If you remember the MPAA vs DeCSS fight from the early 00's.. what Scorsese was doing here would be considered serious copyright infringement by the MPAA.
The reasonable person would consider it fair use to gather reference material for their job. The MPAA was arguing in court that any violation of their DRM was illegal, reprehensible, irredeemable. And Scorsese was likely a member!
He was buddies with Jack Valenti!! Via wikipedia:
In 2007, Scorsese was honored by the National Italian American Foundation (N.I.A.F.) at the nonprofit's thirty-second Anniversary Gala. During the ceremony, Scorsese helped launch N.I.A.F.'s Jack Valenti Institute in memory of former foundation board member and past president of the Motion Picture Association of America (M.P.A.A.) Jack Valenti.
kleiba said a month ago:
Wasn't he recording from TV? What DRM was that breaking?
doublerabbit said a month ago:
I suppose one could argue is that if you were recording cable, your recording the decrypted image alas breaking DRM.
My guess is as best as yours. Lawyers enjoy flinging three letter acronyms around.
basch said a month ago:
Reference material for a commercial for profit job would likely hurt a fair use argument.
First recorded in Marion Stokes’s home in the Barclay Condominiums in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, the tapes had been distributed among nine additional apartments she purchased solely for storage purposes during her life. Later, they passed on to her children, into storage, and finally to the California-based archive. Although no one knew it at the time, the recordings Stokes made from 1975 until her death in 2012 are the only comprehensive collection preserving this period in television media history.
kerrsclyde said a month ago:
UK TV comedian Bob Monkhouse was another obsessive VHS archivist. He amassed a collection of 35k tapes and saved some recordings of UK TV shows which were previously thought to have been lost by the BBC.
I was going to say that the cost of just the tapes would be up to a million of todays dollars. But then I read:
"going back to when Monkhouse first bought a home video recorder in 1966"
Wow... if he started that early, the costs must have been astronomical in the beginning.
kerrsclyde said a month ago:
There was a BBC Four documentary about his archive. I think in that it reported that he was one of the first people in the UK to own a VHS device with the facility to record.
max_ said a month ago:
Leo DiCaprio said that, Martin Scorsese has watched every movie ever made until 1980. [1]
Made me understand how seriously he takes film.
[1]: An interview with letter box on Killers of the Flower Moon on YouTube
neetrain said a month ago:
Why did he stopped then?
The numbers of films produced per year has dropped significantly over time.
max_ said a month ago:
I think there too many movies now.
He can't watch all of them. But I am sure he does watch some recent movies.
tracerbulletx said a month ago:
Mr Scorsese should consider donating his collection to the film experts at the VFA. https://vfa.expert/
jt2190 said a month ago:
They were already donated to the University of Colorado Boulder
I'm honestly surprised when I see On Cinema references in the wild, mainly because I'm still amazed that they survived cancellation by Adult Swim only to create their own hyper-niche streaming service that has survived for going on three years.
Ohhhhh, I've got the Oscar fever, Hope you got it too! Pour me some bubbly now its all you got to do. Its Christmas for tinsel town, the academy awards. Pop up some popcorn, Welcome aboard. Whose gonna win? Whose gonna lose? It's I've got the oscar fever hope you got it too. Whose gonna win? Whose gonna lose? I've got the... who...
kouru225 said a month ago:
I work for someone who has a very large collection of old video tape. You think these people would be interested?
toomuchtodo said a month ago:
The Internet Archive will likely take them. Happy to facilitate logistics and cover costs.
From the website I can't exactly tell why sending all the tapes there would be a great idea. But you guys seem to know something I don't, care to elaborate? :)
davexunit said a month ago:
Gregg Turkington has vast movie expertise, set a Guinness World Record for watching 501 movies in 501 days, and maintains the largest film archive in North America. I can't think of someone I'd trust more with Mr. Scorcese's collection.
dumbo-octopus said a month ago:
Is watching one movie a day really that impressive? I bet a ton of people in old folk's homes have him beat by virtue of sitting around all day in the in vicinity of televisions.
throwup238 said a month ago:
No, it's not and the Guinness World Records were a joke long before this. It's a consultancy that people hire for PR ("verification").
Hikikomori said a month ago:
Watching movies doesn't give you all the facts to become an impressive movie critic. Would you for example know the exact number of Oscars each lord of the rings movies got from just watching them?
labster said a month ago:
No, I would look Oscar wins up on a wiki just like everyone else.
Hikikomori said a month ago:
Then you would not be a very good movie critic, just an elderly person.
umanwizard said a month ago:
I don’t really get your point. Having an encyclopedic knowledge of trivia surely doesn’t make you a good critic, either?
Hikikomori said a month ago:
I take it you're not a gregghead.
davexunit said a month ago:
Or how many Blondie movies there are? No Googling!
defrost said a month ago:
Penny Singleton or Debbie Harry?
Videodrome's a classic.
nick__m said a month ago:
Death to Videodrome!
Long live the New Flesh!
palmfacehn said a month ago:
Maybe he saw them in theatres
kouru225 said a month ago:
Typical Greghead response
kubectl_h said a month ago:
This whole subthread is a five bagger.
VelesDude said a month ago:
The responses to this... chefs kiss
nxobject said a month ago:
It's always fascinating to see how accomplished artists work to be in conversation with others in their medium. How do people use the past to form their current goals, and how do people use their current goals to guide their research into the past? How do they deconstruct what they think works, what doesn't? And how do they organize all of this thinking?
These are really analytical guiding questions. Although I won't have an artistic career, I'd love to learn to think analytically like these artists do.
Waterluvian said a month ago:
I dunno exactly why but the idea of being some university student in some back room, watching and digitizing what Scorsese thought was interesting decades ago, ideally at 1am, seems incredibly cozy to me.
