What was that book where they were digitizing books by shredding them and then vacuuming them up and digitizing all the scraps as they passed through the vacuum hose to reassemble digitally and then OCR?
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
51–60 of 71 posts
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#52What was that book where they were digitizing books by shredding them and then vacuuming them up and digitizing all the scraps as they passed through the vacuum hose to reassemble digitally and then OCR?
[deleted]
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very old audio equipment is in a similar boat - I know archivists who are prioritizing stuff for digitization based on the number of tape head hours they think they've got left in older machines.
Is contact absolutely required in such old machines - I wonder if you could float the tape using, say, air [1], ultrasound, or silicon spray, or even just carefully fitted wheels in order to maximize life of the head itself. I'm surprised generic non-contact magnetic readers haven't been developed for retro tech given the prevalence of magnetic storage tech for HDDs. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_bearing
I'd wonder more if a newer more modern head could also be used on the same tape at the same time (a few inches over on a slightly extended tape path), with the output of the "original" used to train software to interpret the higher resolution data coming from the new head.
Seems to me that might in some ways be similar to some things required for software defined radio signal processing.
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
And why do they want to keep it? Even old film has a low resolution, let alone magnetic media. Do they expect to be able to better digitalise the same media that will be in worse state (more decay) in a distant future?
Two examples from France: in 1998 AFP digitized the World Cup 98 pictures. In 800x600... Now they simply have no easy access to their '98 archive. From 1999 on, INA (French national archives) digitized videos in MPEG2 8mb/s 4:2:2 @MPML. That was supposedly "good enough" in comparison with the old media it came from (and was an admitted standard for archives worldwide back then). Actually, it was the only not unreason…
Yeah but film has grain and at one point your resolution becomes finer than the grains. At that time you know new technologies won't bring much more precision.
Now if the support is in poor conditions, perhaps the technologies mentioned in the other posts are worth considering. But if it is a tape or film stored in decent condition, it is unlikely that future techniques will add much to current ones.
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny that you mention that. Polyester film is widely used for long-term archival, precisely because it so stable.
You're right, but analog signal degrades, and humidity can cause mould. Digital data tapes have a nice layer of error correction on top. Better than film, but still requires some care.
> Better than film
I bet in the very long term it's not. I suspect that error correction on digital tape is only meant to address the problem of magnetic spots flipping or fading over time, but the tapes are throwaways as soon as there's detectable physical degradation or disintegration. Contrast with analog tape (or to speak to your point, film) which can be handled in all kinds of crazy ways (cleaning, baking, coating, etc.) in order to get at least a partial or imperfect copy of the original made.
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#56>He who controls the past controls the future. Hard to see this as anything other than an attempt to minimize and erase Canadian culture, such as it is. Nice A / B with the french counterpart, where there is political will to bolster theirs.
Probably accurate, given the renaming of the British North America Act to the fraud of a name, "Constitution Act of 1867".
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#57This reminds me of Blade Runner 2049: "We had everything on drives, everything."
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#58I'm concerned that the same thing will happen to libraries and books someday. Books are a great technology. I hope we don't throw them out too.
I wouldnt be too much. Books are a primary medium, they can be consumed without the need of an interpreter or interface.
They dont face any threat of not beeing readable anymore and therefore storage becoming a waste of money, gradually
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#59How do they digitize it? 8K RAW and no Compression?
There's nothing wrong with compression, data can be lossless and still compressed. That's why a FLAC file can be three times smaller than an otherwise identical WAV file.
Not saying it is wrong, just wondering the way they do it. Audio files are much easier then video.
Re: CBC is destroying its broadcast archives after they’re digitized
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two examples from France: in 1998 AFP digitized the World Cup 98 pictures. In 800x600... Now they simply have no easy access to their '98 archive. From 1999 on, INA (French national archives) digitized videos in MPEG2 8mb/s 4:2:2 @MPML. That was supposedly "good enough" in comparison with the old media it came from (and was an admitted standard for archives worldwide back then). Actually, it was the only not unreason…
Yeah but film has grain and at one point your resolution becomes finer than the grains. At that time you know new technologies won't bring much more precision. Now if the support is in poor conditions, perhaps the technologies mentioned in the other posts are worth considering. But if it is a tape or film stored in decent condition, it is unlikely that future techniques will add much to current ones.
That was the logic behind the choice of MPEG2 8mb/s @MPML: you're full (SD) resolution, full color, so you're better than the source (for instance, U-Matic is ~200 lines of ~250 points and a 4:2:0 color space). However, the switch to HD broke all expectations, because the low resolution of U-Matic captured in full SD and upscaled to HD is awful. Somehow that doesn't work out; you must capture even the very low resolution supports with a resolution as close as possible to the target work format (a so-called pivot format). Maybe upscaling the current HD JPEG2000 archives to 4K will fare better, and maybe they'll need to digitize everything from analogue once again...