Ahh, interesting to hear. But surely Nine (and presumably, most if not all the other networks) do/did have recordings of their old news/current affairs programs with the on-screen graphics and presenters of the time?
Otherwise, how on earth have we ever managed to see snippets of news bulletin footage with the presenters/graphics of the time during farewell packages for presenters or the countless clip shows (20 to 1, The Amazing 80s/90s/Noughties, etc.) there have been over the years?!
They are having to go through their Youtube channel and download vision from there (with bugs and straps attached).
I’m confused. A few posts earlier you were saying they’ve lost raw news packages/raw vision, now I’m getting the impression they don’t even have recordings of their bulletins?
To me it’s obvious that Nine does/did record and archive the final version of news & current affairs programs (complete with all the presenters, sets, graphics, theme music and other presentational elements of the time) which closely resembled what would ultimately made it to the screens of viewers. If they’ve even lost those, then you’d think Nine would race to the National Film & Sound Archive to retrieve copies of things sent to them over the years!
If a producer or reporter needs old vision in their story from a previous story, they’ll send a request to the news x department who’ll then source the vision from an archive (clean copies). They’ll then restore this file and send it back to the reporter and editor. At the moment, they are presumed lost and are instead having to go back on social media and YouTube to download old off-air uploads with relevant vision. This is obviously not ideal, as you don’t want a dirty copy of the vision and the quality is much more poor.
All the networks are guilty of disposing of old material that was held on 2", 1", Betacam, Umatic etc. Even ABC were disposing of a lot of stuff like old LP’s. Apart from the obvious storage costs, having a machine to play it back on is the big issue. Heads/drums/rollers etc are no longer available or very difficult to source. I know Seven have a guy at Mt Coot-the who is getting what they can off videotape for the whole business. Nine used to have a big archive offsite from Willoughby at one stage but that was possibly canned years ago. LTO tape offsite sounds better and better for digital archive/backup the more I hear about Nine’s woes.
As has been mentioned, members should really check out this post from just August last year where the Nine archives were shown and described.
Do we know what the latest is here?
Are Nine having to restore every computer and server in Sydney from a backup or are they building the whole thing again from scratch?
I know at our work we have 2 machines fully functional that meet our requirements that are hooked up then 2 other machines that only do SP not LP so only play in newer tapes and we are still digitising and think we have a few years ahead of us yet.
I do know we have some old 60mins tapes we could send over.
That would be programming. Not news. Believe all news content is basically unavailable at the moment.
This will definitely only be a short term measure, until their systems are restored. No doubt they will have lost raw material from the last few weeks/months, but most of their news archives will have off site backups that will be unaffected.
If they don’t, then their IT department should be sacked.
Deals can be struck with ABC, ATN and TEN if they need to source vision desperately.
Imho it also doesn’t justify the copyright infringement of people “archiving” stuff on YouTube for them - they were right to go on that blitz, they have to maintain responsibility for their content.
Other than pooling vision, the networks wouldn’t be able to ‘help’ like that (i doubt they’d even want to). It would be against anti competition laws.
Bruce Gyngell himself told me the story in 1983 … when TCN9 started, Frank Packer told Bruce to telerecord (to 16mm film) “something every week” … Bruce told me he thought it was a dumb idea, but did it anyway … as the first anniversary of the launch came up in 1957, Packer told him to make a one-year special using all of the footage he had diligently kept … for that special they re-made the “Good Evening and Welcome To Television” bit that, of course, had not been recorded on the day … Gyngell is often credited with 9’s far superior historical archive, but he admitted to me that it was Frank Packer who, as a newspaperman, recognised the value of a comprehensive archive, and was really the man responsible …
… I think you’re confusing raw camera tapes/discs/files and ingested/edited packages …
… no it wouldn’t and it’s done all the time …
In what form?
… that stopped in the early 90s when the ABC was attempting to set up its own Pay TV operation and suddenly realised that historical material was worth dollars … a bigger problem at the ABC was not that material was being destroyed but that there were no proper records of where it was kept and the corporation was relying on the memories of the “old hands” and a few cards in boxes to find stuff …
Commercial LPs, not ABC recordings.
If the archives are lost, that means broadcast systems have been exposed to the internet (either directly or indirectly) and that is a very very bad idea.
It might be that the archive database itself was exposed, if so, searching for archive materials will be very difficult…
That’s possible. It’s not currently accessible on the AP Archive website.
