At the New York City Ballet, dancers can study three decades of history — without opening a book. Since the 1970s, the ballet company has videotaped performances and rehearsals as a record for future generations of dancers, choreographers, and ballet masters.
“Dancers tend to study the tapes to look at their performances on previous days or to look at performances from other dancers in the same role,” says Lydia Harmsen, manager of external affairs for the New York City Ballet. “The ballet masters of the company use the tapes very often because a ballet might not go for about three seasons, and then they'll watch the tape again just to refresh their memory. So it's all areas of people that check these tapes everyday. We use them quite often.”
Partly because of this frequent use, the VHS and U-matic tapes have become brittle and fragile over the years. “Some of the tapes were not in good condition at all,” says Harmsen. “You would put it in the machine for viewing, and the picture would disappear. Part of that is just because they're simply old, and part of that is also they were located in a room where the person who was taking care of the videos was a heavy smoker.”
To preserve these resources for future dancers and choreographers, the NYC Ballet hired VidiPax, a subsidiary of Loudeye that handles magnetic media restoration. VidiPax recommended that tapes recorded before 1986 should be cleaned and remastered to a digital format. This isn't the most high-tech method of restoration available today, but for the NYC Ballet it's been an effective one.
“Between 10 and 15 [years] is the borderline when tapes really start to go,” says Steve Kwartek, general manager of operations/marketing manager for VidiPax. “So at this point they are just [cleaning] the tapes that are definitely on their way out.”
Kwartek says that it was crucial for VidiPax to clean the tapes for them to be preserved. “The outside was shedding and some of them were sticking together. They were suffering from something called ‘sticky-shed syndrome,’” he says. With this phenomenon, a tape binder deteriorates to such a degree that it loses its cohesive strength, and the magnetic coating sheds on playback.
Gail Clark, vice president/general manager at VidiPax, says the tapes' condition was partly a function of age but also of frequent access. “The inherent problem is when you use your archival masters for viewing and duplication and everything else. They should be kept very separate,” she says.
To keep these functions separate, VidiPax is remastering the tapes in two formats — Sony Digital Betacam for a preservation copy and miniDV for working copies.
“[The miniDV tapes] are not meant to be preservation copies,” says Kwartek. “The reason why we don't recommend miniDV for preservation is because there's a lot of compression involved with it and it's also a very small tape, so it can be damaged easily. [Digital Betacam] is what they'll use for preservation. There's a very low rate of compression.”
According to Harmsen, the New York City Ballet is storing the preservation copies off-premises for added security.
VidiPax plans to have the tapes remastered by June, but this is an ongoing project for the New York City Ballet. “We're trying to get the equipment to do inhouse duplication,” says Harmsen, “so we can transfer tapes that are post-1986 onto a digital platform for us to keep those recordings as well.”
