Interview with Bruno Burtre (VectraCom) (part 2/2)

PACKED: What tools do you use for restoration?

Bruno BurtreWe use a lot of products from Snell & Wilcox¹ such as the Archangel system, both in HD and in SD, for which VectraCom is and was a beta tester, which allows us to tell them what we would like them to improve in the system. In addition, we use the Revival software tool developed first of all by DaVinci, and now by Blackmagic and we recently purchased a Digital Vision Nucoda with all the restoration DVO. Archangel is a restoration tool that works in real time. Physically, it is a large rack with cards; it is hardware. It includes a picture stabiliser, anti-scratching filters, etc. with the possibility of adjusting the parameters in real time. It is a system that was developed in collaboration with the INA and PrestoSpace, as the PrestoSpace project provided for the creation of a restoration tool. It has a command panel that allows control of all the machine’s adjustments.

Tools such as Revival however require lengthy rendering when working on images so that the processing being carried out can be visualised. If we had to do everything with Revival, six months of processing would be necessary. With Archangel, we remove 90% of the defects: dust, scratches, etc. and we can really refine our adjustments to act on the grain of the image, the noise, etc. Then, for a more detailed retouch, we use Revival, which works frame-by-frame. Investing in restoration software is relatively inexpensive, but the ability to digitise, restore in real time, and finalise using software only when necessary is a big advantage. Both of these two tools are truly complementary.




PACKED: The idea is to make maximum use of the capabilities of Archangel in order to use Revival as little as possible?

Bruno Burtre: Yes, because the processing time is much longer with Revival. But the objective is above all to get the most out of the original and this starts by a good cleaning of the tape to have as little dust as possible. No matter how advanced the machines we use, with re-grain and contrast or contour enhancing functions, in the end, we denature the work somewhat by losing detail. With good cleaning and subtle adjustments of Archangel, we remove most of the defects without heading towards restoration that is irreversible. If we remove too much noise, for example, in the end there will be too many flat colours in the image, and not enough matter to reverse the process.





PACKED: In addition, the video image has a certain patina that could be lost with too much treatment.

Bruno Burtre: Yes, and sometimes the artist included the defects intentionally. Another problem concerns video artworks that come from television channels, because broadcasters want a perfect picture and their encoders need a smooth picture.


Packed: What are the most common means of storage?

Bruno BurtreAt present, many clients use LTO-4². More and more, we also work with hard drives, such as with the INA for example. In this way, they can carry out quality control without having to unload an LTO cartridge. Hard drives have a practical side.


PACKED: But it is not a recommended format for archiving.

Bruno Burtre: No, of course, it is just an exchange media, as a hard drive may stop working overnight for many different reasons. Magnetic tape may also encounter problems, but the greatest difficulty lies within the durability of the players. Today, it can be hard to find an LTO-1 drive. There is backward compatibility, but it is not eternal. LTO-4 drives can read LTO-3 and LTO-2 cartridges, but not LTO-1 cartridges. This technological evolution obliges us to migrate data. The INA encountered this problem when Sony stopped supporting the DTF format³.


PACKED: Do you always work with the same kind of customers?

Bruno Burtre:We may work with television channels such as NRJ 12 and TF1 as well as institutions such as the BNF⁴ and the INA, or even town and county councils that send out requests for digitisation proposals. We also work with cultural centres, and companies such as the Montreux Jazz Festival, or Gaumont Pathé Archives for the digitisation of film. We have quite a variety of customers. At present, we are working on a batch for the BNF, which includes a lot of old formats; V2000, EIAJ, 1” type A, 2”, etc.


PACKED: Does the nature of the material influence the way you work? For example, is there any difference if the client is the INA or the Pompidou Centre?

Bruno Burtre: No, there is no difference in the procedure. Whatever the archive, the operator will be as meticulous as possible during digitisation in order to have as few corrections as possible to carry out. We are not artists, we are not here to give our view of a work, and our role is to reproduce it as accurately as possible.


