Apple - Pro/Video - Jerome McDonough, pg. 3

Technician Lindsay Anderberg processes Nao Bustamente’s performance of "San Gravity," which is part of the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics’ collection.

Check Out the DVD

“Final Cut Pro has made our presentation process really simple,” says McDonough. “We use it to put timecode on Betacam tapes, to write titling information and to create the standard signals at the beginning of each tape. Those things are easier with Final Cut Pro than with any other tool.” McDonough also appreciates the simplicity of moving material from tape to disk. “With Final Cut Pro, it’s so straightforward,” he says. “We just grab our material for the edit and do a complete, high-quality capture.”

As a librarian, McDonough is naturally concerned with his patrons’ ease of access to the materials he’s painstakingly assembled. “Our Final Cut Pro files on the G5 are really high quality, but they’re not useful to people who don’t have the software,” he notes. “So to get more people connected to our library assets, we use DVD Studio Pro to make DVDs for our media center.”

“For high-quality video and audio production the Apple platform is just the place to be. It has better hardware, better software, easier integration of components and better third-party products. There was never a question about what platform we would use.”

Finally, his group creates MPEG-4 files that can be streamed over the Internet. Explains McDonough, “We were asked to produce low bit-rate files that would allow people on 56Kbps modems to view the performances. So we drop the frame rate way down and crank up the MPEG compression. The MPEG-4s are great for faculty working from home and for people in the developing world, where high bandwidth Internet isn’t as common as it is on university campuses.”

Audio isn’t as big a compromise. “One of the benefits of working with MPEG-4 in the Final Cut Pro environment is that the AAC audio that goes with the video stream in 56K is quite clear,” notes McDonough with satisfaction. “So while the video is only 3fps, the audio is pretty good. If you’re watching dance or theater, the video may not be as clear as you’d wish. But a lot of our performances are talking heads — lectures or poetry readings — and for those, the audio is more important anyway.”

Mac Fan Now

“I was not a Mac person before,” McDonough confesses readily. “When I was a student at Berkeley, most of my software development work was on Solaris or DEC Alphas. And at home, I mainly used Windows PCs.”

But the conversion was a no-brainer. His reason for choosing Macs for the Hemispheric Institute project was simple: “Because they work!” He adds, “This project got me into the Mac platform in a big way. For high-quality video and audio production the Apple platform is just the place to be. It has better hardware, better software, easier integration of components and better third-party products. There was never a question about what platform we would use.”

According to McDonough, the needs assessment for the project went something like this: “We said, ‘Well, we need a 4:2:2 capture card to do 10-bit capture and to handle uncompressed video, so I guess we’ll be using Apple hardware.’ Because those are capabilities you couldn’t find anywhere except on Apple.”

No Laughing Matter

McDonough thrills to the new frontiers he’s crossed into. “The best thing about this work is that we get to push the envelope of what libraries are capable of in terms of services to users,” he reflects. The project illustrates the rapid advances in his field. “Five years ago,” says the librarian, “the notion that you could take a couple hundred hours of video and make it available in high-quality streams to anybody on the planet — well, people who really knew technology might say, ‘Yes, we can do that someday,’ but everybody else would just laugh.”

No longer. “Now, it is feasible for a major research library to do just that,” says McDonough. “And in a few years, it will be something anyone can do.”

It’s exciting, he feels, to be playing on such a big stage. “Having access to these performances is vital to scholars who want to achieve a deeper understanding of the cultural and political life of the Americas,” says McDonough. “By bringing all this material together in one place, making it publicly available and ensuring that it will live on and be available in the future, our library is making a real contribution to scholarship in the world. This type of project is the reason why I love being a librarian.”

Pro/Video

Jerome McDonough

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Rebuilding an Afghan Treasure

The NYU digital library unit has other projects in the works, including digitizing original library materials from Afghanistan. “We’re focusing on the early print industry with the idea of creating an Afghan digital library,” says McDonough. The plan is to make the material available free online and to repatriate the digitized works with the government of Afghanistan.

“Under the Taliban, Afghanistan lost so much of what was in its libraries — books in Dari, in Pashto, in Farsi, religious and secular works, government publications,” says McDonough. Finding the surviving works is a treasure hunt. McDonough’s team is working with scholar Robert McChesney, who is creating a complete bibliography of works published in Afghanistan between 1870 and 1930; next, they’ll try to locate physical copies of those books. Many, of course, were destroyed. Others were damaged.

“Some of them are very old works that haven’t been treated well,” says McDonough. “The pages are torn or they have foxing [discoloration of the underlying paper].” But, he adds, “Others were hidden and preserved or are in the hands of private collectors. We scan and digitize them, then return them to the owners. And slowly we’re building a corpus of works published in that period.” Some of the books are already available; the entire collection will eventually be posted.

For now, the Afghan works will be available as unsearchable images. “So far we’ve only been able to scan the page images,” explains McDonough. “But we’d like to transcribe them, too. There is OCR software that handles major languages such as Arabic and Farsi, but it’s not easy to find programs for Dari and Pashto, particularly with older works where the printing quality may not be the best. But we’re looking.”

About “Sans Gravity”

In “Sans Gravity,” Nao Bustamante explores metaphors associated with water by burdening her body. The weight and the movement of the water she attaches to herself become extensions of her gestures and another layer of the distorted self. Later, the audience becomes a mechanism of relief.

One viewer describes the performance like this: “Bustamante goes through different ways of taping bags of water to herself, gradually making herself larger and heavier. At the end of the performance people poke the bags of water with sharp objects. It’s very disturbing. In one instance, she has taped a bag of water and a microphone over her head. It’s funny — until you realize she can’t breathe, and then it then it becomes very awkward.”

Nao Bustamante is an internationally known performance art pioneer from California. Her performance art often challenges traditional roles for women and what it means to be American. She also questions imagery of the Latina body, putting the audience, and often her own body, in vulnerable and dangerous positions.