Quality assurance of VTR transfers - ISR and HF traces

Quality assurance of VTR transfers is a time-consuming and tedious task. Professional VTRs provide methods for status reporting, most prominently Sony's Interactive Status Reporting, ISR. ISR has been implemented by Sony over many generations of VRTs, however users have found that the status signals' validity will depend heavily on the actual recording format, and the player model in use. This is a critical aspect when it comes to securing archival transfers. Supplementary, analogue video signal analysis, i.e. on HF signal levels, may be used to support operators at Eyeball, or even partly replace eyeball validation during the ingest. Moreover, the collected parameters may be used to help with machine maintenance, in order to optimise the life time of wearing parts, and the employment of tape cleaning.