Tapes, Computers, Video Projectors - They're All Out To Get Me!

Soooo yesterday. Well job one was to start digitising some audio tapes. Good except the binder on two of them has hydrolised and they were squealing through and distorting the sound like nobody's business so now I've got to sort that out plus any more I find like that in the current box. Then I had to scan an oversize book with the A3 scanner but all the pages had 'rifts and dips' so they wouldn't scan properly, had to photograph them which, to do the job well, is no small feat without a proper rostrum setup. Then I thought I'd chuck a DVD in the computer and watch some stuff on the bigscreen through the video projector whilst I was doing all this but it wasn't picking up the computer feed (again) so I got a DVD player but couldn't find all the right leads and adaptors for feeding the sound to the speakers so I put it through the sound card of one of the computers and a quick few seconds job to bung on a DVD turned into a 15 minute lead-fest! Bloody hell!

And would you believe today was alright. Yes it was! The Steenbeck worked fine, the film was no more awkward than it usually is (very awkward but even that one I had to redo practically every splice in didn't cause me to use any words stronger than b*llocks!) The 16mm film I ran on the other Steenbeck was the right way round, the reel wasn't one of those with the STUPID F**KING ROUND HOLES in the bottom and even installing some software on a laptop went without a hitch.

However tomorrow I am back at the archive and I have some more tapes to digitise. And at least one of them will be sticky, and it will be sticky not because they've been stored badly for decades but because:

Nothing's ever f**king easy!

Memory Stick

Sorry about the lack of updates loyal readers. I've spent the last four days fretting about my lost memory stick. Thankfully I found it yesterday and joy and elation have been uppermost in my mind! Needless to say a complete backup of the data on it has gone from being 'must do at some point' to 'do it now!'

So to things in life that haven't been f**king easy. Well last night I spent some time editing a compilation video in Adobe Premiere. Everything went fine until I tried to output it as a file... whereupon the computer crashed and restarted itself. Thankfully I am the sort that saves his work as he goes along so I reloaded the project and tried again. It worked but when it was done I noticed a couple of things I wanted to change so I did and started again... whereupon the computer crashed and restarted itself. I tried again and it worked but crashed just after it finished! It's definitely to do with the programme because my computer doesn't restart randomly (usually!) and it was the same process that triggered it on both occasions. Of course what should happen is that one sets it to output the file and it outputs the file but that would be far too easy wouldn't it and, as we know,

Nothing's ever f**king easy!

VLC has been crashing too! C*nts!

ARGH!

Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh I HATE days like today. First the power trips out in our storage area so rather than cataloguing films on the Steenbeck I end up lugging tons of projectors around. Our messed up climate being what it is the weather goes from wishing I had a second jumper on barely a week ago to sweltering hot the day I have to lug said projectors around. The electrician's on holiday for two weeks and we're not sure anyone has got the key to the cabinet with the breaker in so I can't get on with anything 35mm. I can't find my f**king memory stick. Where the f**k is the case for my driving theory DVD and why on such a f**king hot day did today have to be the one time I forgot to take my water bottle to the Trust? I've been bloody gasping all day. I've agreed to look through some 35mm films for a friend, at least three of the ten or so cans I've looked in so far have been two sets of 16mm stacked on top of each other, not difficult to deal with but what the $£%*! None of the 35mm films are on cores so I have to sort that out as well and some of them, like ours, are covered in so much sh*t (metaphorically speaking)! This gets all over the winding bench, all over the Steenbeck, all over me! And it looks like I'm working the next two weekends in a row so that will be a whole month straight I've worked weekends! And lastly why the f**k did the phone have to ring the exact, very second I sat down when I came in!

NOTHING'S EVER F**KING EASY!