PACKED: Does the INA send you their most problematic tapes?

Bruno Burtre: No, most of the times they prefer to do this internally, as they have the qualified personnel and the right solutions. The INA sets the standards in the world of video archives, and also the production costs are relatively high as soon as you leave the framework of mass digitisation. We can do it, but the price is rather prohibitive, so quite often customers such as the INA will prefer to do it themselves. A tape transfer that requires three days’ work will inevitably cost more than an hour-long tape requiring just one hour to transfer.

When we work for the INA, it is in large volumes, and a room is dedicated to them. We do not mix articles or customers. Once the tapes enter the digitisation room, the customer files are created, which specify who the contacts are, and what formats and destination media are demanded. The operator knows straight away whom he is working for, and what specifications he must apply.




The process is always more or less similar and standardised, as whoever the customer is, the goal is the same: get the most out of the tape. It is cleaned and if it is sticky, it goes through the baking process, and is transferred two days later. When the tape is ready, the video and audio parameters of the player are adjusted, as well as the tracking, that is to say the optimisation of the video head’s signal. Then we digitise using the format chosen by the customer. For the Montreux Jazz Festival, specifically, we do a full-width uncompressed 10-bit capture. For the audiotapes, we use 24-bit 96 kHz, as this is the specification they asked for.

In the case of the INA, we do the capture in DV25 and then transcode to MPEG-2 8 Mbit/s, which is the INA’s storage standard. They are currently mulling a switch to MPEG-4 or to Motion JPEG2000, so if they adopt these new specifications next year, we will have to do uncompressed captures.


PACKED: MPEG-2 appears to be a strange choice for a heritage institution such as the INA?

Bruno Burtre: The INA chose this standard nearly ten years ago now, and at the time they made the best and most reasonable choice in terms of quality. Today, people are used to HD television and always having superb picture quality. Now, when Sony launched the DV-Cam and Betacam SX formats, for example, and we saw these on SD (Standard Definition) screens, we thought that there was little difference between Digital Betacam and DV Cam pictures. Today, things are different, because on HD screens you can see that compression creates visible artefacts. Our way of viewing has changed and the size of the resulting file was of greater importance at the time. Storage costs are one tenth of what they were, which is why we now almost exclusively work with uncompressed files or DPX⁵ for Telecine. Then, if the client wants MPEG-4, we encode afterwards.


PACKED: Have the low cost of storage also raised the standard in terms of quality.

Bruno Burtre: Yes, however we do recommend DV25⁶ for transferring VHS, U-matic or EIAJ tapes. There is no point in creating uncompressed files, as the picture quality of the original media is inferior to DV25. On the other hand, for 2”, 1” and all Betacam formats, uncompressed video is justified, because there is a big difference.

What’s more, whenever we work on uncompressed video, we dedicate a server to a customer and we cannot work after eight o’clock. The encoding is done at night, and if the files are uncompressed, the necessary data rates are high and the costs are also different. The infrastructure is always adapted to the demands of our customers.


PACKED: What container formats do you use for uncompressed files?

Bruno Burtre: At the moment we use uncompressed AVI, but this always depends on the client, some of them want QuickTime, MXF, or MJPEG4 H.264 for compressed video.


PACKED: Have you had any demands for MJPEG-2000?

Bruno Burtre: We’ve been hearing about the MJPEG-2000 standard for several years, and as I said the INA is considering it. Until now, we’ve been hearing about this format within the PrestoSpace project for the past five years, but none of the editing tools, like Final Cut Pro⁷, Avid⁸, or any others, are capable of playing it back, so it would appear to be a difficult format to work with.

Today, software and plugins are being developed and MJPEG-2000 will certainly gain growing support and become more widespread. None of our clients have asked us for MJPEG-2000 yet, but we are starting to see it in certain requests for tender. More surprising however, is the rather strong demand for encoding in Apple’s ProRes format⁹.


