The climate-controlled vaults in the George Eastman House
archive and the Louis B. Mayer Conservation Center are home to
the Motion Picture Department’s collection of over 24,000 films.
But there is one shelving unit that holds important moving
images in a non-film format: analog tape. The department holds
over 200 videocassettes in varying standards, with most of them
in the obsolete three-quarter-inch (or “U-Matic”) format. The
tapes contain things such as television recordings from the
1970s to the 1980s, interviews with filmmakers and actors,
archival footage, and early video transfers of films from the
collection. While not ultimately as critical to the collection
as film material, there is still an urgent need to examine the
content on these tapes and digitally preserve what is deemed
important. This urgency stems largely from risks to the physical
materials themselves; most of the tapes are at least twenty
years old and suffer from increasing levels of decay due to the
shedding of the magnetic oxide re