NEW YORK
(click thumbnail)A small portion of the 350,000 hours of film footage storage in the CBS News archives.Interest in capturing and preserving television images began not long after researchers first demonstrated workable television systems in the 1920s.
Low resolution recordings were made on 78 rpm phonograph disks as early as 1927. As technology moved television away from a mechanical platform in the 1930s, image quality went up and attempts were met with varying degrees of success to capture these very ephemeral and fleeting images on film. Videotape arrived 20 years later.
To the delight of researchers and archivists, some of these earliest recordings still exist. However, this is not always the case, even for much more contemporary television recordings. Most of us remember last year's revelation that NASA had misplaced many hours of video recordings made during the first manned lunar landing in 1969.
Scattered around the country are literally billions of feet of newsfilm, kinescope recordings and early videotapes. Some of these have been very carefully cataloged and stored, while others are simply stacked in back rooms or pushed under piles of junk. Some find their way to yard sales and eBay.
To the relief of many historians (and also content syndicators), some serious efforts are being made to collect, catalog, salvage, restore and preserve television recordings.
CBS NEWS FOOTAGE
Most content collections pale next to that of a major network that's been around practically since the dawn of television. The News Division of CBS Broadcasting Inc. has been generating content on a daily basis for almost 60 years.
News archiving operations are conducted in a climate-controlled 60,000-square-foot operation dedicated solely to the storage and preservation of CBS news footage. It's located opposite the main network building on 57th Street in Manhattan.
According to Roy Carubia, news archives manager, CBS embarked on a regular archiving program in 1954. From that year onward, all news-related material has been preserved.
“We have some 350,000 hours of film here,” Carubia said. “We've also got something in excess of two million video cassettes.”
Carubia estimates that about 250 hours of material is screened every seven days, and that a total of 3,500 tapes are ordered and returned each week by various CBS News units.
“We have 29 fulltime employees working here on a 24/7 basis,” Carubia said. “Videotape and film are preserved by copying to a D2 master, with a Betacam SP circulation copy for the news units.”
Most of the group's work is directed to network requests for historical footage, but some of it is repurposed in other ways.
“We did a deal with the BBC six years ago,” Carubia said. “They are the global sales agents for CBS archival material. They license the footage and have put us on a global front.”
News footage acquisition is an evolving process and this has not made the lives of Carubia and others who must deal with the “format of the month” club especially easy.
“We have to have equipment to accommodate all formats,” Carubia said, who noted the problems inherent in servicing older equipment. “And tape usually outlasts equipment,” he said.
The network provides maintenance technicians especially skilled in quadraplex video to keep the operation's 2-inch tape machines in tiptop shape.
“There are very few instances when we can't get something to play,” said Carubia.
The operation has two Ampex AVR-1 quads in daily use and an additional machine is retained as a spare. There are also a couple of Ampex VR-2000s. Six one-inch machines are kept in repair for type “C” playback and there are numerous U-matic 3/4-inch machines, as well as models for most any other format that was used for recording news content.
“Whenever the network decides to get rid of a tape machine, we've had first dibs,” said Carubia.
A Rank Cintel machine is used for film transfers, and the operation keeps some Movieola flatbed editing machines in shape for screenings and preparation and repair of film. The Movieolas also provide a means for recovering magtrack audio from double system recordings. In addition, the archiving operations keep several tape cleaning machines busy.
NO BEST FORMAT
When asked about the choice of D2 and Beta SP for dubbing of content, Carubia explained that these formats worked best for CBS News' purposes.
“There is no one format that will solve all of an archive's problems,” he said.
When content is being transferred from its original format, archivists also bring along any metadata included with the footage and index key words describing content scenes. These key words are stored in the operation's EOS library system to make it easier to locate content in the future. The D2 tapes become the “golden” masters and the Beta SP tapes are used by the news units and producers.
To make life all the more interesting, some of the news material for a single story may exist on as many as 20 separate cassettes or reels. All of this content has to be evaluated, indexed and transferred. Carubia sees life being made a bit easier with a move to server-based storage technology.
“It's an exciting time for us now as we are about to go digital at the News Center,” he said. “We're already working on workflow issues.”
However, Carubia doesn't want to rush into new technology just because it's available.
“The longer we wait to make the digital jump, the better it is for us. We'll be in a better position to see what works and what doesn't,” he said.
What sort of content does Carubia and his staff deal with?
The entryway to the operation is crowded with stills depicting such events as President Kennedy's ill-fated trip to Dallas, a distressed Walter Cronkite reporting the aftermath of that day, 1960's anti-war demonstrations, a gunned-down student at Kent State University and a burning World Trade Center. It's not all gloom and doom, as there are also pictures of the Beatles with a smiling Ed Sullivan, and shots of several comedians who appeared on the network.
Carubia says that the oldest archives footage is a 1948 edition of “Douglas Edwards with the News.” In the fall of 1956, Edward's evening newscast made history as it was the first television program to be aired on videotape. Surprisingly, the earliest tape footage logged in the archives is a story on Fidel Castro from January 1959.
When asked about unusual finds within the millions of feet of film and tape, Carubia said that his group is always discovering “diamonds in the rough.” He was particularly fond of some footage shot at about 5 a.m. with Edward R. Murrow interviewing Louis Armstrong on the steps of a Paris nightclub.
Even in the aftermath of the 9/11 disaster, Carubia says that he is not that concerned about such a concentration of rare and historical footage under one roof.
“It's very convenient for us, and it works,” he said. “It makes it very easy to move material right across the street to where it's needed in the news operation. n
In the last of this two-part series, we'll look at how Walter Media Works a two-year old Michigan company is preserving news archives from local stations.