PACKED: It is surprising, since it’s a proprietary format.

Bruno Burtre: Exactly, especially coming from archivists, who usually prefer open formats. Once again, VectraCom is just a service provider, so we do not set the rules; it is up to the archivist to determine beforehand what format he wants. What the field of video archiving lacks is a sort of regulation, of standardisation implemented by an international institution, which is what PrestoSpace and FIAT¹⁰ did for a time. But I think that if there are no clear recommendations, it is also because nobody wants to fall out with the manufacturers.


PACKED: Do you also work for foreign clients?

Bruno Burtre: Yes, VectraCom is even capable of setting up in situ installations for certain clients who do not want their tapes to leave their country. This is the case notably in Saudi Arabia, where we are part of a consortium entrusted with the preservation of 250,000 hours of video for that country. VectraCom has a technical team that has been over there for eighteen months, and which manages a local workforce. We hire the equipment: four 2” players, four 1” type B players, a Telecine as well as a few U-matic decks.


PACKED: That concerns a big project. How do you manage a smaller one?

Bruno Burtre: If we take on, for example, some EIAJ tapes, and there are a few tapes for about fifty hours of material, it will be possible for us to fit it into our production calendar within two or three months.


PACKED: Do only your operators perform quality control here, or does the client also sometimes come himself?

Bruno Burtre: If the customer wants to come, then our doors are open and he can then see how the backup of his material takes place. We are used to working with artists, editors, etc. When we are working on the restoration or the calibration of a film, for example, the client is often present.

When the artist is present we can often do more, because in his absence, we must stay as neutral as possible. This was the case when we processed certain works of the Pompidou Centre, these being looped sequences on tape, as at the time it was the way continuous works were shown. In a situation like this, we cannot know what is important and what is not, so we copy everything. Without the artist, we cannot decide what is part of the work and what is not.


PACKED: How is the quality control?

Bruno Burtre: During digitisation, an operator checks the levels, looks for defects, and adds any comments that are necessary. Once the digitisation is complete, the operator checks the beginning, the middle and the end of the file. Then there is a random check by the technician who sets the encoding parameters, and validates the file before it is copied to the final media. For the Montreux Jazz Festival, we chose operators who are also musicians, and who have a certain sensitivity that may be important.

Whatever happens, the customer carries out quality control on reception. He will be entitled to an inspection period, the duration of which has been agreed on beforehand. The INA, for example, has twelve weeks to carry out this inspection and during this period we keep the files on our servers. When this period is over, we erase them. In the case of the Montreux Jazz Festival, we send the LTO cartridges, the XD-Cam¹¹ and the DVDs and we keep a copy of the LTO tapes here for the duration of the project. In this way, if an anomaly is detected upon delivery, we can find it on the LTO.





PACKED: What acquisition cards do you use?

Bruno Burtre: We mainly use Blackmagic cards¹², in particular the Extreme HD cards, which appeared lately. Blackmagic offers the best value for cards and, as a consequence, they are ever more widespread. Blackmagic design cards are fitted as standard in a large amount of equipment and if you buy a Resolve system¹³ for calibrating, it uses a Blackmagic card. Cards made by Aja¹⁴ and Matrox¹⁵ are comparatively expensive.

As a general rule, customers only specify what they want in terms of a final product and then we choose which configuration we are going to use to get there. However, for major projects, the client sometimes specifies which acquisition card must be used. This was the case for the Montreux Jazz Festival, as they wanted to work directly with uncompressed 4:2:2 and a specific Aja codec. They asked us to use a specific Snell & Wilcox 10-bit converter with an Aja acquisition card. As soon as the production line was ready, they came to inspect it and left with files that they validated themselves. Only then did we receive the go-ahead for the operation.


PACKED: How is the maintenance of the equipment managed?

