Tape Ark, global experts in tape to cloud mass migration, have just signed a three year partnership with the West Australian Ballet as their Historical Digital Preservation Partner. West Australian Ballet will be celebrating their 75th anniversary in 2027 and Tape Ark have been appointed to capture and convert over 3,000 hours of their historical video footage from archived performances and interviews that date as far back as 1970.

 

Tape Ark are on a mission to bring organisations into the 21st century by providing secure and safe high-volume migration of ageing corporate data from tape media directly to the public cloud. Tape Ark offers an innovative, cost-effective solution embracing digital and virtual data storage technologies, leveraging data analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning. For West Australian Ballet, this means unlocking and preserving precious memories so they can live forever. 

Prior to the cloud existing, the world stored its historical collections of content and data offline and on tapes. Tape Ark’s mission is to empower businesses to gain access to their past so they can thrive in the future by seamlessly liberating macroscale datasets and arranging it in the cloud so that those businesses can use historical data for predictive analytics and make better decisions in the future.

Excitingly, for the West Australian Ballet, Tape Ark will not only preserve precious historical content by uploading it to a cloud based account, but will help the company explore potential innovations like applying artificial intelligence for facial and music recognition and provide West Australian Ballet and even choreographers with analytical data that has never previously been derived.

What the partnership means to Tape Ark 

Guy Holmes, CEO and Founder of Tape Ark said “For as long as I can remember I have had a deep empathy and kinship with anyone in the creative industry or really anyone at the top of their game in any field.  I have walked around always worried about the fact that only one individual on the planet can do what that person does, and what happens to everything they know when they leave us. 

A medical researcher will have a head full of information that only they possess which can be used to tie two discrete points together that will make that next big discovery in their chosen speciality.  It was never about what they published, but always more about what they had not published.  Their musings, their worries late at night, the unrequited ideas that never made it to the whiteboard at the office for actioning.  Could it ever be captured?  It seems likely that the world loses 99.9% of its best ideas to a simple distraction by something that interrupts the thought process.

Artists and performers for me fall into that same category. There is only one Rudolf Nureyev, one David McAllister, and only one Lucinda Dunn.  What they did in performances, their unique style, their contributions to shaping the performances they appeared in and later those they choreographed is unique to them, and them only, and frankly losing these unique contributions is difficult for me to live with. 

Tape Ark was created to capture these valuable contributions so that they can never be lost.’ 

The project task 

  1. Receive, barcode, photograph, and prepare for conversion video from legacy tapes (Approximately 1850 tapes and other media, containing 3700 hours of video footage)
  2. Liberate all the video to digital files to the highest quality possible in the most appropriate video format for the video type recovered
  3. Provision of all the content on an external hard disk, two preservation copies on a new high-density tape, as well as a single copy in a cloud-based account 
  4. The naming of the video files created will be based on the tape labels and any other information provided to assist with the process 
  5. Confidential disposal of the items after internal acceptance of the material as required.

 

Challenges ahead

As part of the commitment, Tape Ark will provide where practical facial recognition of dancers; object detection (items within scenes, venues, etc); speech to text capture to help enhance the metadata and searchability of the video content; music recognition & video quality enhancement.

The challenges with the content is how feasible it will be to use certain AI features on the footage, as it may not be of a high enough quality to produce good results . Deterioration of old tapes and footage captured on obscure and dated recording devices all add a layer of difficulty to the quality of the output and affects the AI facial and music recognition that Tape Ark can derive. This however, is a project challenge that Tape Ark won’t shy away from and are embracing. 

 

What this partnership means for West Australians and the Ballet community Alumni

Lauren Major, Executive Director of West Australian Ballet said “West Australian Ballet has such a rich and storied history and we can’t wait to uncover cherished moments and hidden gems that might have otherwise be forgotten. As we approach our 75th anniversary in 2027, it’s more important than ever to preserve the company’s legacy for the future.”

Guy Holmes said “We are excited to partner with the West Australian Ballet and ensure these timeless memories are kept for future generations”

 

Follow us on Instagram to watch the excitement unveiling #jumpingforjoy #legacytape #preservinghistory #ai