Disc jam

No not, as the title may suggest, jam made from discs but a disc jamming in the DVD recorder. I have a VHS/DVD/HD all-in-one machine and was having a problem with the new DVDs I bought (can only record on them in one 'mode' apparently and I want the 'other' mode but can't format them to it because nothing's ever f**king easy). I then thought I had got the machine to dub OK but couldn't stop the recording so I pulled the plug out, when I put it back in it tried to read the disc, couldn't, and would hang on the loading screen. For a short while I was worried I'd totalled my machine (which would have been a big problem because I really need it for my work at the moment and I haven't got the money for a new one). Fortunately I must have contracted a healthy dose of luck virus (see Red Dwarf for those of you who don't know what this is) as I discovered that if one turns the cog jutting out from the underside of the player one can loosen the disc from the clamp at the top and slide it out of the drive. I switched the machine on, everything worked as normal and my heart started beating again. So that was a bloody trying experience.

Nothing's ever f**king easy!

BNC Adaptors

Today my video corrector finally arrived in the post. Yay! Once I finally get round to sorting out a telecine system at the Trust I'll be able to plug this into the chain and do some basic colour correcting on colour shifted film! So I thought I'd give it a quick whirl and check it works OK. Trouble is most of my video equipment is either out at the archive or in the loft. The only thing I had to hand was my Betamax. Now the corrector only has BNC inputs and my Betamax only has a BNC output for baseband. So I'd have needed 3 BNC adaptors (as I have no dedicated BNC leads kicking around), two for the corrector and one for the betamax. I do have 3 BNC adaptors but only two here- the other is at the archive! I'm taking the corrector with me tomorrow so I'll get to test it soon enough but it couldn't be f**king easy could it because, as we all know,

Nothing's ever f**king easy!

Bach - Orchestral Suite No.3, Air in G

F**king hell, who've thought it would be so damn difficult to find an arrangement of this for solo piano online, hasn't it been out of copyright long enough?! It took me nearly half an hour to find a decent arrangement, in the end I found this one here:

[Link removed: see edit]

Harpsichord but what the hell, I'm playing it on an organ rather than a piano anyway! Can't believe how difficult this was to find.

Nothing's ever f**king easy!


Edit: And would you believe that arragement was utter crap, we're not talking shifting the odd inversion here and there we are talking wrong notes. Some people are SO DUMB! What's more it means I need to go and find a proper copy, a task which should be simple but then

Nothing's ever f**king easy!

Edit 2: STILL can't find a copy. Gonna leave it for now but if I don't find one tomorrow I'll need a f**king Hamlet cigar alright!

Nothing's ever f**king easy!

Premiere

Being the forgetful soul I am I forgot to pack my can of PTFE lubricant for the archive today so was unable to put the last tape I have through the last stage of the process to get it to play. Well there's a little project I wanted to do in Adobe Premiere anyway so I thought I'd go and find that laptop I was using a few months ago with Premiere on it. I found the laptop and clicked the link, dead shortcut, turns out our tech guy uninstalled it a while back. So I had to reinstall it. No big deal but bloody hell, I couldn't just pick up the laptop and click and 'boff' there we go could I?

Nothing's ever f**king easy!

Semi-Easy

Well loyal readers it seems some things can be semi-easy. I've learnt today that, although they are basically Fox holes (no real problem) the pitch between the perforations on 28mm and 35mm film is the same. This means we can fix the Premier! All we have to do is get our guest electro-mechanical genius to chop the end off a small 35mm sprocket, level the shaft so that the width of the sprocket is 28mm rather than 35mm, reattach the end, file away the excess pins on one side, find a new handle to fit to the shaft for the racking and deal with any other unforseen problems once we've got that far. Rather him than me!

(Edit: I have since spoken to our genius and it looks like there are no 35mm sprockets small enough for the job so it looks like he'll have to machine one from scratch after all, nothing's ever f**king easy!)

Speaking of removing pins I love tape splicers. I've been using one in my work that we had lying around, a fair splicer but the blades are a bit blunt so the tape doesn't always cut cleanly. Well I finally got off my backside today and dug around in our splicer box and found a better one. Then, spurred on by the delight at finding one with decent blades, I decided to dismantle it and remove the stupid guide pins at the ends (such a pain in the behind when dealing with shrunken film). Actually this was genuinely semi-easy! It made repairing the tears caused by the gummy splices in the latest film so much easier. Of course, as I've mentioned before, it's extremely annoying that the, erm, fool who owned the films before used standard sellotape to fix the breaks and now I'm having to deal with all the resultant crap rather than the film simply unspooling nice and easily onto the cores but, of course, this is because

Nothing's ever f**king easy!

