Mass Productions Digitizes Film and Video Media For Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

In 2021 Mass Productions was chosen by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to digitize film and video to over 400 digital preservation files. This project was paid for by a CLIR recordings at Risk Grant,and is just a small fraction of the large media archive at WHOI. We started at the beginning with early 8mm and 16mm films of the Alvin deep submersible vehicle. Some of the films were color faded and needed restoration. Many of the 16mm films were spliced together on the film reels with masking tape or gaffer tape,  which created a unique challenge for us. Then we moved onto half inch black and white EIAJ video reels, which required cleaning and baking.  Some tape brands such as Karex and AMPEX were very difficult to recover. Finally we digitized some Umatic and VHS media.    We will be continuing where we left off in the fall of 2023 with deteriorating Umatic videotapes before they fail, including unseen footage of the Titanic! Click the link below to check out this recent detailed article about the project published by WHOI.   It goes into great detail,  and they mention how much they liked working with us!

Read “Data on Deck” Article by Karen Ubrec-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution