Site Survey before Digitization

Video restoration does not begin with ingestion. Ingestion is the pipeline that starts with receiving the original (digitized) videos, going through various treatments at the workbench, resulting in the finished work. Video restoration begins at finding the originals and performing an inspection on the state of the original to be restored. Inspection of the original video I will address at another time. Before there is anything to ingest, analog media may first require digitization. Before digitization, however, comes an even earlier step: the site survey. First, a differentiation.

Restoration and digitization are not the same thing, even if they might be used interchangeably, betimes. Digitization is the process of converting analog videos such as Hi8 cassette tapes to their digital form, through a combination of hardware and software. Meanwhile, restoration is the process of recovering and preserving as much of the original viewing experience as possible from the digitized source material.

However, when digitization is required, it is simply not enough to accept the media and start converting. I first complete a site survey. This can be completed in one of two ways: when at all possible, go to the place where the media was kept. If that is not possible, then ask as detailed questions as possible from the custodian of the media. The intent is to understand the environment in which the media was kept, whether it has been transported and what that might have been.

Walking down one flight of stars to a below grade storage space in Washington DC might be different from a similar space at the western edge of Virginia or the southern edge of Maryland. Environmental conditions such as humidity, temperature fluctuations, light exposure, airborne dust, and storage orientation all contribute to the long-term condition of analog media. Equally important is understanding whether the space was designed for archival storage or simply used as general household storage. These are some fundamental questions to be assessed because they might impact the degradation of the storage mediums.