On July 7, Sony announced that production of MiniDisc playback equipment would cease in September of 2011. According to Sony, the format’s creator, the blank MiniDisc recording media will continue to be manufactured for up a year beyond the players’ discontinuation.
MiniDisc never made as big a splash as Sony had hoped, at least in markets outside of Asia. Introduced in 1992, Sony had envisioned that the format would be just as ubiquitous in the 1990s as the audio cassette – and another Sony invention, the Walkman – was in the 1980s. Unlike Audio CDs, MiniDiscs offered a more compact design to increase portability, greater durability and anti-skip capabilities, and all MiniDisc playback equipment was capable of writing to recordable and re-writeable media from the outset. By contrast, the first sub-$10,000 CD writers wouldn’t become available until 13 years after Compact Disc’s 1982 introduction to the market, and almost 3 years after MiniDisc was widely available.
Unfortunately, MiniDisc had barriers to adoption from the outset, most of which were placed – deliberately or otherwise – by the company who introduced the format in the first place.
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The drumbeat continues to sound for the preservation of obsolete and endangered moving image formats, particularly videotape. As older tape formats become unplayable, either through decay or lack of equipment to play them back, the urgency grows to find ways to preserve their content using modern digital formats.
The problem has been considered by multiple organizations acting separately over the past decade, and all of them have wrangled over the same question: What digital format should be used to preserve this content in the digital space, and help ensure that we aren’t finding ourselves in the same obsolescence predicament right away? Interestingly, those analyzing this problem and making decisions for their respective organizations have often come up with different answers.
Those differing opinions, and the rationale behind them, were the subject of a talk held earlier this month in Philadelphia, at the Association of Moving Image Archivists / International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (AMIA/IASA) 2010 Conference. Representatives from the respective digital preservation projects underway at the Library of Congress, Rutgers University Libraries, and Stanford University were each on hand to offer their perspectives and the paths their organizations took for digitally preserving their video.
The abstract of the talk, as well each presenter’s slides and notes, can be found here:
I feel an important conclusion to take away from this talk is that there isn’t always a single right answer to the digital preservation conundrum. There is a common desire among preservationists to have and use a widely accepted standard format for keeping our digital objects safe in the long term. However, while formats and standards can be recommended and can work very well for a wide variety of use cases, there are always those local requirements and special needs that need to be considered, and adjustments made accordingly.
Fortunately, a great deal of progress has been made in the last several years, as those who were once wading into this problem alone have experimented and learned from past mistakes. It’s venues like this which permit that knowledge and experience to be shared, so that those preservationists just starting to consider the problem can use that wisdom, and have multiple case studies to consider in making decisions of their own.
If you have any Kodachrome Film stashed away, the last days to get it developed are at hand. According to Dwayne’s Photo, the last commercial developer of the film format, they will be developing their last received rolls of Kodachrome film on December 31, 2010. After this date, their remaining equipment to handle this type of film will be shut down forever, and discarded. Per the statement on their website:
The last day of processing for all types of Kodachrome film will be December 30th, 2010. The last day Kodak will accept prepaid Kodachrome film in Europe is November 30th, 2010. Film that is not in our lab by noon on December 30th will not be processed.
A 1949 Kodachrome Slide of Shaftesbury Avenue from Piccadilly Circus, in the West End of London. Although discontinued by Kodak, Kodachrome is a well-known format by preservationists for its longevity and color accuracy over decades of time.
The announced obsolescence and discontinuation of a number of film formats by their vendors has resulted in an expected outcry from a niche of users who continue to use these older formats for their creative and artistic works. But another, more surprising result of this community outpour is a sort of grass-roots resurrection of these media, through user involvement and investment. It happened with the Impossible Project and Polaroid film. Now, after Kodak has signed the death warrant for the once-venerable Kodachrome format, a film enthusiast has built his own film manufacturing device.
Not a whole lot of background detail is available yet, but this photoset on flickr has been making the rounds among gadget blogs and photography discussion forums. It depicts the “Filminator,” a homemade film manufacturing machine, intended by its creator to make a homebrew version of Kodachrome film.
According to the person who took the photos:
Can’t buy the film you want any more? Just make the stuff! In this set you will find random photos and information on a project a friend has undertaken – a machine to make his own camera film. Plastic and goop go in one end, and camera film comes out the other end. This is not a trivial undertaking.
Can’t buy the film you want any more? Just make the stuff!
In this set you will find random photos and information on a project a friend has undertaken – a machine to make his own camera film.
Plastic and goop go in one end, and camera film comes out the other end. This is not a trivial undertaking.
Indeed. Although it’s gotten a lot of interest from enthusiasts who obviously want to see a way for Kodachrome to keep on living in some fashion, the builder of this contraption is strictly using the Filminator for his own personal use. No plans exist at this time to go commercial, or to sell any film stock made from it.
The Filminator is apparently working “quite well,” but so far there’s no known images online for people to assess the results for themselves. Nor is it known whether film stock coming out of this machine has the same longevity and resiliency that the real Kodachrome was celebrated for in its time.
YouTube is definitely the wild-west for video content, and if you look hard enough, you’ll find a lot of vintage video content. Quite a few of it is uploaded by people whose rights to publish the stuff is questionable, but while it’s there and before it gets taken down, it’s pretty fascinating to come across old commercials, television station idents, and little vignettes that exemplify past culture.
Here’s a good example: a 1971 Woolworth TV ad, promoting a sale on LP albums and even some 8-tracks:
An ad from a defunt store depicting a obsolete formats. Fascinating.
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