I hope the room is filled with other ancient technology such as reel to reel, filmstrips, and microfiche so that it smells incredible.
speedylight said a month ago:
Seems like a great idea for a date!
corytheboyd said a month ago:
Man what a vibe, I’d be all over that and I’m not even a film buff.
rurban said a month ago:
Marty's obsession with collecting films is very well known in the film industry since the eighties. Just read any better 80ies film book about New Hollywood. He sat hours a day in his basement, and often invited others to watch movies with him.
I'm sure the Venn diagram between HN and Hollywood could make this happen!
pkkm said a month ago:
I think the biggest obstacle right now is not the software, but the hardware. The software works, but requires either buying a $300-$500 set of three circuit boards, or finding a specific PCIe capture card and potentially modifying it. If someone made a nicer version of the Domesday Duplicator - single board in a case, $100 to $200 - I think that would make the project a lot more accessible. Even better would be if someone started selling modified VHS players, having replaced their normal electronics with a capture device and a USB3 port. After all, many people don't have a soldering iron or a desktop computer.
actionfromafar said a month ago:
If we are talking about serious archiving of lots of tapes, $500 for a capture device is nothing. The labor costs of keeping the actual tape deck(s) in good order is probably going to dwarf.
But I have actually toyed with the idea of setting up complete workstations modified player, and a slightly better software UX. Don't know how to reach the market willing to pay for such things, though.
For tinkering at home, the specific PCIe capture device is actually quite easy to find, it seems it's still produced for some reason.
kouru225 said a month ago:
I’m sorry what is this? Is this a software capture card? I’m so confused.
pkkm said a month ago:
It's a fully software-based VHS decoder. It takes the raw signal from a VHS tape, captured with a high speed sampling device, and reconstructs the video on your computer. In theory, this approach should allow higher quality digitization than any physical VHS player - it cuts the analog decoding electronics out of the loop, and it allows you to capture once, then tweak the algorithm and decode many times without disturbing the tape. You could even preserve the raw captures in case better decoding algorithms come out in the future.
pdabbadabba said a month ago:
It appears to be software designed to use an SDR or (and?) a DTV capture card to capture the output of a VCR playing a VHS at the RF level, and then transcode and store it. Pretty cool, if I'm understanding it correctly!
Solvency said a month ago:
How lossy is transcoding at the RF level of an already lossy medium?
actionfromafar said a month ago:
It's much better than any other existing technology to capture VHS.
It bypasses all analog processing of the signal by the VHS player and captures the video signal directly from the tape head.
All further processing is then done in software. If any improvements in software processing is made, the "raw" capture can then be reprocessed with better results.
kmoser said a month ago:
Yes, but still don't throw away the original tapes, because if a better (read: more accurate/sensitive) tape head ever becomes available, you'll want to use it to upgrade your capture device and then re-scan the original tapes with even better fidelity.
iisan7 said a month ago:
Best at capture/preservation, but only theoretically best at playback someday. Currently the best software processing algorithms are imo not on par with video playback quality from the best hardware of the era, especially for damaged tapes. It's hard, although certainly not impossible, to imagine that changing. I'm 100% glad it exists though.
actionfromafar said a month ago:
You could always take the best hardware of the era, and capture from that. If you were talking about decks. I'm not sure about playback - the output from vhs-decode looks pretty darn good to me, but I'm not an expert at all in composite video gear.
iisan7 said a month ago:
Right, my language was sloppy but I meant two things-- the quality will still be dependent on the hardware chain, and I should expect that a 'bit perfect' capture of a VHS tape will usually be inferior to one captured from a vintage pro deck. And then regarding processing, I'm not a professional, but I've done several successful restorations using virtualdub and avisynth, and on some degraded tapes I couldn't do nearly as well as whatever magic was going on in the vhs to dvd section of the JVC SR-MV50.
xattt said a month ago:
Even the best VHS decks from the 80s/90s, which would have been used in production environments and thus “well worn”, would have wear-related quality issues.
actionfromafar said a month ago:
But that’s the beauty of vhs-decode. The transport mechanism needs to be stable and the head clean. The rest of the player doesn’t matter.
xattt said a month ago:
My impression was that the transport mechanism would have seen the most wear.
Solvency said a month ago:
I'm not following why would software still be inferior playback to now ancient hardware? Isn't that sort of like suggesting digital can't replay a vinyl record transcoded to digital as well?
iisan7 said a month ago:
No, I'm thinking of proprietary hardware or software in the decks that perform tbc, noise reduction, filtering of artifacts, etc. If given a choice of a perfect copy of a spotty VHS and all the virtualdub and avisynth filters, or the mpeg2 output from a JVC SR-MV50, my experience has been that the latter is better. However, I grant that a video preservation professional might get better results from treating a direct capture than I.
actionfromafar said a month ago:
Sort of correct - except that the software to reliably decode VHS took some time to get right, and there still are regular improvements to the vhs-decode github repo.
For a long time a great S-VHS deck, professional Time-Base-Corrector and so on from a TV studio, was the better option over vhs-decode software, especially on bad tapes. But now, I'd go with vhs-decode any day.
bitwize said a month ago:
So it's like a Kryoflux for VHS tapes? That is cool.
actionfromafar said a month ago:
Ha, adding that to my parlance! It's exactly like Kryoflux for VHS tapes.
An example - S-VHS tapes can not be played back in regular VHS players. They can't handle the format.
But with vhs-decode, it doesn't matter. A regular cheap VHS player can "rip" an S-VHS tape.
