2024-03-10
Why we still care about tape
Most of the films here exist as one or two prints in institutional collections. Those prints get scanned rarely, and the scans get released even more rarely. Meanwhile, a lot of these films were broadcast on Japanese television in the 1980s and 1990s, and people taped them.
A home recording is a poor copy of a broadcast, which is a poor copy of a print. But it is a copy that exists, and sometimes it was made from a print that has since deteriorated or been lost. That is the whole argument for keeping tape.
So the archive has two layers: the best print scan we can get, and every tape copy we can find, each labelled with what it is.