Matthew Yang, Summer 2023

Bay Area Video Coalition

During the summer, I had the opportunity to work in the preservation department at the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) under the guidance of Kelley Coyne and Tim Lake. My main responsibility was digitizing VHS tapes for the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts as part of BAVC's Preservation Access Program (PAP). This program offers affordable preservation services to individuals and smaller organizations with analog audiovisual collections.

Throughout the project, I deepened my understanding of signal flow, the hardware components involved in the digitization process, and the identification of common video tape issues, such as dropouts, sync errors, and head switching noise. I particularly enjoyed working on patching and assembling different digitization hardware configurations, which helped me become more familiar with time base correctors and various legacy cable connectors.

In addition to hands-on experience, I also got to work with essential software tools like Vrecord, an open-source software for capturing video signals and converting them into digital files, and QCtools, a software tool used for analyzing and understanding digitized video files through audiovisual analytics and filtering.

Overall, this internship experience has solidified the concepts I learned from the program, and I am excited to delve deeper into video preservation through the Video Preservation course in the upcoming fall semester.

Prelinger Archives

I had the incredible opportunity of doing my summer internship at the Prelinger Archives where I was involved in its ongoing digitization project funded by the Filecoin Foundation. The three-year grant funded project is a collaboration between the Prelinger Archives and the Filecoin Foundation to preserve and create broad access to rare home movies, newsreels, educational, and sponsored films from the Prelinger collection. Throughout the nine-weeks I got to learn its unique digitization workflow from film preparation to creating culturally responsive metadata.

One of the highlights was assisting Rick Prelinger select materials for digitization. He has immense knowledge of the images found within the cans and it was incredible to watch him pick the films with precision and little hesitation. The collection has many incredible images, but what I found most interesting were the home movies that captured the travels of families in North America. These home movies contain immense evidentiary and one particular collection captured the bay bridge as it was being built. Through this project I got to also finesse my film scanning skills as I had the chance to work on a variety of small gauge formats as well as scanning those with audio tracks. A number of the films were warped, however I got to learn how to use Scanstation's dedicated warp gate, which does an incredible job in keeping the film still and in sharp focus during scanning.