And decode the HiFi FM-stereo signal, too.
rainbowzootsuit said a month ago:
Or Domesday Duplicator for LaserDisc Preservation.
gofixurcode said a month ago:
It’s actually a fork of that project!
beebmam said a month ago:
He should have donated these to the Victorville Film Archive, which exists specifically to archive and care for VHS recordings
dmix said a month ago:
Have they documented the gear/process they use for archival?
dedman said a month ago:
Honestly a bit rude of Martin to not have consulted with Gregg Turkington first.
Solvency said a month ago:
> Long before YouTube and Netflix gave the world instant access to a deep repository of media, Scorsese began the project of amassing his own private on-demand video library. In each week’s TV Guide, he would note the movies and shows that caught his interest. A full-time video archivist in Scorsese’s New York office would then record the telecasts from a kind of audiovisual hub made up of multiple VCRs and monitors, which could often be active at all hours. The tapes were meticulously labeled, cataloged initially using a library-like card system and later a computer, and filed away for Scorsese’s personal viewing and research.
Wait so let me get this straight. Scorsese, an incredibly busy and prolific director, paid a full-time team to record TV content, around-the-clock, all based on him whimsically highlighting programs of interest from a weekly TV guide?
And then he'd periodically book a flight to NY to randomly pluck these VHS tapes from storage and watch them?
Was this just an ultimate wealth flex? Could someone like Scorsese really not simply gain access to virtually any content he wants directly from studio sources for research work?
lelandbatey said a month ago:
When you're that rich and that interested in your niche, in a world where there aren't any other ways to catalog then you do what you gotta do even if it's pay ~$1 million / year.
For Scorsese, by paying for this system he can make sure that he can do the watching and the research he wants, no matter what. The "no matter what" is the important part; no matter matter who makes a show/movie, no matter what his relationship with it's creator/owner, no matter if the studio wipes the tapes hours after airing it just the one time, Scorsese will have his own copy as sure as the sun will rise. For many a rich folk, they will blow 7 figure sums on things they themselves feel are less important than such an ironclad guarantee without a moment's hesitation.
It's not too far fetched.
listenallyall said a month ago:
I doubt Martin Scorsese was all that wealthy in the 80's when he started this. He was well-respected, sure, but he made art films, not summer blockbusters like Spielberg and Lucas or big-time comedies, and the external revenue streams (HBO, video rental) were fewer and smaller. He was known, but he wasn't MARTIN SCORSESE like we know him today (that would probably have been Coppola). And I'm guessing most of what he was taping was news and talk shows (to get accents, styles, vernacular, etc), which would often not be kept permanently by the broadcasters, and lots of more obscure things that would be difficult to track down.
rurban said a month ago:
No news, no shows, sorry. Just films.
boomboomsubban said a month ago:
The article mentions he also taped things like his mother's appearance on Regis and Kathy, but primarily films.
listenallyall said a month ago:
"a devoted interest in recording films and shows from the '80s to the 2000s"
"4,400 distinct titles, including features, documentaries, shorts, history programs and award shows"
pjc50 said a month ago:
> simply gain access to virtually any content he wants directly from studio sources for research work?
I suspect that's a far more miserable, time-consuming and failure prone approach than simply taping them off the TV. The studios aren't set up to show films, they're to hand them off to distributors. The whole system is set up to deal with films in bulk, not to individual users. And they won't have them in convenient VHS format, so even if Scorsese had a guy he could just ring and ask for Film X, what he'd get would be .. several reels of 35mm. Sure, he's probably got a little cinema for that as well, but it's not as convenient as a TV.
And of course asking the studio runs a high risk of "no".
actionfromafar said a month ago:
If you have (much) more money than time, it seems like a TiVo with concierge user interface.
chiph said a month ago:
I'm thinking the system helped him avoid Hollywood politics. If a studio lost the bidding to distribute his next film, they might try cutting him off from high-quality originals out of spite.
shannifin said a month ago:
Probably a lot easier and cheaper to build his own collection. Not sure paying others to do the work makes him the archivist though.
The-Bus said a month ago:
Scorcese's production company office was based in the Directors Guild of America building on 57th St for many years.
ThinkBeat said a month ago:
This is cool for sure, but given the horrific resolution of the medium
any recovered rare movies would, at least forme me, make watching it
a painful experience.
He could have the best VHS records out there and the best tapes, but
the source material being recorded would be painfully limited, as
would the recordings.
I would have expected Scorsese to have requested, threatened, manipulated, bribed, and so on to obtain film reels.
This would not be possible for a lot of the content but surely for quite a few.
He could do the same for original VHS cassettes with the movies (like you would find in a rental store. Just unwatched ones.
Also that he would have people to buy DVD version when (if) they came out.
Still if a DVD version was released that would indicate that the source
film was available and Scorsese could have a copy of that instead.
airtag said a month ago:
VHS is indeed horribble, if watched on today's TVs and wasn't that great back then. European PAL was a bit better than NTSC. And, while it's full of noise, it doesn't have the smear of digital noise reduction.
Scorsese grew up with this TV resolution and I'm sure he would have preferred high quality for things we cared about, but for day-to-day use, having VHS was fine. (If he really cared, he could have gotten a betamax recorder or a super-VHS recorder to record off the TV)
I'm pretty sure that he'll stream better copies - but for those not available, having a noisy VHS is great. And with streaming/digital "sales" you never know which films you're going to lose next...
rchaud said a month ago:
VHS resolution is 330p, and Youtube still has millions of videos that top out at 360p but still look fine for consumption purposes.
porbelm said a month ago:
It's not 330p as 330 is the HORIZONTAL resolution, not the vertical. Vertical is still the same as NTSC (525 lines) or PAL (625 lines) so you'd technically have "480p" (NTSC) or "576p" (PAL) visible, with half the horizontal resolution. You can't describe these old video formats in the newer NNNp or NNNi terminology.