Videotape and French eBay

Can't remember if I mentioned this before but if I did here it is again anyway. My main project at the archive at the moment is transferring some 1/2" EIAJ open-reel videotapes that have lost their lubricant. To get them to play requires a process involving cleaning, re-lubricating and then transferring. I had three tapes ready and waiting to be transferred today. The first two were fine. The third had a thin band of noise in the lower quarter of the picture. One or two tapes I've done have had this problem and I have found a way to mask it- hold your (clean!) finger on the tape very gently just above where it touches the head. In theory one could rig up some kind of pressure pad to do this but since I REALLY can't be bothered I use my finger. The thing is after twenty minutes or so one's arm feels about ready to drop off. Thankfully these are half hour tapes and one grits one's teeth and gets on with it- I'd hate to have to do it for one of the hour long tapes though! But why couldn't life be a bit simpler and this not be necessary? The other two tapes played OK as have the majority of the tapes I've done, why do one or two have to be just that little bit extra awkward? It's bad enough one has to relubricate the damn things in the first place!

So just now I did what I so frequently do and popped over to French eBay to check for rare 9.5/17.5/28mm projectors. I won't detail my exact search terms since I've already given away a trade secret by telling you I do this and if you don't do this already and collect these things you're probably thinking 'Hey that's a good idea, I'll do that!' Since this increases my already sizeable competition you can find your own damn projectors! However I will say I always select "Enchères & Achat Immédiat" because Petites Annonces is about as much use as a chocolate 200B. Until today Enchères & Achat Immédiat was on the far left of the search box and from habit I selected the far left option. As of today that is now the new category "Tout eBay" and Enchères & Achat Immédiat is in the middle. The work of seconds to change category but again just one of those irritating little niggles that makes life such a pain in the posterior. Why couldn't they put the new category in the middle or on the right? Why couldn't that third tape play without a noise bar? Why couldn't the N1500 tape I finally found play more than a minute or so without clogging up the heads in a pretty big way? I'll tell you why:

Nothing's ever f**king easy!

Where Is That F**king Tape?

I am a very lucky man in some ways. Thanks to a eBay purchase I made a couple of years ago, striking up a friendship with the seller and two trips to a flat in Camden I have a working Philips N1500 (I've got an N1700 as well but because nothing's ever f**king easy I need to get it fixed again). Recently thanks to a contact in a regional film archive and a very generous man in York I have some more Philips tapes and one of them has N1500 material on it (at least according to the label). I threw it in my bag the other day (at least as far as I can remember I did) and thought I'd give it a whirl tonight. But try as I might I can't find where I put that f**king tape! Maybe I left it at the archive after all. If not I'll have to tear this whole f**king room apart to find it, no easy task let me tell you! Why couldn't it just be in plain sight so I could get on with it? I'll tell you why:

Nothing's ever f**king easy!

Standard Crap

Well loyal readers it's been a couple of days and the main reason for that is there has been nothing terrible particularly worthy of note. Yesterday in particular was actually pretty good. Today I've had a couple of films where some %&*! has rewound them back to front (one reel 'flipped' half way through, morons) but that's just standard crap. But don't worry loyal readers, if there's one thing I've learnt it's that things running as smoothly as this is an exceptional state rather than the usual and, being a pessimistic sort of fellow, not only will nothing be f**king easy pretty soon but it will probably crash spectacularly and things will be very not f**king easy! We shall see.

Where's my f**king umbrella?

Found my umbrella today, it's been missing since Tuesday, that's because I left it at the archive, no wonder I couldn't find it yesterday.

Nothing's ever f**king easy!

More gummy splices

Ooh if I could only get my hands on whoever previously owned these reels of film I'm working on at the moment. There are some sections between splices where the film has been torn in half on the horizontal for several feet, one has to peel off one half and then the other half and splice them back together along the tear, not impossibe but such a trial.

Nothing's ever f**king easy!

P.S. We had a call today from a company wanting to borrow an Edwardian 16mm camera. Only thing is the Edwardian era ended in 1910 and 16mm wasn't produced until 1923, you'd have thought they'd've checked first!

