There are a lot of companies out there that have a ton of video footage from days gone by. It may be historical footage of the company’s early days and growth, or footage of the founders, or old commercials and training videos and raw footage of various projects. Chances are it is just sitting in some boxes in a closet or the warehouse gathering dust. What you may not know is that these old tape formats are degrading and oxidizing and will eventually be lost to the element of time and become unusable. Furthermore there are not a lot of facilities around anymore that keep many of these old video players (1″, 3/4″ Beta SP, Digi Beta just to name a few) around. The digital era has ushered all of these tape formats to the junk heap. That is why it is crucial to get these media formats digitized and backed up to a hard drive or LTO back up system sooner rather than later. Media archiving is important because one never knows when some of this footage may be needed for a historical piece or just to have for the record. The longer you wait the less chance there is that all of your old tape formats will survive the test of time. A lot of dollars were spent capturing and creating these older videos and it is a shame to see all of that just waste away.