LocalH said a month ago:
480i or 576i, as VHS is an interlaced format.
p0w3n3d said a month ago:
To write good piece of music you need to know by heart a lot of music in such and other styles. Thes same with movies. As I have watched many Scorcese's and Tarantino's movies, I'm not surprised by what they put into their masterpieces, these guys are learning from old school.
On the other hand, I am outraged that I am forbidden to watch old movies, as they are not publicly available, and enshittification of streaming services is progressing. Less classic content, more money, divided by studios/companies/corporations. Am I supposed to pay 200$/month for 6(7?) subscriptions to have 30% of the content I want to watch
rchaud said a month ago:
I spent the early '00s watching old and obscure movies via torrent. Megacorp stores didn't stock them then and mega-streaming networks today won't either. Don't look for art at the toy store.
indus said a month ago:
...and my SO complains about my Natgeo print collection.
walterbell said a month ago:
> The entire archive must be digitized – a major undertaking. Converting thousands of hours of analog recordings is slow, tedious work. For the moment, the university requires the person requesting materials to pay for the digitization of any tape that hasn’t already been converted.
Canada spent a small fortune to digitize thousands of hours of analog Canadian TV shows, published them on YouTube, then… deleted the channel without advance notice before the videos could be publicly archived, 35716982
Excellent, thanks for tracking those down! About 50% (1600 of 3000 items) of the original archive, uploaded Aug-Oct 2023.
Now to figure out what's missing. At first glance, it's missing the world-best TV series about investment banking and stock trading by humans, Traders (1996), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traders_(TV_series).
the_af said a month ago:
Wow. Why did they delete it after all that effort?
walterbell said a month ago:
Unclear from public statements.
If the content was licensed elsewhere, at least they could have told viewers where to pay to view it.
actionfromafar said a month ago:
It's sometimes not possible to pay anyone to see it, for many reasons, one being if the copyright ownership is unclear.
walterbell said a month ago:
In this particular case, digitization was done in concert with rights holders.
With the help of many industry partners, the [Canada Media Fund] CMF team unearthed Canadian gems buried in analog catalogues. Once discovered, we worked to secure permissions and required rights and collaborate with third parties to digitize the works, including an invaluable partnership with Deluxe Canada that covered 40 per cent of the digitization costs. The new, high-quality digital masters were made available to the rights holders and released to the public on the Encore+ YouTube channel in English and French.
the_af said a month ago:
I googled and one result in Reddit claims they were announcing new uploads mere days before shutting the channel down, which is doubly puzzling.
Someone else claimed the woman in charge of the project suddenly quit and there was no other recourse than shutting it down. I find this hard to believe...
bell-cot said a month ago:
Worth noting, for crusaders against administrative overhead at colleges & universities:
> In the basement of the University of Colorado Boulder’s main library, an 85-year-old stone fortress built in the Italian rural style, the archives of the school’s Rare and Distinctive Collections occupy rows of shelves as far as the eye can see. Here, amid yellowed books, historical maps and medieval manuscripts, Martin Scorsese has quietly made public a very private preoccupation. More than 50 storage boxes hold thousands of VHS tapes that contain films and television programs Scorsese recorded directly from broadcast television. The renowned director and film preservationist, it turns out, was also, for decades, a prolific guerrilla archivist.
> For the archivists at the Rare and Distinct Collections, the most pressing issue at the moment is the preservation of the Scorsese collection. Magnetic media degrades as it ages. It is believed that a VHS tape begins to progressively lose image quality after only 10 years. Some of Scorsese’s tapes are more than 40 years old. And so the entire archive must be digitized – a major undertaking. Converting thousands of hours of analog recordings is slow, tedious work.
In a perfect world, there might be plenty of well-run and -funded museums, which could do such work. In the world we've got...yeah. Big, prestige-hungry universities probably bear 90% or more of this burden.
In a far-from-perfect world, it would still be lovely if universities provided detailed, honest financial statements - which clearly distinguished this kind of "preserve history" technical work...from the all the myriad sorts of education-irrelevant crap that they squander fortunes on these days.
In the world we've got...I'm sure that top-of-market administrator salaries and hand-carved jade ceilings in the shiny new student amenities are higher priorities.
nxobject said a month ago:
For what it's worth, I'm sure that, if you asked every direct report why they created a position below them, they'd give a perfectly cromulent justification. That doesn't explain away the inefficiencies of college in general, but I do think there are root causes of that that are worth going in depth into.
For example, presidents have large offices because they would say they hold many hats these days, more than they did in the past when higher ed institutions recieved more state money: fundraising on the road and glad-handing big donors for that personal touch, going to policymakers for more money and for advocacy, working with big donors to plan large investments that open entire research units, dealing with internal governance of the college and with faculty. No one person can handle all of these responsibilities.
Or you could look at student services: some administrator saw a need to support certain student populations to increase retention (more college completion = more alumni $$$$, more good press about alums), so you now have people that create programming to engage first-generation college students, Black students, students with disabilities. That's a huge set of communities to engage (especially in large institutions), and no one person can do all of that as well.
The question is: are colleges doing work that should rightly be done elsewhere, and why isn't society making that happen? For example, colleges are developing integrated safety nets and free services (people who disburse emergency funds, mental health care, people that help students navigate this internal system, for example), because American society and government doesn't offer such an integrated system, at least to the standards that colleges are now aspiring to.
