Summer 2023 Internships @ BAVC & Prelinger Archives

During the summer, I had the great opportunity to work in the preservation department at the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) under the guidance of Kelley Coyne and Tim Lake. My main responsibility was digitizing VHS tapes for the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts as part of BAVC’s Preservation Access Program (PAP). This program offers affordable preservation services to individuals and smaller organizations with analog audiovisual collections.

Throughout the project, I deepened my understanding of signal flow, the hardware components involved in the digitization process, and the identification of common video tape issues, such as dropouts, sync errors, and head switching noise. I particularly enjoyed working on patching and assembling different digitization hardware configurations, which helped me become more familiar with time base correctors and various legacy cable connectors.

In addition to hands-on experience, I also got to work with essential software tools like Vrecord, an open-source software for capturing video signals and converting them into digital files, and QCtools, a software tool used for analyzing and understanding digitized video files through audiovisual analytics and filtering.

Overall, this internship experience has solidified the concepts I learned from the program, and I am excited to delve deeper into video preservation through the Video Preservation course in the upcoming fall semester.

I had the incredible opportunity of doing my summer internship at the Prelinger Archives where I was involved in its ongoing digitization project funded by the Filecoin Foundation. The three-year grant funded project is a collaboration between the Prelinger Archives and the Filecoin Foundation to preserve and create broad access to rare home movies, newsreels, educational, and sponsored films from the Prelinger collection. Throughout the nine-weeks I got to learn its unique digitization workflow from film preparation to creating culturally responsive metadata.

One of the highlights was assisting Rick Prelinger select materials for digitization. He has immense knowledge of the images found within the cans and it was incredible to watch him pick the films with precision and little hesitation. The collection has many incredible images, but what I found most interesting were the home movies that captured the travels of families in North America. These home movies contain immense evidentiary and one particular collection captured the bay bridge as it was being built. Through this project I got to also finesse my film scanning skills as I had the chance to work on a variety of small gauge formats as well as scanning those with audio tracks. A number of the films were warped, however I got to learn how to use Scanstation’s dedicated warp gate, which does an incredible job in keeping the film still and in sharp focus during scanning.

Spring 2023 Internship @ the New York Public Library

Under the guidance of Benjamin Turkus (MIAP’2016), I completed my Spring 2023 internship at the New York Public Library’s Media Preservation Lab. Throughout the semester, I provided preservation care on film outtakes (specifically, Ellis Island and Book of Days) from the Meredith Monk Collection in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. The internship was structured into several phases, including film preparation and repair, film scanning, quality control, audio digitization, and basic computer programming. This structure allowed me to expand upon my prior knowledge gained through the program and develop technical skills across various disciplines related to audiovisual preservation.

In my internship report, I highlighted the key skills I developed, including my ability to effectively use the Lasergraphics ScanStation 6.5K scanner for film scanning. However, what I enjoyed most during my internship was gaining hands-on experience with the library’s quality control process, which involved utilizing in-house Python scripts. To prepare film scans for transcoding, metadata harvesting, and archiving, we followed a specific workflow involving tools such as RAWcooked, FFmpeg, and Rsync.

Observing the department’s use of Python to automate their QC processes was enlightening. They utilized a microservices-based approach to construct a comprehensive workflow, which grants them fine-grained control over each individual process. This method allows for swift modification and customization to fit their ever-changing requirements. Nonetheless, it necessitates ongoing maintenance and a devoted overseer, which may not be attainable for smaller organizations.

Use scrcpy to Mirror Android Devices On Your Desktop

scrcpy is a great open source application that “provides display and control of Android devices connected via USB or over TCP/IP.” In other words, one may screen-mirror and control their Android device from their desktop with scrcpy!

Platforms: Windows, Mac and Linux

Key features:

• Screen mirroring and recording
• Copy-paste in both directions
• Android device as a webcam (Linux only)
• Physical keyboard simulation
• Physical mouse simulation

Preparing your Android device

1. Go to ‘Developer options’
2. Enable USB debugging
3. Enable USB debugging (Security settings) -Allow granting permissions and simulating input via USB debugging
4. Enable Wireless debugging
5. Connect your Android device to machine via USB
6. Ensure your device is on the same network as your machine

Installing scrcpy for Linux:

1. On Debian and Ubuntu:

sudo apt install scrcpy

2. Run:

adb tcpip 5555

3. Now run:

adb connect <your android's ip address>:5555

4. Disconnect the USB connection and run scrcpy

Google Analytics for GitHub Pages

This post covers the set up of Google Analytics for GitHub Pages.

1. Go to Google Analytics and create a Google Analytics account for the site you would like to track.

2. Take note of the tracking ID and copy the code snippet provided that looks like the following:

<script
  async
  src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-XXXXXXXXX-X"
></script>
<script>
  window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
  function gtag() {
    dataLayer.push(arguments);
  }
  gtag("js", new Date());

  gtag("config", "UA-XXXXXXXXX-X");
</script>

3. Create a new .HTML file in the _includes folder that contains the code snippet and name it google_analytics.html.

4. Add the following code to your default layout: _layouts/default.html.

{% include google_analytics.html %}

fin

2023 Website Refresh & Update

Hello

This site has undergone a noticeable refresh to include a work page as a reflecion of my renewed commitment towards writing more about my work and learnings gleaned from my graduate studies, which I’ve embarked on since September 2022. 2022 was a productive year of change that took me away from the maintenance of this site, hence the lack of updates. But I intend to correct his by documenting the projects I’ve embarked on and the challenges I’ve faced along the way.

I love the new theme’s simple design that focuses on the site’s content. Migration of the posts from the previous theme and its visual assets was a breeze - altogether a fairly straightforward process which took less than 10 minutes.

The set up of Google Analytics was however a pain, and I wrote a short post on its set up here.