Bruno Burtre: We follow the ISO 9000 standards¹⁶, which recommend that we reference each machine, and do periodic inspections, etc. The standard describes quality control of maintenance as well as results, but also how quality control is implemented, the control monitors calibrated, the machines labelled, what are the tools used to certify that a video signal conforms to the original, etc. For the time being, we call on a maintenance company situated in the same building. This company carries out maintenance on all our recording appliances: HD-Cam, Digital Betacam, etc. and of all the equipment that enables us to produce the final media so that we can certify that the recorded signal conforms to the original. Then, we look after the maintenance of all the video players: 1”, U-matic, 2”, etc.


PACKED: When you have to transfer ½” tapes or V2000 cassettes, is the maintenance of these players done in-house?

Bruno Burtre: Yes, we have our own “old-school” maintenance department for the old formats. We have kept the technical documentation of this equipment, it is very important to be able to do this work internally.




PACKED: Is the documentation also something that you organise, in a certain way?

Bruno Burtre: No, not really, as the standard does not oblige us to do so. On the other hand, the manuals and diagrams are all put away in specific cupboards.


PACKED: Do you also keep defective machines that could be used for spare parts?

Bruno Burtre: Yes, but usually, we only take parts from a machine that works perfectly well. If a machine currently being used for transferring breaks down, we will take a card from a machine that is reported as being functional. If we take a card from storage, we cannot be sure that it will work. It is only afterwards that we use the cards from our store, when we want to make the broken machine operational again. Machines can be cannibalised, but not carelessly. For 2”, for example, we have eight machines that are ready and working, and a store of spare cards.


PACKED: Is it the same as for cassettes, some equipment manufacturers are more reliable than others?

Bruno Burtre: No, here we have both professional and non-professional recorders, for example. The paradox lies in that, the latest non-professional VHS recorders are often of better quality than older professional recorders, partly because they have automatic tracking or gain adjustment, etc. Quite often, we get a much more stable picture with a non-professional recorder than with a professional one. On the other hand, tapes such as certain Super-VHS are only readable on professional recorders. This is why we keep Panasonic professional players for S-VHS and Digital-VHS.


PACKED: How is your equipment stored?

Bruno Burtre: Our spare equipment, which is not being used in the transfer rooms, is stored with the archives. It is an area with air-conditioning, because if you store equipment in a place that is too damp, there will be problems with rust, and with grease becoming tacky, etc. It is stored on shelves, at 20°C and 40 to 50 % of relative humidity.




PACKED: This might not concern you because you use them frequently, but do you think it is necessary to switch on a machine from time to time if it is not used for a long period of time? Is this something you have thought about?

Bruno Burtre: We don’t have the time to do this, but we do however warm up a machine that has not been used for a long time. We simply switch it to “on”, to avoid the capacitors¹⁷ blowing. Then we clean it thoroughly, before putting a tape into it. When a machine has been in storage for a long time, there are often mechanical problems, connected with the silicon-based grease still used in modern video recorders. When this grease becomes solid over time, it has to be cleaned and greased again.


PACKED: How do you manage the expertise of the machines at VectraCom?

Bruno Burtre: The hardest part is finding experienced technicians in electronics, because the young technicians who have just graduated in electronics are hardly capable of recognising a chemical capacitor. Today, electronics are taught using a numeric keypad, but for working on video archives, this is not enough. André Grasset, one of the three directors of VectraCom, is now 73 years old and he is one of the very first technicians to have worked with 2” tapes. He is currently passing on his knowledge to Denis Mahé, but acquiring this type of knowledge requires being an old-school electronics engineer.


PACKED: Your colleague Denis Mahé was already an electronic engineer to begin with?

Bruno Burtre: Yes, Denis Mahé obtained a Baccalaureate in electronics before graduating in audiovisual studies. But he is above all a true enthusiast, who is used to working with audiovisual electronics. You have to be able to tinker around, in a good sense, and such skills are becoming very hard to find. That is why we are thinking ahead, and preparing for André Grasset’s retirement. We are trying to recover of much of his know-how as possible, but it is above all his daily experience of repairing that we are trying to pass on. As the machines get ever older, and the tapes are often in poor condition, failures are very frequent. Recently for example, we experienced a true disaster during which four U-matic video recorders broke down, one after the other.