BirAdam said a month ago:
Tbh, regarding the preservation and digitization of the collection of concern in this thread, plenty of institutions, private individuals, companies, and organizations would love to take that work from the university. The uni, otoh, has no incentive to let the asset out of their hands.
bell-cot said a month ago:
True - but "of the collection of concern in this thread". And at this point in time. Vs. many older & larger universities have accumulated vast collections of stuff over the centuries - 99%+ of which would attract zero-ish interest from qualified alternative custodians.
karaterobot said a month ago:
> Scorsese’s secret life as an obsessive VHS archivist
Seems like he employs an archivist, not that he's an archivist. A better title might be Scoreses's secret VHS archive, I don't know. Archivist is a specific job with specific, non-trivial training. It's a nitpick, but it reminds me of when people acted like Elon Musk designed the rockets for SpaceX or his Tesla cars, or when they talk about Steve Jobs creating the iPhone. The person with the money and the vision is critical to success, but it's just not accurate to say that they did these things themselves.
porbelm said a month ago:
If all they do is follow his instructions on labeling and categorization, he himself is also an archivist, with the people being his clerks. He started taping on his own long before it became a multi-VHS "i need people to do this" setup.
karaterobot said a month ago:
> In each week’s TV Guide, [Scorsese] would note the movies and shows that caught his interest. A full-time video archivist in Scorsese’s New York office would then record the telecasts from a kind of audiovisual hub made up of multiple VCRs and monitors, which could often be active at all hours. The tapes were meticulously labeled, cataloged initially using a library-like card system and later a computer, and filed away for Scorsese’s personal viewing and research.
Seems like he said what he wanted recorded, then paid an archivist to archive them.
sandspar said a month ago:
The guy who owns the farm is still considered a farmer even if he isn't the one picking corn.
111 Comments:
If you remember the MPAA vs DeCSS fight from the early 00's.. what Scorsese was doing here would be considered serious copyright infringement by the MPAA.
The reasonable person would consider it fair use to gather reference material for their job. The MPAA was arguing in court that any violation of their DRM was illegal, reprehensible, irredeemable. And Scorsese was likely a member!
He was buddies with Jack Valenti!! Via wikipedia:
Wasn't he recording from TV? What DRM was that breaking?
I suppose one could argue is that if you were recording cable, your recording the decrypted image alas breaking DRM.
My guess is as best as yours. Lawyers enjoy flinging three letter acronyms around.
Reference material for a commercial for profit job would likely hurt a fair use argument.
rights for me but not for thee,
or rules for thee but not for me.
related:
The Remarkable Story of a Woman Who Preserved Over 30 Years of TV History https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/marion-stokes-televisi...
First recorded in Marion Stokes’s home in the Barclay Condominiums in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, the tapes had been distributed among nine additional apartments she purchased solely for storage purposes during her life. Later, they passed on to her children, into storage, and finally to the California-based archive. Although no one knew it at the time, the recordings Stokes made from 1975 until her death in 2012 are the only comprehensive collection preserving this period in television media history.
UK TV comedian Bob Monkhouse was another obsessive VHS archivist. He amassed a collection of 35k tapes and saved some recordings of UK TV shows which were previously thought to have been lost by the BBC.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Monkhouse#Film_and_televis...
I was going to say that the cost of just the tapes would be up to a million of todays dollars. But then I read:
"going back to when Monkhouse first bought a home video recorder in 1966"
Wow... if he started that early, the costs must have been astronomical in the beginning.
There was a BBC Four documentary about his archive. I think in that it reported that he was one of the first people in the UK to own a VHS device with the facility to record.
Leo DiCaprio said that, Martin Scorsese has watched every movie ever made until 1980. [1]
Made me understand how seriously he takes film.
[1]: An interview with letter box on Killers of the Flower Moon on YouTube
Why did he stopped then?
The numbers of films produced per year has dropped significantly over time.
I think there too many movies now.
He can't watch all of them. But I am sure he does watch some recent movies.
Mr Scorsese should consider donating his collection to the film experts at the VFA. https://vfa.expert/
They were already donated to the University of Colorado Boulder
https://archives.colorado.edu/repositories/2/resources/1887
I'm honestly surprised when I see On Cinema references in the wild, mainly because I'm still amazed that they survived cancellation by Adult Swim only to create their own hyper-niche streaming service that has survived for going on three years.
The mystery science theater people did a similar thing: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rifftrax/rifftrax-live-...
Ohhhhh, I've got the Oscar fever, Hope you got it too! Pour me some bubbly now its all you got to do. Its Christmas for tinsel town, the academy awards. Pop up some popcorn, Welcome aboard. Whose gonna win? Whose gonna lose? It's I've got the oscar fever hope you got it too. Whose gonna win? Whose gonna lose? I've got the... who...
I work for someone who has a very large collection of old video tape. You think these people would be interested?
The Internet Archive will likely take them. Happy to facilitate logistics and cover costs.
Context: https://www.vulture.com/article/tim-heidecker-and-gregg-turk...
Mr Scorsese from?
Killers of the Flower Moon (206 minutes)
5 bags
I was hoping to see this exact recommendation.
From the website I can't exactly tell why sending all the tapes there would be a great idea. But you guys seem to know something I don't, care to elaborate? :)
Gregg Turkington has vast movie expertise, set a Guinness World Record for watching 501 movies in 501 days, and maintains the largest film archive in North America. I can't think of someone I'd trust more with Mr. Scorcese's collection.
Is watching one movie a day really that impressive? I bet a ton of people in old folk's homes have him beat by virtue of sitting around all day in the in vicinity of televisions.
No, it's not and the Guinness World Records were a joke long before this. It's a consultancy that people hire for PR ("verification").
Watching movies doesn't give you all the facts to become an impressive movie critic. Would you for example know the exact number of Oscars each lord of the rings movies got from just watching them?
No, I would look Oscar wins up on a wiki just like everyone else.
Then you would not be a very good movie critic, just an elderly person.
I don’t really get your point. Having an encyclopedic knowledge of trivia surely doesn’t make you a good critic, either?
I take it you're not a gregghead.
Or how many Blondie movies there are? No Googling!
Penny Singleton or Debbie Harry?
Videodrome's a classic.
Death to Videodrome!
Long live the New Flesh!
