The
RRCPC VHS video tape & DVD collection
There are over forty
old VHS video tapes in the RRCPC Library. They are all listed on the website
(V1-V41), but they are rarely viewed even by those who still have a video
player. Mel said, “I’m looking for someone to copy them onto DVD – they are
full of cave history and interesting and historic content,” or something like
that. “Oh, I’ll have a go at that if you want,” I said without thinking.
After a bit of trial and error I worked out
a way to copy the tapes. I connected an old VHS video player to our TV
recorder, which was connected to the TV. Pressed ‘play’ on the video player and
‘record’ on the TV recorder and the tape was transferred to the hard disc. The
TV recorder itself is old; it was designed to play ‘HDVDs’ but they never
survived the invention of Blue-ray, however I popped in a blank DVD and
downloaded the recording from the hard disc without problem. The recorder has
all sorts of functions which I never used before. I was able to edit the
recordings to cut them into shorter sections or remove unwanted parts such as
adverts. One problem was that some of the tapes had nearly three hours of
recording, but the DVDs only hold about an hour, so these tapes were divided
into two or three sections before dubbing. At the end the DVD is ‘finalized’ to
enable it to play on a computer or regular DVD player. I must have watched each
tape two or three times to edit them so it took a couple of months to process
all the tapes, and label them in cases before returning them to the RRCPC
Library.
Mel was right, these old VHS tapes contained
a vast source of information about caves and cavers – amazing caves, impossible
cave dives, crazy cavers, technical stuff – it’s all there. The collection
consists of three broad types of tapes: ‘home-made’ recordings,
professionally-made tapes and programmes recorded off the television.
The home-made variety are mainly documentaries
of Red Rose’s club trips including explorations to South Wales (1992), New
Goyden Pot (1993), Sardinia (1996) and France (2000). The lack of any
commentary and the one-hand-held technique gives them a surreal quality, but to
see our young, fresh club members in action makes these a priceless record. The
belay technique employed for a ladder that doesn’t reach the bottom of the
pitch is a useful lesson and the record of the après-caving social activities could be used as evidence in court.
Tape V25, although a bit patchy, includes some early history of Notts II. Tape
V19 records the Jubilee events in 1996 – ‘Do in the Field,’ pig-roast and an
interview with George Cornes. The best part is a short section by Ron Bliss
entitled ‘Jim and the Rock,’ which records an epic battle between a large
boulder
and Jim’s Sylvester – it’s a classic and
should be on U-tube! The commercially made tapes are a mixed batch. ‘Diving
from Past to Present,’ a history of diving, is one of the best. Others include
Ron Bliss’s ‘River Lune’, Sid Perou’s films, a
The majority of tapes are home recordings of
various TV programmes. The quality of these is variable and the sound is often
poor. Nevertheless there is a superb range of subjects: Cigalere, Gaping Gill,
This was a very enjoyable project. Certainly
the programmes are educational, but for me the main thing was to see all these
wonderful caves around the world, a hidden world, places I know I will never go
to personally. Use your library.
Postscript:
The
club library has a small collection of camcorder tapes from Ron’s collection
which it would like to convert to digital format. These mini tapes are JVC –
but could have been from a Canon camera. The JVC camera that takes these tapes
is a JVC Camcorder GR D340.
If any
member has any ideas on a way forward to converting these tapes to digital
format please contact myself or Sandra Wilkinson – Club Librarian: Thanks.
Zig & Zag
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