“Looking to the Future with our Legendary Past”
AMHF volunteer Peter Tomlinson, already a collector of motor racing film footage, took on the daunting task of developing what we believe is Australia’s finest archive of our moving visual motoring history. An extensive range of materials has been added to the Archive Database through the development of film, video and digital media.
The Australian Motor Heritage Foundation is dedicated to maintaining a comprehensive archive and library of materials about Australia’s motor heritage for the benefit of all Australians through preservation, education and research as we’re proud of our past and passionate about our future.
The AMHF has established a substantial archive and library of more than 4,700 books, thousands of ‘primary resource items’ including promotional releases, brochures, race programs and results, contemporary media reviews, photographs, film, oral history, as well as about 14,000 magazines.
An extensive range of materials has been added to the Archive Database through the development of film, video and digital media. The current media database includes film footage from 1928 to 2020, most of which has been digitised into MP4 format to preserve film quality and for viewing convenience.
The job of developing the digital and video media database has been a painstaking task due to the multitude of media formats; ranging from 8mm and 16mm film, VHS and Beta video, DVD formats, DV/DVC and Mini DVC. This is in addition to PAL and NTSC picture standards and computer file types including MOV, WMV, AVI, AVCHD, Flash Video, Mkv and MPEG-2. Video quality has ranged from very poor quality “home video” to SD (480p), HD (720p) and up to Full HD (1080p) over the last 20 years.
Thankfully, there was a very high quality of Cinemascope movie films from the 30s, 40s and 50s covering important events such as the Redex Trials and early Grand Prix meetings in Australia. All currently digitised media is in MP4 file format and the majority are in HD (720p) quality.
Finding equipment to play and translate some of the older film formats has required the services of external specialists. Once the media has been compiled and digitised (where necessary) the task of cataloguing has required a simple classification for ease of finding keywords, genre, formats.
Unfortunately, the Dewey Decimal system used in libraries was not convenient and so a relevant system was developed covering history, documentaries, marque and motor sport categories in Australia and Internationally, including historic racing, rallying, speedway and motor cycles. The extensive catalogue listing and media description has required hundreds of hours of scanning, and make up of covers and in most cases OCR to alleviate the need for manual typing.
The Catalogue of Digital and Video is currently still in the growth phase, but to date, the library currently includes more than 600 VHS tapes and DVD, most of which has been digitised into MP4 format. In addition, digital files currently fill an SSD computer hard drive of 2TB (2000 GB), with 2600 files covering more than 2000 hours of viewing pleasure.
The Catalogue has been developed with the assistance and donations from the team of volunteers at the Australian Motor Heritage Foundation and a few external friends of the Foundation.
The next step……the Internet!