Maybe he saw them in theatres
Typical Greghead response
This whole subthread is a five bagger.
The responses to this... chefs kiss
It's always fascinating to see how accomplished artists work to be in conversation with others in their medium. How do people use the past to form their current goals, and how do people use their current goals to guide their research into the past? How do they deconstruct what they think works, what doesn't? And how do they organize all of this thinking?
These are really analytical guiding questions. Although I won't have an artistic career, I'd love to learn to think analytically like these artists do.
I dunno exactly why but the idea of being some university student in some back room, watching and digitizing what Scorsese thought was interesting decades ago, ideally at 1am, seems incredibly cozy to me.
I hope the room is filled with other ancient technology such as reel to reel, filmstrips, and microfiche so that it smells incredible.
Seems like a great idea for a date!
Man what a vibe, I’d be all over that and I’m not even a film buff.
Marty's obsession with collecting films is very well known in the film industry since the eighties. Just read any better 80ies film book about New Hollywood. He sat hours a day in his basement, and often invited others to watch movies with him.
So, not secret at all.
Martin Scorsese should sponsor https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode :-)
It's the ultimate in VHS preservation.
I'm sure the Venn diagram between HN and Hollywood could make this happen!
I think the biggest obstacle right now is not the software, but the hardware. The software works, but requires either buying a $300-$500 set of three circuit boards, or finding a specific PCIe capture card and potentially modifying it. If someone made a nicer version of the Domesday Duplicator - single board in a case, $100 to $200 - I think that would make the project a lot more accessible. Even better would be if someone started selling modified VHS players, having replaced their normal electronics with a capture device and a USB3 port. After all, many people don't have a soldering iron or a desktop computer.
If we are talking about serious archiving of lots of tapes, $500 for a capture device is nothing. The labor costs of keeping the actual tape deck(s) in good order is probably going to dwarf.
But I have actually toyed with the idea of setting up complete workstations modified player, and a slightly better software UX. Don't know how to reach the market willing to pay for such things, though.
For tinkering at home, the specific PCIe capture device is actually quite easy to find, it seems it's still produced for some reason.
I’m sorry what is this? Is this a software capture card? I’m so confused.
It's a fully software-based VHS decoder. It takes the raw signal from a VHS tape, captured with a high speed sampling device, and reconstructs the video on your computer. In theory, this approach should allow higher quality digitization than any physical VHS player - it cuts the analog decoding electronics out of the loop, and it allows you to capture once, then tweak the algorithm and decode many times without disturbing the tape. You could even preserve the raw captures in case better decoding algorithms come out in the future.
It appears to be software designed to use an SDR or (and?) a DTV capture card to capture the output of a VCR playing a VHS at the RF level, and then transcode and store it. Pretty cool, if I'm understanding it correctly!
How lossy is transcoding at the RF level of an already lossy medium?
It's much better than any other existing technology to capture VHS.
It bypasses all analog processing of the signal by the VHS player and captures the video signal directly from the tape head.
All further processing is then done in software. If any improvements in software processing is made, the "raw" capture can then be reprocessed with better results.
Yes, but still don't throw away the original tapes, because if a better (read: more accurate/sensitive) tape head ever becomes available, you'll want to use it to upgrade your capture device and then re-scan the original tapes with even better fidelity.
Best at capture/preservation, but only theoretically best at playback someday. Currently the best software processing algorithms are imo not on par with video playback quality from the best hardware of the era, especially for damaged tapes. It's hard, although certainly not impossible, to imagine that changing. I'm 100% glad it exists though.
You could always take the best hardware of the era, and capture from that. If you were talking about decks. I'm not sure about playback - the output from vhs-decode looks pretty darn good to me, but I'm not an expert at all in composite video gear.
Right, my language was sloppy but I meant two things-- the quality will still be dependent on the hardware chain, and I should expect that a 'bit perfect' capture of a VHS tape will usually be inferior to one captured from a vintage pro deck. And then regarding processing, I'm not a professional, but I've done several successful restorations using virtualdub and avisynth, and on some degraded tapes I couldn't do nearly as well as whatever magic was going on in the vhs to dvd section of the JVC SR-MV50.
Even the best VHS decks from the 80s/90s, which would have been used in production environments and thus “well worn”, would have wear-related quality issues.
But that’s the beauty of vhs-decode. The transport mechanism needs to be stable and the head clean. The rest of the player doesn’t matter.
My impression was that the transport mechanism would have seen the most wear.
I'm not following why would software still be inferior playback to now ancient hardware? Isn't that sort of like suggesting digital can't replay a vinyl record transcoded to digital as well?
No, I'm thinking of proprietary hardware or software in the decks that perform tbc, noise reduction, filtering of artifacts, etc. If given a choice of a perfect copy of a spotty VHS and all the virtualdub and avisynth filters, or the mpeg2 output from a JVC SR-MV50, my experience has been that the latter is better. However, I grant that a video preservation professional might get better results from treating a direct capture than I.
Sort of correct - except that the software to reliably decode VHS took some time to get right, and there still are regular improvements to the vhs-decode github repo.
For a long time a great S-VHS deck, professional Time-Base-Corrector and so on from a TV studio, was the better option over vhs-decode software, especially on bad tapes. But now, I'd go with vhs-decode any day.
So it's like a Kryoflux for VHS tapes? That is cool.
Ha, adding that to my parlance! It's exactly like Kryoflux for VHS tapes.
An example - S-VHS tapes can not be played back in regular VHS players. They can't handle the format.
But with vhs-decode, it doesn't matter. A regular cheap VHS player can "rip" an S-VHS tape.
And decode the HiFi FM-stereo signal, too.
Or Domesday Duplicator for LaserDisc Preservation.
It’s actually a fork of that project!
