This can be right at the start, 10 minutes in or, in the worst case, 2 minutes before the end of the tape. So far, I've been unable to figure out why and despite a recent audit of software and updating outdated drivers, the bug persists. 

Another headache which follows on from the software is the hardware limitations which can cause an already lengthy process to take even more time. I remember when I was attempting to edit some video on my old Macbook pro and the temperatures on the CPU hit over 100 degrees (see photo). Thankfully these days I have my trusty Mac Pro 'cheesegrater' to edit on but hardware obsolescence can be just a big a problem as the software. Take the VHS for instance, sure you might still see some of them every now and then but the devices to play them are becoming increasingly rarer.

Audio can suffer from the hardware problems described before as well. One of the most common can be the scarcity of a device that is able to play the item, let alone allow it to be digitised. Formats such as DATs and Tape reels are sadly becoming more difficult to work with due to many machines capable of playing/reading them either being out of budget to acquire, requiring specialist parts for repair or simply being beyond repair. 

The issues listed above are just some of many which I've seen affect archives ability to digitise their 'at risk' media. Whilst there are programmes being organised, with one of the most prominent being the British Libraries "Unlocking our Sound Heritage", there is still the possibility that “any tape not digitised by 2025 will in most cases be lost forever.” (Deadline 2025 - Collections at risk, 2017)