Old Video Machines

Ah, old video machines, the bane of my existence. Basically the story is this, I'm transferring some sticky videotapes for a certain organisation and my contact there put me in touch with a man in Yorkshire who had two video machines he thought might be most useful to me- a Sony AV3670CE (to compliment my AV3620CE and potential replacement should the machine go tits up) and a Sony CV2100ACE, cool machine, different standard to the 3620/3670, rarer,... and almost always with slack belts and often with knackered heads. Well they arrived at the archive last week and I finally got round to checking them out today. Both machines have pros and cons:

AV3670CE:

Pros:
It powers on.
The heads aren't knackered.
The belts are fine.

Cons:
The heads were absolutely f**king filthy.
It took ages to get them clean.
Once I'd cleaned them I discovered the picture didn't reproduce properly, there's some kind of distortion over the picture that might just be fixable if I spent several hours micro-tweaking the head placement but probably isn't. That machine is staying at the archive to be used as a 'sh*t' machine that can be used for all manner of testing an experimenting as needed, then the proper transfers can be done on my AV3620.

CV2100ACE:
This doesn't really lend itself to pros and cons. On the plus side it powers up, the heads were f**king filthy but cleaned up just fine and it gives a picture with no distortion. The other bit of good news is that the belts aren't as slack as they usually are. That's also the bad news, they are a bit slack, the rewind belt is fine, it's the forward belt that's the trouble, it will give a picture with no distortion but only if you assist it by manually turning the take-up reel as it's playing. Doing this for an hour or so is no fun whatsoever. Replacement belts aren't readily available and I don't particularly want to fiddle about with a CV2100 that works as well as I've ever had one working of the three that have been through my hands. On the plus side I still have one of the other two which has much slacker belts so now I have a working one (albeit with a slightly slack forward belt) I can muck about with the other one and try and find a suitable replacement without particularly caring if my endeavours to find said belt completely screws the machine up. And I got a Philips tape with N1500 material on it so I can finally give my N1500 a proper workout!

However old video machines, the chances of being able to just pick one up and have it work are miniscule, usually because of the belts. The other reason of course is:

Nothing's ever f**king easy!

Broken Perfs and Gummy Splices

To my mind there are two key things that make checking unknown film fun, firstly finding out what's on it, the other is seeing how well the condition has borne up over time. Conversely one of the most frustrating things is when the picture is fine but the perforations have been torn to shreds, usually by some idiot who should never have been allowed within a million miles of film. Luckily the one film I found today that was in the most appalling of conditions was a stray reel that's only fit for ditching anyway but for goodness sake!

The other problem I found today was a reel that had gone a little sticky, this can largely be treated with a healthy dose of film cleaner and lubricant but it's such a pain, particularly when the self same fool mentioned above has snapped the film a good many times and has used ordinary sellotape to 'repair' the join (I use the term repair loosely, from what I could see it looks like he simply taped the two bits together and let the projector punch out the perforations which, by some strange kind of poetic justice, can't have done his projector much good!) The trouble with ordinary sellotape if left over time is it either looses all its stickiness and just flakes off (quite common) or it turns to goo (as happened in this case). This makes cleaning a major pain in the a*se since you turn the handle on the winding bench, hit the goo (or a split perf) and, as happened so frequently today it's unreal, the tissue with the cleaning fluid respectively jolts out of one's hand as it gets stuck on the goo or it gets shredded by the split perf. So a quick cleaning and lube job that should only take a few minutes takes absolutely bloody ages.

Nothing's ever f**king easy!

Kodacolor

Bloody Kodacolor (yes like Kinemacolor the correct spelling is the American spelling of 'color', establishing that for certain wasn't f**king easy to start with!) I've got two 100ft films shot using this. The footage is in superb condition and would be fantastic in colour... except that I haven't got the required tri-colour filter to project it properly. They're very rare and my only real option is to try and make one.

Nothing's ever f**king easy!

Outing

The original plan for today was to go with two film collector friends of mine to visit another collector who lives somewhere near Somerset. Unfortunately both my collector friends are feeling under the weather so the trip has been cancelled. I suppose this is the price one pays for having friends far older than one's self!