He should have donated these to the Victorville Film Archive, which exists specifically to archive and care for VHS recordings
Have they documented the gear/process they use for archival?
Honestly a bit rude of Martin to not have consulted with Gregg Turkington first.
> Long before YouTube and Netflix gave the world instant access to a deep repository of media, Scorsese began the project of amassing his own private on-demand video library. In each week’s TV Guide, he would note the movies and shows that caught his interest. A full-time video archivist in Scorsese’s New York office would then record the telecasts from a kind of audiovisual hub made up of multiple VCRs and monitors, which could often be active at all hours. The tapes were meticulously labeled, cataloged initially using a library-like card system and later a computer, and filed away for Scorsese’s personal viewing and research.
Wait so let me get this straight. Scorsese, an incredibly busy and prolific director, paid a full-time team to record TV content, around-the-clock, all based on him whimsically highlighting programs of interest from a weekly TV guide?
And then he'd periodically book a flight to NY to randomly pluck these VHS tapes from storage and watch them?
Was this just an ultimate wealth flex? Could someone like Scorsese really not simply gain access to virtually any content he wants directly from studio sources for research work?
When you're that rich and that interested in your niche, in a world where there aren't any other ways to catalog then you do what you gotta do even if it's pay ~$1 million / year.
For Scorsese, by paying for this system he can make sure that he can do the watching and the research he wants, no matter what. The "no matter what" is the important part; no matter matter who makes a show/movie, no matter what his relationship with it's creator/owner, no matter if the studio wipes the tapes hours after airing it just the one time, Scorsese will have his own copy as sure as the sun will rise. For many a rich folk, they will blow 7 figure sums on things they themselves feel are less important than such an ironclad guarantee without a moment's hesitation.
It's not too far fetched.
I doubt Martin Scorsese was all that wealthy in the 80's when he started this. He was well-respected, sure, but he made art films, not summer blockbusters like Spielberg and Lucas or big-time comedies, and the external revenue streams (HBO, video rental) were fewer and smaller. He was known, but he wasn't MARTIN SCORSESE like we know him today (that would probably have been Coppola). And I'm guessing most of what he was taping was news and talk shows (to get accents, styles, vernacular, etc), which would often not be kept permanently by the broadcasters, and lots of more obscure things that would be difficult to track down.
No news, no shows, sorry. Just films.
The article mentions he also taped things like his mother's appearance on Regis and Kathy, but primarily films.
"a devoted interest in recording films and shows from the '80s to the 2000s"
"4,400 distinct titles, including features, documentaries, shorts, history programs and award shows"
> simply gain access to virtually any content he wants directly from studio sources for research work?
I suspect that's a far more miserable, time-consuming and failure prone approach than simply taping them off the TV. The studios aren't set up to show films, they're to hand them off to distributors. The whole system is set up to deal with films in bulk, not to individual users. And they won't have them in convenient VHS format, so even if Scorsese had a guy he could just ring and ask for Film X, what he'd get would be .. several reels of 35mm. Sure, he's probably got a little cinema for that as well, but it's not as convenient as a TV.
And of course asking the studio runs a high risk of "no".
If you have (much) more money than time, it seems like a TiVo with concierge user interface.
I'm thinking the system helped him avoid Hollywood politics. If a studio lost the bidding to distribute his next film, they might try cutting him off from high-quality originals out of spite.
Probably a lot easier and cheaper to build his own collection. Not sure paying others to do the work makes him the archivist though.
Scorcese's production company office was based in the Directors Guild of America building on 57th St for many years.
This is cool for sure, but given the horrific resolution of the medium any recovered rare movies would, at least forme me, make watching it a painful experience.
He could have the best VHS records out there and the best tapes, but the source material being recorded would be painfully limited, as would the recordings.
I would have expected Scorsese to have requested, threatened, manipulated, bribed, and so on to obtain film reels.
This would not be possible for a lot of the content but surely for quite a few.
He could do the same for original VHS cassettes with the movies (like you would find in a rental store. Just unwatched ones.
Also that he would have people to buy DVD version when (if) they came out. Still if a DVD version was released that would indicate that the source film was available and Scorsese could have a copy of that instead.
VHS is indeed horribble, if watched on today's TVs and wasn't that great back then. European PAL was a bit better than NTSC. And, while it's full of noise, it doesn't have the smear of digital noise reduction.
Scorsese grew up with this TV resolution and I'm sure he would have preferred high quality for things we cared about, but for day-to-day use, having VHS was fine. (If he really cared, he could have gotten a betamax recorder or a super-VHS recorder to record off the TV)
I'm pretty sure that he'll stream better copies - but for those not available, having a noisy VHS is great. And with streaming/digital "sales" you never know which films you're going to lose next...
VHS resolution is 330p, and Youtube still has millions of videos that top out at 360p but still look fine for consumption purposes.
It's not 330p as 330 is the HORIZONTAL resolution, not the vertical. Vertical is still the same as NTSC (525 lines) or PAL (625 lines) so you'd technically have "480p" (NTSC) or "576p" (PAL) visible, with half the horizontal resolution. You can't describe these old video formats in the newer NNNp or NNNi terminology.
480i or 576i, as VHS is an interlaced format.
To write good piece of music you need to know by heart a lot of music in such and other styles. Thes same with movies. As I have watched many Scorcese's and Tarantino's movies, I'm not surprised by what they put into their masterpieces, these guys are learning from old school.
On the other hand, I am outraged that I am forbidden to watch old movies, as they are not publicly available, and enshittification of streaming services is progressing. Less classic content, more money, divided by studios/companies/corporations. Am I supposed to pay 200$/month for 6(7?) subscriptions to have 30% of the content I want to watch
I spent the early '00s watching old and obscure movies via torrent. Megacorp stores didn't stock them then and mega-streaming networks today won't either. Don't look for art at the toy store.
