Perth, Aug 7: Footage of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip at Ellerslie Racecourse in 1953 is among the treasures recovered in what Silver Trak Digital and its DAMsmart NZ division describe as one of the most ambitious audiovisual archive recoveries undertaken in Australasia.
The collection, 7,367 tapes in total, was assembled over many years from racecourses across New Zealand and had been held in a 40-foot air-conditioned container by Entain Australia and New Zealand, operator of the TAB and betcha betting brands and the Trackside broadcasting service.
Most of the tapes captured horse racing, harness racing and greyhound meetings, primarily from the early years of Trackside broadcasting between 1992 and 1998, with some themselves archive copies dubbed from earlier formats onto U-Matic for posterity.
Having been stored for years in old buildings with no climate control before being collated, many tapes were in poor and unstable condition, and TAB NZ had expected perhaps 60 per cent of the content could be recovered. DAMsmart NZ ultimately achieved a 95 per cent recovery rate despite facing a mammoth technical challenge in doing so.
U-Matic, introduced in the early 1970s as one of the world’s first broadcast-quality cassette formats, is now 40-year-old obsolete technology and functioning machines are scarce as not only are spare parts are no longer manufactured but the engineers maintaining the equipment are also becoming a vanishing breed.
DAMsmart NZ kept its decks running by cannibalising “donor” machines to build working units, sourcing rare line-up tapes for calibration, and hand-cleaning tapes that had begun to shed oxide.
Every tape required “baking” in a controlled oven to stabilise the binder before being given a single pass through the machine and digitised, a painstaking process of preparation, sorting, barcoding, cleaning, boxing and filing that took close to two years.
“This was a long and delicate process and the only way we knew what was on each tape was the handwritten label on its spine, because we had not been able to play them for years,” said Maryanne Twentyman, NZ Media Talent Manager for Entain Australia and New Zealand and a long-time Trackside staff member who drove the project from the client side.
“DAMsmart NZ did an extraordinary job. We had hoped to recover perhaps 60 per cent of the archive and they brought back 95 per cent. To see races and faces we thought were lost forever returned to broadcast quality is something Nicole Sims and I and the whole racing industry are genuinely excited about.”
For Twentyman, the project carried a deeply personal dimension as her father, the late race caller and administrator Jack O’Donnell, appears on the tapes calling races at Omoto racecourse, a footage for which almost no other audio or vision was known to exist.
The recovered library spans a full catalogue of equine codes from the start of Trackside in 1992, a strong spread of feature racing through the 1980s, and selected footage from the 1970s captured by independent contractors who filmed racing around the country on an ad-hoc basis, libraries later purchased by the TAB to form the foundation vision collection for Trackside’s launch.
Only a small number of tapes were beyond saving due to advanced deterioration.
Salvaged footage is already returning to air on Trackside television and coverage of jockey Kylie Williams’ first victory in 1997 was broadcast when she rode her 1,000th career winner, an early example of the archive’s editorial value to the production team.
Silver Trak Digital and DAMsmart NZ were selected for the project after an extensive assessment and tender process, chosen for the specialist archival handling the deteriorating tapes required.
Incorporated in 2005 and operating Australia and New Zealand’s largest commercial digitisation facility, the companies provide end-to-end content solutions for broadcasters, production houses, streaming services and content owners, with technicians carrying more than 30 years of industry experience across film, tape and audio digitisation, content QC, theatrical mastering and delivery.
DAMsmart NZ operates purpose-built facilities in New Zealand, Australia and Malaysia, delivering preservation and broadcast-grade digital content that meets global standards.
For TAB NZ and the wider New Zealand racing industry, the project secures a visual record that was at genuine risk of being lost completely through hardware degeneration and tape decay, returning it to a condition where it can be browsed, broadcast and enjoyed by future generations of racing fans.
In other news: Lenovo has become a Global Founding Partner of the Esports World Cup 2026, with its Legion desktop PCs and monitors powering competition arenas, broadcast studios and training facilities as the event lands in Paris for the first time, running seven weeks from 6 July to 23 August and drawing more than 2,000 players and 200 teams from over 100 countries; fans will also get hands-on with Lenovo’s latest innovations, including the Legion Pro Rollable Concept, throughout the festival.
In other news: The Singapore Tennis Invitational Cup returns to The Kallang from 23-26 September, bringing together national players from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Cambodia across five events ahead of the Singapore Tennis Open (Southeast Asia’s only WTA500 tournament); entry is free, and the tournament has appointed regional icons Yayuk Basuki, Tamarine Tanasugarn and Latisha Chan as ambassadors to champion emerging Southeast Asian talent.
Media & PR: editor@dailystraits.com. Copyright 2021–Present DailyStraits.com. All rights reserved.