Mass Productions Audio, Video, and Film Transfer News

“Two years ago the Yiddish Book Center discovered a treasure trove of several thousand hours of vintage Yiddish audio recordings in the basement of a Jewish library in Montreal.  Dating back more than 60 years, the collection included cassette recordings of Yiddish novels and stories read aloud by Yiddish actors, and reel-to-reel recordings of lectures by and interviews with virtually every major Yiddish writer of the second half of the twentieth century.  Library colleagues told us there was only one person who could properly restore, remaster and digitize these unique materials, and that was Paul Adams.  For the past two years Paul has done just that – conscientiously, skillfully and meticulously.  Thanks to his painstaking work, these long-lost, one-of-a-kind recordings are now restored, enhanced, and freely available online, where they are being enjoyed by listeners around the world.  Paul has literally helped preserve the native voices of a nearly vanished world, and we all own him an enormous debt of gratitude.”  Aaron Lansky, President, National Yiddish Book Center.

The Massachusetts College of Pharmacy in Boston chose Mass Productions to digitize over 350 VHS and Betacam videotapes.

Using the best VHS deck ever built,  Mass Productions will be digitizing all of the videos to uncompressed QuickTime video files to create an archive.

The tapes contain many years of public relations footage that will be used in future video productions.

This is a project that MCPHS has been wanting to do for years.   We are providing them with an experienced streamlined process.

This is a photo of famous Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci somewhere in the 1960’s. On the left, she is pictured with her portable reel to reel recorder. On the right, one of her tapes here in our studios at Mass Productions. This tape is an interview of the late Peter O’toole. We are currently digitizing all of her tapes for Boston University’s Gotlieb Archives.   We are faced with many challenges, such as tape speed issues, and 44 year old C120 cassettes that are jamming and breaking. However we have solutions for these problems and painstakingly restoring the recordings one tape at a time.

Mass Productions is starting another audio archive.   These tapes are interviews of German Scientists involved in the Manhattan Project in the 1950’s.

The tapes are from Boston University’s Gotlieb Archives, and being digitized for use by the Atomic Heritage Foundation.

The tapes are small little reels recorded at 1 7/8 IPS on very thin tape, but we know how to deal with it, and AHF is very happy with our work.

Another Digital Audio Archive is complete! We returned hard drives and tapes to The Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA this week. We rescued and preserved 1500 fragile audio reels, and 279 cassette tapes to digital audio files which will be available online through archives.org. Director Aaron Lansky said “if we do have more projects in the future, you’ll be the one we call, and I’m going to recommend you to all our friends. We are thrilled.”

We just finished the last reel for the Longy School of Music digital archive project. This has been a two year project, and one we are very proud of. 276 audio reels and 63 Digital PCM recordings on Betamax videotape. The tapes used either Dolby A, Dolby B, DBX 1 or DBX 2.  Many tapes had issues that required some creative problem solving. The music on these tapes is beautiful and we hope it becomes released to the public soon.

Click on the link below to see the newsletter article about the project we just completed:

Longy School Of Music Digital Archive Project: Engineered By Mass Productions

Our reputation seems to be spreading around the world!  We now have a happy customer in Poland!

Mass Productions can now transfer Digital Betacam, Betacam SX, and Betacam MPEG IMX videotapes directly to DVD or digital video files on Hard Drive! Call us today for pricing information!

We are noticing an increase in the amount of VHS videotapes coming in to us that have mold on them.   Apparently even tapes stored in your living room that are over 20 years old are susceptible to this problem.   We can clean the mold from your tapes before transferring them at an additional cost.   However, we highly recommend you have us digitize any videotape over 15 years old before this happens.

In the next few weeks, Mass Productions will be starting another audio archive project. This time for Umass Boston. This archive is about 500 cassette tapes from Leccos Lemma’s early Boston Hip Hop radio program.

The tapes consist of both the full radio program, as well as the original cassettes submitted from Boston city youth.   Considering the varying quality of recorders used,  each tape is going to require custom azimuth calibration  to retrieve the best audio from the tapes.

Mass Productions will also be photographing the tape cases, which are often decorated with interesting graffiti art.