...and my SO complains about my Natgeo print collection.
> The entire archive must be digitized – a major undertaking. Converting thousands of hours of analog recordings is slow, tedious work. For the moment, the university requires the person requesting materials to pay for the digitization of any tape that hasn’t already been converted.
Canada spent a small fortune to digitize thousands of hours of analog Canadian TV shows, published them on YouTube, then… deleted the channel without advance notice before the videos could be publicly archived, 35716982
Chasing through the links, it looks like someone did manage to upload a significant portion of the channel to archive.org: https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Encore%20%2B%2...
Excellent, thanks for tracking those down! About 50% (1600 of 3000 items) of the original archive, uploaded Aug-Oct 2023.
Now to figure out what's missing. At first glance, it's missing the world-best TV series about investment banking and stock trading by humans, Traders (1996), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traders_(TV_series).
Wow. Why did they delete it after all that effort?
Unclear from public statements.
If the content was licensed elsewhere, at least they could have told viewers where to pay to view it.
It's sometimes not possible to pay anyone to see it, for many reasons, one being if the copyright ownership is unclear.
In this particular case, digitization was done in concert with rights holders.
I googled and one result in Reddit claims they were announcing new uploads mere days before shutting the channel down, which is doubly puzzling.
Someone else claimed the woman in charge of the project suddenly quit and there was no other recourse than shutting it down. I find this hard to believe...
Worth noting, for crusaders against administrative overhead at colleges & universities:
> In the basement of the University of Colorado Boulder’s main library, an 85-year-old stone fortress built in the Italian rural style, the archives of the school’s Rare and Distinctive Collections occupy rows of shelves as far as the eye can see. Here, amid yellowed books, historical maps and medieval manuscripts, Martin Scorsese has quietly made public a very private preoccupation. More than 50 storage boxes hold thousands of VHS tapes that contain films and television programs Scorsese recorded directly from broadcast television. The renowned director and film preservationist, it turns out, was also, for decades, a prolific guerrilla archivist.
> For the archivists at the Rare and Distinct Collections, the most pressing issue at the moment is the preservation of the Scorsese collection. Magnetic media degrades as it ages. It is believed that a VHS tape begins to progressively lose image quality after only 10 years. Some of Scorsese’s tapes are more than 40 years old. And so the entire archive must be digitized – a major undertaking. Converting thousands of hours of analog recordings is slow, tedious work.
In a perfect world, there might be plenty of well-run and -funded museums, which could do such work. In the world we've got...yeah. Big, prestige-hungry universities probably bear 90% or more of this burden.
In a far-from-perfect world, it would still be lovely if universities provided detailed, honest financial statements - which clearly distinguished this kind of "preserve history" technical work...from the all the myriad sorts of education-irrelevant crap that they squander fortunes on these days.
In the world we've got...I'm sure that top-of-market administrator salaries and hand-carved jade ceilings in the shiny new student amenities are higher priorities.
For what it's worth, I'm sure that, if you asked every direct report why they created a position below them, they'd give a perfectly cromulent justification. That doesn't explain away the inefficiencies of college in general, but I do think there are root causes of that that are worth going in depth into.
For example, presidents have large offices because they would say they hold many hats these days, more than they did in the past when higher ed institutions recieved more state money: fundraising on the road and glad-handing big donors for that personal touch, going to policymakers for more money and for advocacy, working with big donors to plan large investments that open entire research units, dealing with internal governance of the college and with faculty. No one person can handle all of these responsibilities.
Or you could look at student services: some administrator saw a need to support certain student populations to increase retention (more college completion = more alumni $$$$, more good press about alums), so you now have people that create programming to engage first-generation college students, Black students, students with disabilities. That's a huge set of communities to engage (especially in large institutions), and no one person can do all of that as well.
The question is: are colleges doing work that should rightly be done elsewhere, and why isn't society making that happen? For example, colleges are developing integrated safety nets and free services (people who disburse emergency funds, mental health care, people that help students navigate this internal system, for example), because American society and government doesn't offer such an integrated system, at least to the standards that colleges are now aspiring to.
Tbh, regarding the preservation and digitization of the collection of concern in this thread, plenty of institutions, private individuals, companies, and organizations would love to take that work from the university. The uni, otoh, has no incentive to let the asset out of their hands.
True - but "of the collection of concern in this thread". And at this point in time. Vs. many older & larger universities have accumulated vast collections of stuff over the centuries - 99%+ of which would attract zero-ish interest from qualified alternative custodians.
> Scorsese’s secret life as an obsessive VHS archivist
Seems like he employs an archivist, not that he's an archivist. A better title might be Scoreses's secret VHS archive, I don't know. Archivist is a specific job with specific, non-trivial training. It's a nitpick, but it reminds me of when people acted like Elon Musk designed the rockets for SpaceX or his Tesla cars, or when they talk about Steve Jobs creating the iPhone. The person with the money and the vision is critical to success, but it's just not accurate to say that they did these things themselves.
If all they do is follow his instructions on labeling and categorization, he himself is also an archivist, with the people being his clerks. He started taping on his own long before it became a multi-VHS "i need people to do this" setup.
> In each week’s TV Guide, [Scorsese] would note the movies and shows that caught his interest. A full-time video archivist in Scorsese’s New York office would then record the telecasts from a kind of audiovisual hub made up of multiple VCRs and monitors, which could often be active at all hours. The tapes were meticulously labeled, cataloged initially using a library-like card system and later a computer, and filed away for Scorsese’s personal viewing and research.
Seems like he said what he wanted recorded, then paid an archivist to archive them.
The guy who owns the farm is still considered a farmer even if he isn't the one picking corn.
Counterpoint: so Howard Schultz is a barista?