Shira Peltzman, Summer 2012

Shira Peltzman, Bay Area TV Archive - San Francisco State University, Summer 2012

The primary focus of my summer internship at the Bay Area TV Archive was to digitize, remaster, and catalogue 16mm archival newsfilm clips of the Black Panther Party and add the material to the TV Archive's virtual database so that the footage can be accessed by the public. This was a particularly exciting project because these clips feature unique footage of key Party members and events, but had been unavailable to the public since it had been shot by local Bay Area television stations including KPIX, KQED, and KRON over 40 years ago. I worked to clean, inspect, and repair the 16mm newsfilm, and then created Standard Definition resolution digital master files. Ultimately digital access copies were made from the master files, which files were then remastered using Final Cut Pro, catalogued using the Dublin Core metadata standard, and added to the Bay Area TV's virtual archive.

A second component of my internship was assisting with the processing and intake of a collection of newsfilm donated to the TV Archive by local news station KRON. This collection consisted of almost 700 cans of film, each containing original negative and reversal footage shot by the KRON news team throughout the 1960s. We spent approximately one day per week on-site at KRON’s headquarters to select, inventory, and catalogue, and assign unique ID’s to, and re-pack in archival boxes a large portion of their archival newsfilm holdings.