Technical information - Updated 09 March 2004

As mentioned on the home page, we are engaged in an ongoing effort to archive the teachings of the past Masters for the benefit of all.

Quick Summary:

There is a wealth of videos and film transfers extending back to rare footage from the time of Baba Sawan Singh Ji Maharaj. There are forty to fifty Satsangs of Sant Ajaib Singh Ji that were recorded on 3/4" Umatic video tape in 1980, but the originals are not available at this time. We are concentrating on the much larger body of footage of Master Kirpal, Baba Somanath and Sant Ji that was stored on VHS and S-VHS tapes. We use the best copies available to us. Fortunately, in many cases these are original master tapes, so quality is as good as possible.

Capturing Video:

When transferring a tape, we use either the JVC 9911 or Panasonic 7650 S-VHS video decks. Both of these contain digital timebase correctors to reclock and stabilize the signal. The JVC deck contains digital noise reduction circuitry that is effective in improving the signal. So does the Panasonic, with the additional benefit that the parameters of the noise reduction and timebase corrector can be varied. This allows us to accurately recover signals from tapes containg significant skew and other problems present in older tapes. The video decks are checked for alignment using a calibrated test tape, waveform monitor and vectorscope. The goal is to archive the tape as accurately as is feasible today.

Audio tracks are processed if necessary using an FMR RNC1773 stereo compressor. This is an excellent all-purpose single-band compressor which allows us to bring up levels and even out inconsistencies.

Video is transferred via S-Video cable to a Canopus ADVC-50 PCI card, which also accepts the audio signal. The A/D converter in the Canopus card performs well. Files are captured via IEEE-1394 (Firewire) cable to .AVI format using Ulead Video Workshop. This software has an excellent track record for capture without dropping frames.

Archiving & Beyond:

The hard disks are put into permanent storage, and are used as the source for transcoding the video to MPEG2 files, which is the format stored on DVDs. If improved techniques for converting AVI files to MPEG become available, or if someone wishes to attempt color correction, noise reduction or similar DSP, then the original files can be accessed again. Who knows how this technology will improve in the next ten years!

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