I started writing this column during church. Actually, that's only half true: lest you envision me sitting in the pew jotting down notes while pretending to follow the sermon, realize that I wrote it in Torino, Italy, on a Sunday evening in February when many of you who volunteer or work in your local church's media department are hard at work doing what you do best.
     Before you lambast me for slipping off to the Winter Olympics, know that I was there for work and not for pleasure. But the venue and the event both drive home a topic that I've received a bit of feedback about from readers of the first Amen Corner column. So I decided to use this column to address the topic that several readers said was timely for their budget cycles: knowing which format to use to acquire and save content.

Even the move to digital, which several readers said they were preparing to make, is fraught with peril. A church that a student of mine interned at had the same pastor for over 30 years, as did my own childhood church. The student called one day asking for recommendations on video and audio search tools, since the senior pastor had requested a way to scan through past sermons to find video or audio clips to use in a new series of sermons. I gave the student some recommendations for digital encoding, indexing, and retrieval systems, but I also warned him to consider buying one or two additional tools that would help salvage the audio or video from cassettes that may have been archived in less-than-optimal conditions.

Alongside the topic of archiving is the question of cost of equipment and expendables, such as videotape. In an article in the Abbey Newsletter a few years ago, Jim Lindner noted that the initial sale of videotape machines (known as "quads") cost almost $600,000 per unit. But the reason that stations bought these units was that tape--unlike film--could be reused. What the stations couldn't know back in the late 1950s was that the tapes themselves would not survive without very careful care and, if they did, the equipment would not be available to play back the content after 40 years.

The issue is not just limited to audio tapes. In the same Abbey Newsletter article, Jim Lindner reported, "In the specific case of the Nixon-Khrushchev `Kitchen Debate' videotape, the record of a significant world event has been distorted and permanently lost by the obsolescence of the system used to record it, the instability of the media used to record it (which has severe shedding, causing image distortions and `drop outs'), the lack of proper documentation and labeling, and the lack of a management and preservation strategy that included proper environmental conditions for the media. As a result, scholars and historians will never have an exact record of a historic interchange between two leaders in the Cold War and one of the first color television recordings ever made. In the larger case, thousands of hours of broadcasts that document world events and cultural history that were recorded in the 1960s and 1970s are lost forever due to a series of poor or non-existent preservation strategies and the failure of media that was never designed to last forever."

So what's a worship media director to do? While I can't give direct advice to every single reader of this column, I can provide some basic guidelines that might help you make a decision for your specific needs:

• If just starting out, go digital and go HD. The cost of a consumer high-definition HDV camera is about $1000 less than the price of a Sony VX-1000 MiniDV camera when it was introduced about 8 years ago. Not only will an HDV camera put you on track for widescreen recordings that are great for choir and praise team video, it will also allow creation of widescreen standard definition DVDs and native editing with Final Cut Pro 5 or Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 today, plus high-definition DVDs in the future with the advent of Blu-ray and HD-DVD burners and players.
• If money's tight, buy second-hand or second-generation technology, then use the cost savings to buy two of everything. The last thing you want to find out is that scarce resources have been thrown into a format that is already on its way to obsolescence or breaks shortly after the product line is discontinued. I know several houses of worship that still use early Videonics or VideoToaster mixers quite happily, but I know others who have had to make unexpected new equipment purchases when they only had five business days between services to track down parts to repair an older piece of equipment.
• When in doubt, buy more computing power and storage space. The number one reason cited for loss of pertinent video content is not the cost of tapes but the cost of long-term storage. Tapes are not the best storage medium for a period over three years, but capture and archival on a tape in HDV format today, coupled with falling storage prices, faster computers, and better compression technologies available in products such as Discreet's Media Cleaner Pro 6.5 on the Mac and Cleaner XL 1.5 on the PC (see my March Cleaner review) , or Popwire's Compression Master, provides a way to future-proof content against obsolescence if set up properly to automate re-encoding to newer formats or codecs every 30-36 months.

Be assured that format churn isn't going away. The format you save on today may be obsolete tomorrow, but conversely the amount of storage space at your fingertips will also grow dramatically. Develop a long-term plan to future-proof your media equipment acquisitions, starting with a good current format but planning with an eye to the future of the market when it comes to archival and retrieval.