I bet TCN is now regretting going on a copyright claim blitz on Youtube a couple of years ago, removing decades of archive footage collected by members here. A friend of mine who works in archives, told me there is a real chance they’ll never be able to recover their library (dating back to the 60’s). Most of the hard copies were destroyed or disposed of when they left Willoughby.
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What about these archives which if I’m not mistaken, are at French’s Forest? Were there not any old news bulletins stored there?!
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Wow.
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News archives.
… 9 has spent decades since the start of television in 1956 building up that archive … I can’t imagine them being “destroyed or disposed of” for any reason …
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Yeah, sounds fanciful to me. And any archives digitising their collection would have off-line back-ups.
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Would that have contained all the bulletins or just raw unbranded footage?
Either way, I’ve certainly seen snippets of old Nine News & Current Affairs programs used in a heap of shows (both on their network and others) over the years, which would suggest that such content is/was recorded in some way, shape or form.
Not all the early stuff was recorded though. For example, the “Good Evening and Welcome To Television” clip we’re all familiar with was a recreation done a few years later.
Then you’ve got other stuff which for one reason or another, was erased or dumped - a practice most broadcasters seemingly did before recording/storage mediums became relatively affordable.
One would hope that to be the case, especially for a major company like Nine.
I believe it would be raw news packages and raw field vision.
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Networks have a history of disposing news tapes once they have been digitalised. Nothing new.
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But not having off-line off-site backups would be unimaginable, to me anyway. I used to work at an archives, and that is what we did.
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Every station has offline storage.
But yes, some content has been lost.
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It’s unimaginable because you just wouldn’t take the risk of not having an off-line backup
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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.
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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.
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As has been mentioned, members should really check out this post from just August last year where the Nine archives were shown and described.
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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?
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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.
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