Managing Mini-Tape Archives

J

jdh3334

Active member
We're building a fairly extensive collection of mini-DV tapes. What is the best location and storing procedure for prolonging their shelf-life? And, what identification methods do you use for archiving footage... so that you can find what you need? A recent project that relied heavily on our house stock footage took me months because the raw footage was poorly identified, and mini-tapes are so small to write much detail on the spine :-)
 
Re: Managing Mini-Tape Archives

I don't know anything about storage when it concerns shelf life, etc. (except to keep away from magnets ;) ), but I have a system for keeping track of tape content.

Owing to being really uptight about Y2K-esque situations, I number each tape in the spine and side, and the cartridges on the spine and side with a five-digit number. The sides also have the date and the side of the cartridge has a short description of the contents. I keep them in just an ordinary rack I ordered from taperesources.com.

I then log each tape into a 4-column spreadsheet. The first column is the tape number. The second is the date (MM/YY). The third column contains a description for each section of the tape, and the fourth column is an approximate starting timecode for each section. Thus if a tape has 5 different kinds of material on it, it will have 5 rows in the spreadsheet, one for each section.

At this point I'm only up to 58 or so, which makes it pretty easy to remember roughly where in the order something I've shot falls. The tapes stay fairly chronological. Tape 00001 is the first thing I did at this job, and 00058 is the most recent. That makes it pretty easy to locate something on the spreadsheet, as long as I remember roughly how long ago I did it.

Hope this helps you.

Dang, that's a long first post.
 
Re: Managing Mini-Tape Archives

A place to store them I wouldn't know... one thing I can recommend though for labelling is making a binder or book, with all of your DV tapes labelled using a number or code of somekind... this really depends on how many you have... I would recommend a number/alphanumeric system...

Put these numbers on your DV tape's spines... then, in your binder... using a table or chart or something put in the different numbers of the DV tapes and beside it, put a description of what is on the tape and approximately where on the tape it is... this way, in the future when you need to find a specific piece of footage, you can simply look through your binder... then when you see what you're looking for, find the numbered tape and you'll know where on the tape it is... this should save you tonnes of time of looking through them and cut down on the number of passthroughs you have to do on each tape.

I know this is what my school had for it's picture archive... it had cds lablled in this way...

colour coding might also be a good idea as a broader way of organizing tapes... ie, a red mark indicated footage from a certain camera or a certain place then have the book organized into the different colour sections or have a different binder of each colour...
 
Re: Managing Mini-Tape Archives

HAHAHAHA!!! I wrote my post at the same time as you and it turned out to have the EXACT same idea on it... right on!
 
Tapes should be stored tails out in a cool dry atmosphere. They should also be stored vertically not lying flat.
 
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