Problem solving
working with vintage gear
one of the biggest hurdles with this project has been working with and maintaining vintage gear. one of the best examples of this was having the VHS player I had modified to run the videotape loops break down the day before the showing casing me to use a workaround of re-recording over alternate VHS tapes to achieve a similar decaying effect.
​
because of the showing being held in the tv studio facility available at college all of the electrical equipment, I would be using that operated on mains power had to be PAT tested in order to comply with the college's insurance which with vintage equipment is hit or miss as to whether it would pass. unfortunately I found this out just a few days before the showing and had to quickly arrange for the equipment to be tested the day before and hope that it would pass and be usable. fortunately, I have collected enough in the run-up that the one VHS recorder that did not pass the PAT could be swapped out of the setup.
compatibility and a lack of standardisation
a lot of the equipment I used was produced in a time when electrics companies where trying to pioneer there own proprietary ecosystems so standardisation on I/O and connectors was next to non-existent this lead to the use of a lot of RCA to BNC adapters in order to get everything to interconnect but it also leads to one of my best and most convoluted workarounds to get a video to play through the system.
And yes that is indeed a laptop playing a video(that refused to play on the raspberry pi) with a DV tape camera pointed at the screen with the output connected to a VHS recorder in order to convert the digital video loop into an analogue format. over the course of the project, I quickly learnt that it is next to impossible to plan to avoid problems with vintage equipment and you're better off being prepared to deal with and put out the fires when they come up.