The Mary Rose – A lifetime on film.

As a collection volunteer with the Mary Rose Trust, my first project was to document the museum’s audio-visual collection, ahead of a mammoth digitising project in partnership with the University of Portsmouth’s school of Film, Media, and Creative Technologies.

The Mary Rose Trust’s audio-visual collection has been growing for over 40 years, but many changes to format, management and data storage over the years have affected the museum’s ability to make full use of the collection.

Beginning in the 70’s, 16mm film reels, U-matic cassette tapes, and 5mm audio tapes were all used to various extents to capture aspects of diving, excavation, archaeological documentation, promotional footage, documentaries, radio shows, and the raising of the hull. Following this in the mid 80s, we see Betacam tapes, Super 8mm reels and some very retro looking Video Compact Cassettes (VCC). With the ship now raised, this footage is mostly promotional or documentary footage of the new museum, including interviews with the museum team.

With the collection listed they were taken to the University of Portsmouth for digitising. U-matic and Betacam tapes need specialist equipment to be converted into digital archival formats. While some of the more familiar footage has been digitised before for documentaries many of the tapes have likely not been viewed since the 80’s or 90’s. It is hoped that some new exciting information and insights can be found from the digitised footage as their content is reviewed and catalogued.

I think the collection highlights the value of foresight and understanding that current formats may not be recognisable in 20 years’ time. The Mary Rose Museum is always striving to keep up with current best practice in documentation and accessibility. Now, through digitising, we can continue to make this part of the Mary Rose story more complete and accessible for the modern age.

To read more on the digitising project, see the University’s blog post here: University of Portsmouth and Mary Rose Trust launch major project to preserve decades of excavation footage of iconic Tudor warship | University of Portsmouth