PACKED: Do the technicians take notes on the failures?

Bruno Burtre: Yes, but these are usually personal documents proper to each technician, or reminders, etc. We have whole notebooks regarding the different formats, 2”, 1”, EIAJ, etc. For ½”, because we only have a few technical diagrams, some have been drawn up by hand.


PACKED: At what point does maintenance come in?

Bruno Burtre: We carry out preventive maintenance on all our recorders, and corrective maintenance on other equipment. For players of old formats, we cannot do preventive maintenance; we only intervene if a breakdown occurs. However, cleaning is done systematically before each use. This includes cleaning the video heads, of all the guide rollers, and the re-lubrication of certain components if it is necessary.


PACKED: How do you manage the required spare parts?

Bruno Burtre: Sony guarantees maintenance up to seven years after an item is removed from sale, so for example they no longer supply parts for Betacam SP players. We currently have a large stock of spare parts and enough video heads, but the solution that we have found for the 2” players is to send them to video head refurbishing companies based in the USA, such as Videomagnetics¹⁸ and Aheadtek¹⁹. We dispatch our worn-out drum and they will refurbish it completely.

For the EIAJ players, as there are no longer any spare parts at all, we have them custom built. Generally, these machines haven’t had many hours of use, about five hundred, and the guide rollers inside them are not deteriorated. On the other hand, the pinch rollers are often in very poor condition, and in response to this, we found a company that is capable of making the rollers, and recovering old guides, etc. When we had to modify a Telecine in order to transfer 9.5mm film, André Grasset called on them after calculating the necessary diameter of the components.


PACKED: Do you still buy equipment?

Bruno Burtre: Yes, it still happens frequently. We have just bought two audio decks for the Montreux Jazz Festival, one is a 24-track analogue, and the other is 32-tracks digital. These are appliances that we bought from private individuals on the Internet.


PACKED: Internet is the source of choice for buying equipment?

Bruno Burtre: Yes. At Sony we bought ten EIAJ players on the Internet, only two of which actually worked. The others were used for spares. It is not easy to find this type of equipment and it almost always requires repairs. But the electronics of these machines is distinctive and complex. Often the technicians of the era knew how to use the player, without necessarily knowing how to repair it.

For broadcasting equipment such as the U-matic players or 1”, we sometimes buy from certain brokers.


PACKED: Do you communicate on your methods of preservation?

Bruno Burtre: VectraCom has always had a fairly open policy with the clients; we have nothing really confidential to keep from them. Of course, we do not give away all of our little secrets, however I think it is better to tell and to explain all the difficulties in transferring a video, so that the archivists do not turn to charlatans. A lot of companies offer archive duplication services, but these are people who do not know the old machines and the rigor that is required for processing audio and video archives; they risk causing even more damage.

It is for this reason that our customers have the possibility of coming when the project is launched, or having us go to meet them to explain everything we intend to do. We have a partnership with the archivists, as they most often know what they want, but do not necessarily know how to get it. It is up to us to find the solutions that are most suited to their demand.


PACKED: Do clients always have very precise demands?

Bruno Burtre: No, a lot of clients ask for “average” restoration in their specifications. But this does not exist; it may take six months just as it may take a few days, depending on the material and the media. In these cases, we do formulate a reply otherwise someone else will be awarded the contract, but it would be better to have a real discussion, as a partnership is not set up in ten minutes. When we give an estimation, it always includes baking and standard cleaning. If But if we have to use lubrication or cleaning with solvents, the cost for the customer will be higher different. Because they often do not even know what is on the tape, the cost of the operation makes them back out.

Click here to read part 1 of the interview

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