Video Holdings-Then And Now

The Shambhala Archives houses more than 2,500 video tapes that date from 1973 to the present. Further accruals from Kalapa Recordings and Shambhala International are ongoing. The history of the Shambhala Archives’ video collection parallels fairly closely that of our audio collection. The focus is consistently on recording the teachings of Trungpa Rinpoche, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche and other important teachers to our lineage. A significant number of the earliest tapes in our possession were re-mastered in our Video Recovery Project, mounted from 1992 to 1994. 

Digital Migration of Early Video Formats

As video technology has moved on to digital formats, the need to migrate all early analog video to digital video is critical. Since 2009 the Archives, with funding from the Shambhala Trust, began to carry out digital preservation of 500 hours of video recordings of the Vidyadhara the Venerable Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. The Archives purchased hard drive storage capacity on a RAID 5 storage device, and more than half of the early video, esp. that of VCTR, is now stored on the RAID, known as VAJRADHATU. Of these digitized tapes, editing, remastering and DVD authoring have made access possible for the Shambhala sangha and the general public (where applicable). As well, once digitized, the cost for future preservation migrations will be significantly lessened. "RAID" is an umbrella term for computer data storage schemes that can divide and replicate data among multiple hard disk drives. Once data is on a RAID, security is assured as it can repair itself by rebuilding a failed drive from the data on the other drives. The platform we are using is very stable, industrial strength equipment, consistent with our practice of using professional grade technology in all of our preservation and production work.

To see the many seminars currently available, go to shambhalamedia.org and follow the links for Video – VCTR

To support our work digitizing the remainder of the VCTR videos, please

Donate

Capturing and Storing Digital Video

Since the mid-2000s more and more recordings have been made with digital recording technology – and since 2009 all audio visual field acquisition has been “born digital”, that is, coming to us in digital formats from inception. Shambhala Media now provides a camera kit for all of the Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche events; to ensure a high quality video record is made of all of his teachings. These files are stored on our RAID (see explanation of RAID storage systems, above)and backed up on at least one other server to ensure protection of the data.

Screen shot of Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche's digital assets

The Recordings policy handbook of Kalapa Recordings, distributed to all recordings volunteers at urban and land centres, gives specific guidelines for digital recording.

The Handbook is available here.