Lemme guess; it’s on BetaMax?
Edit: reels?! You don’t have a god damn flashlight and a wall?! I can still watch my dad’s old 8mm tapes this way. It just doesn’t have a consistent frame rate 🤷🏻♂️
I don’t think it’s that kind of reel. Idk anything about Ampex but it’s probably magnetic tape
Pretty sure you’re also going to need a focusing lens and a shutter to not have it just be a smear on the wall.
But it’s not projector film, anyway. Magnetic tape also came on reels back in the day. Mainframes were using them for long term storage. There were also reel-to-reel music players.
Whoopsie! History just slips through your fingers like sand sometimes, huh?
Complete incompetence that it wasn’t digitized already.
That tape is old and degrading. If it’s not digitized soon, it will be lost.
I don’t think tapes degrade that fast. Yes, the quality will get slightly worse but it can be played until it becomes too brittle.
Video tape isn’t really that durable over time. Most of the info I can find comes from digitization services, but they are fairly consistent in saying that, for tapes that are stored in “normal” conditions, you can expect 10-25% degradation in 20 years. These tapes are 40 years old. They have likely degraded significantly already and may fall apart when played.
God damn! Somebody buy the government a VCR!
/s
I’m gonna call bullshit based on the story by Snowden in his biography about his Boomer co-worker who was in charge of maintaining a tape drive that recorded all incoming communications from field agents as a backup
I mean, there’s a difference between a reel of AMPEX film that the NSA is dragging their feet on digitizing, and the modern 45TB 8gbps tape cartridges that absolutely could be used to store thousands of hours of video per day.
If I remember correctly, he said it was definitely not a modern tape drive, which is why an older man was maintaining it
It’s more modern than what’s being talked about in the article. Snowden knew his stuff, that doesn’t mean he knew what the old guy with the tape was doing tech wise.
I know two VCR repair men who would be up to the job 🤔 somebody call Lighting Fast VCR!!
