Fairfield Media Center uploads archive to YouTube

FAIRFIELD - Fairfield Media Center has finished uploading its entire archive to YouTube, which includes close to 1,600 tapes dating back almost 30 years.

The newly digitized content is a window into Fairfield's past. One of the recently uploaded videos is a 2001 tour of Barhydt Chapel on the campus of Maharishi International University. Mark Shafer and Suzan Kessel are seen on film talking about the various features of the church in one of the final recordings made of the Parsons College-era chapel before it was demolished.

FMC Director Jason Strong said a silver-lining to the pandemic in 2020 was that it gave him time to transfer the media center's enormous archive of tapes into digital files and then upload them to the internet for the public to view. Fairfield Media Center was founded in the early 1990s, though a few videos on the YouTube channel predate its founding, like a video of Fairfield High School's prom in 1985.

Strong said he was able to find only a handful of videos from 1992-1994, but the number rose sharply after that. Those who peruse the media center's archive of recordings from the 1990s and 2000s will find programming from Carnegie Historical Museum, the Fairfield Art Association, Jefferson County Historical Society and Fairfield Municipal Band concerts, just to name a few. Connie Boyer and Suzan Kessel had a show called 'Opening Fairfield Doors,” and those episodes are online now, too.

Richard Thompson, who helped with the archiving efforts, recorded tours of the Greater Jefferson County Fair, and those are on the YouTube channel. The archive contains Live on the Square concerts, and special occasions like bidding farewell to the 224th Engineer Battalion. Lee Gobble, aka 'Mr. Fairfield,” makes frequent appearances on these tapes as well.

Strong said he was able to salvage about 90 percent of FMC's tape archive. Some tapes were lost to degradation just due to their age. Strong remarked that VHS tapes' life expectancy is about 25 years in ideal conditions.

'For some tapes, you can hear the audio sounds funky and the colors are off a bit,” Strong said. 'That's from degradation. That's information that's starting to be lost, and that was the real push to get this done.”

Strong said VHS players are hard to find nowadays since the technology is obsolete, but fortunately the media center still has its original VHS deck it used to broadcast from VHS tapes. Strong was able to play the tapes onto a screen that captured the sound and image, converting it into a digital file. He's made three copies of each tape to ensure they will not be lost.

The old archived material is visible on a separate YouTube channel from Fairfield Media Center's main channel. The old videos from the early 1990s to 2010 can be found at the channel archive. Strong said he created a special channel for the archive so that he could upload the old tapes without crowding out Fairfield Media Center's recent recordings of things like city council meetings and COVID-19 updates from public health.

Strong said he's glad he was able to save the media center money by doing the digital transfers himself. He said the going rate for digitizing VHS tapes is $20 per tape. With about 1,600 tapes to transfer, he was looking at a hefty price tag. Strong said he was able to do all the transfers for only about $500 in equipment costs. Not only that, Strong has donated hundreds of hours of his own time to this project.

The Union asked Strong why he felt it was important to complete this project.

'Our TV station is in a unique position of being a living archive of what goes on in our community,” Strong said. 'Video allows people to connect in a way that they won't connect to a history book or something like that.”

The Fairfield Media Center is run by a board of directors which consists of Dick DeAngelis, Werner Elmker, Richard K. Thompson, Erika Richards, Shawn Brogan-Diddy and Neil Cunningham.

The archive can be accessed on YouTube at: youtube.com/channel/UCib5irw5bfb66Hhxts1iRoA.

The Fairfield Media Center's other YouTube channel where it posts more recent videos is: youtube.com/user/FFMediaCenter