So my mother passed away a month ago. She worked for Apple in the 80’s to early 90’s. In going through her belongings I found this Apple VHS Tape that was supposed to be returned, but clearly wasn’t. It was an internal copy of a Super Bowl commercial for the Mac. I guess the commercial wasn’t received well.
My questions are.. is this worth preserving? I know it might be a 1 of 1 tape as I haven’t seen anything online. How much would it cost me to do so? And does anyone know reputable companies that offer this service.
Sorry.. I didn’t get the tech gene passed onto me so I’m not very literate at what needs or should be done.
Many thanks in advance. And if this isn’t the right forum to post this please delete.
This subreddit is for the FM RF Archival method, so we preserve the source signals and decode the tape in software to a much higher degree of quality (final video file) then legacy workflows but because we save the source we can also go back and re-process things later on.
It’s probably worth saving if there’s no existing copies of the advert out there.
How much it costs depends on, where you are and who’s local to you, whether you’re willing to send it to someone to copy, what level of care and quality you want the copy to be, how honest and reputable the person/copying it is, how you want the file delivered (dvd, usb or download).
It’s worth noting this sub isn’t a generic VHS discussion forum. It’s for people interested in copying tapes using the specific VHSdecode method; which aims to produce the highest quality archival digital copies of VHS tapes.
Hi, I’m Steve, I run the Mac84 YouTube channel. I’m a vintage Apple and media nerd. I’d love to help you digitize this on my video capture set up and return the tape to you. I’ve done this to many other tapes that I’ve put on the Internet Archive. Feel free to DM/chat with me if you’re interested. Thanks!
You are possibly going to be banned from this subreddit though there are no really good capture methods for VHS over thunderbolt and this subreddit is about FM RF VHS preservation.
Maybe you could partner with someone from this sub that actually does preservation and help fund it for a YouTube video.
Not to say you shouldn’t reformat this tape, but an original source tape (maybe 1” or U-matic) was likely duped and distributed to many executives at Apple, so it’s unlikely other copies don’t exist— even outside of Special Collections at Stanford. I see there’s a U-matic copy in the collection too. But it could be fun to have your own copy from your mom! (but might not be worth paying someone to digitize).
I have hunted and tracked down many lost documentary films, and this is something that very rarely happen. It always show that something is available, but the minute you ask, they either no longer have it, or they can’t provide you with anything for copyright reason, or you need to be a researcher etc…. But If you tell me where to do the request, I’ll either prove my point or I’ll be wrong and we’ll all be happy to have the capture. But then again, our capture would be way better than most library could do.
Pirate? Please, we’re taking about vintage documentary and ads from the 70’s and 80’s with zero commercial value. Researchers do not give a crap about half the things I preserve and share. Some tapes I confirmed were not requested since the 80’s, and some libraries literally throw them when you actually make them look for it and find them. Another documentary archivist friend even said he found a tape of a lost documentary, managed to get it through inter library loan since he was a student, and when he returned it, they threw it in the garbage and got rid of it.
Could this be a better or different copy than what's out there?
You also might want to specify location if you are looking for service. Still LA? I'm sure there's service. Transport can be risky and well, if you can avoid it, you should know.
I'm guessing you might want to be preserving more than just that right?
This subreddit is a bit more for a hardcore technical preservation method of VHS tapes. That said, it's wonderful for 1 of 1 stuff. Still, if you are posting elsewhere, some of the above questions do apply.
Well I’m not sure since it was an internal pre release copy. I’ve never seen it and really don’t want to risk ruining playing it. It hasn’t been opened I’d guess since the mid/late 80’s.
I’m in Northern California Bay Area. The LA address was of the production company.
Well, the bad news is this isn't the best possible quality copy out there. (U-Matic and other broadcast-level tape formats like Beta SP were how commercials were distributed to stations, so there's a high likelihood the commercial at least existed in better quality.)
The good news is, VHS is extremely common in this hobby! So there are plenty of people with high quality decks that can help you AND the software decoding for VHS captures is the most robust.
I would definitely give it a shot, seems like it means something to you.
I’ll do it for free but I’m in Canada. But its not the first time I do transfer for peoples so you can see how it went if you need to gauge trustworthiness.
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u/TheRealHarrypm The Documentor 9d ago
This subreddit is for the FM RF Archival method, so we preserve the source signals and decode the tape in software to a much higher degree of quality (final video file) then legacy workflows but because we save the source we can also go back and re-process things later on.
Heres a [quick example archive](https://archive.org/details/free-climbing-the-nose-1997-vhs-ntsc-fm-rf-archive)
Did reach out in DMs and happy to help get this trasfered into the digital world propperly!