In the summer of 2012, after a four-year, multimillion-dollar effort to preserve digitally the video interviews in its Visual History Archive, the USC Shoah Foundation discovered that 4,755 testimonies had technical or mechanical issues, such as video dropout or flickering, or audio problems.

Nine months into USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive Restoration project, technology staff have finished restoring nearly one third of the damaged tapes in the Visual History Archive.

Damaged videotapes in the Visual History Archive, previously thought to be unfixable, are being restored thanks to new software developed by USC Shoah Foundation technology staff.

A love of old movies drew Shiraz Bhathena into the moving image archive field. As an archivist and post-production specialist at USC Shoah Foundation, he supervised the process of restoring the Institute's testimonies with video and audio problems. The herculean task is finally complete.

Alan Auyeung pulled on a pair of latex gloves and a N95 face mask. For good measure, he placed a pair of protective goggles over his eyes too. A trip to the supermarket? In these Covid-19 times, it could have been but, in fact, Auyeung was preparing for a task of quite a different nature: saving the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, whose eye witness accounts of Nazi atrocities were at risk of being eaten away by mold.