On the plus side it means I can do some of the other thousand and one things on my list of things to do, on the downside it's already 12:55 and I haven't really started yet.

Nothing's ever f**king easy.

Er... 1

Howdy folks. Well here it is, the first post. In homage to one of my favourite blogs (hell, one of my favourite places on the Web) I've gone with the same theme used by Nannyknowsbest. Down with the Nanny state. So, I suppose you want to know the point of this blog. Well I've noticed lately that nothing is ever f**king easy. Actually that's not true, I've noticed this for some time but recently it's been getting to me. For myself I hope this blog will be a useful outlet for venting my frustration at the fact that nothing is ever f**king easy and maybe I'll notice a pattern over time that will help me combat this fact, here is where I start fighting back! For you, the reader (this blog has a reader?) I hope my posts will be entertaining and amusing in the same way that you watch a Road Runner cartoon and smack your forehead at how dumb the Coyote is. Anyhoo all this whittering isn't really giving you much of a flavour of this blog's (soon to be) regular style of post so let's catch up on the last two days: (just before we do that you should know that I am an unemployed ex-student, qualified librarian and film archivist and do two volunteer jobs, one at The Living Archive in Wolverton, the other and The Projected Picture Trust at Bletchley Park, I am the Trust's archivist)

Yesterday:

Had a call at the end of last week at the archive from a guy who wanted to view some film, the idea being to see what he wanted to get put onto DVD. The conversation went well and I arranged to meet him on Tuesday. One question I asked is what type of film he had. Standard 8 he said. Darn, we've only got a useless, clapped out P8 at the archive, better bring my Siemens in. Arrange for mother to drop me at the train station, arrange to call ahead to be picked up at the other end. Realised I didn't have the archive's number in my new-ish phone so flashed up the website pronto just before I left and copied the number. Got to Milton Keynes and rang through, no answer, 7 times no answer. Was getting a bit annoyed but thought I'd walk it, not impossible with the projector it just feels somewhat heavier by the time one gets to the archive.
Got to Wolverton and the road to the high street was shut (turns out it was a gas sub-station that had caught fire.) The only other way is to walk miles around the other way. Called again and finally got through- turns out I'd copied down the fax no. by mistake. Anyway got picked up, the guy arrived and I went to put the film on the projector. JUST as I lifted the reel to put it on the spindle I noticed the spool's rather large centre hole and checked the perforations. SUPER8 not bloody standard 8. Now we've got a super8 projector there that can handle reels that size so I didn't need to bring the bloody projector in in the first place! Then the films turned out to be about four hours worth of holiday film, countryside, flowers, car journeys... YAWN! Nothing's ever f**king easy.

So today. I had one aim today, get to the Trust, clean lots of film and re-can them. Got there and found that finally the new magazine has arrived, only six weeks bloody late! So 10:30 to 11:30 was spent shoving copies of Rewind into envelopes. When that was done I went off with a view to cleaning the films. Juuuuust as I was about to start I heard voices coming along the corridor (shouldn't happen in our storage area in theory). Stuck my nose out and it was two members of staff from the Park. Lovely ladies they were (particularly one of them!) and they seemed most interested in our stores and what I was doing so I was only too happy to chat and show them round. They went off and I began cleaning the film. About an hour later Ken (our curator) came in looking rather worried and said he wanted me to get some particular reels of film together that he knew we had. Since I haven't catalogued the 35mm films yet this was quite a tall order but after two and a half hours of swearing at film cans and poor labelling I managed to find the reels he wanted. However, juuuuust as was about to start looking I had another visitor, another person from the Park responding to a security alert, some twerp with a ladder trying to get into the building (not me I hasten to add!) Had a quick look around with them but couldn't find anyone. By the time all this was done there was only about half an hour left so I went back to the workshop and finished up for the day. What annoyed me was that all I wanted was to get in there and clean film, I was so damn determined to do that and only that today and not get sidetracked, maybe I should have called this blog 'nothing ever goes to plan'? Ah well, it's called what it is and it's here to stay. So there.

Nothing's ever f**king easy.