GrayMeta Introduces New Videotape Cleaners

GrayMeta is proud to partner and represent InDelt’s line of TC-Matic videotape cleaning systems.
There is no better time than to expedite the digitization of your videotapes than right now. 

The window for reliable videotape digitization is closing. Tapes degrade, playback decks fail, and spare parts grow scarcer each year.
SAMMA, GrayMeta’s Emmy Award-winning System for Automated Migration of Media Assets, transforms what was once a painstaking manual process into a controlled, repeatable workflow accessible to archivists, librarians, and operators alike. Before a single frame is digitized though, older videotapes need inspection and cleaning. TC-MATIC by InDelt is a robust cleaner and inspection system that catches problems early (stuck hubs, broken leaders, stretched or folded tape) so you don’t discover them mid-transfer. Professional tape cleaning dramatically reduces the chance of irreversible damage — to both irreplaceable content and increasingly scarce playback decks. Tape cleaners aren’t a cost, they’re risk mitigation and throughput multipliers. There are three models offered to clean and inspect:
3/4″ U-Matic cassettes, Beta/Betacam/Digital Beta, and VHS/SVHS

Making the Business Case for Professional Cleaning Equipment
One destroyed tape or one damaged VTR head can exceed the cost of professional cleaning. Your investment in tape cleaning can:

• Reduce VTR head replacements
• Prevent catastrophic tape loss
• Increase digitization throughput
• Decrease manual labor hours
• Avoid repeat transfers due to dropouts

Videotape has become the lens through which societies remember, interpret, communicate, and most importantly preserve the past.
This value is only realized when these tapes are carefully migrated as high-quality digital assets. If your tapes contain news, cultural, historical footage, or broadcast masters, the cost of a cleaning machine is minimal compared to the value of content that might otherwise be unrecoverable.
For professional archives, libraries, studios, or broadcast facilities a videotape cleaning machine is considered essential infrastructure.
It’s too important to be optional.
Don’t take chances, be sure to clean and inspect your tapes before digitization.
Then choose SAMMA for the simplest and cleanest path to preservation.