Silver Trak Digital and DAMsmart NZ recover, restore and digitise over 7,000 historic racing tapes for TAB NZ
Announcement posted by Silver Trak 06 Aug 2026
Silver Trak Digital, together with its DAMsmart NZ division, has completed one of the most ambitious audiovisual archive recoveries undertaken in Australasia, successfully digitising more than 7,000 deteriorating U-Matic tapes held in the TAB NZ archive and returning the New Zealand racing industry's visual history to broadcast-ready condition.
The collection, 7,367 tapes in total, was assembled over many years from racecourses across New Zealand and held in a 40-foot air-conditioned container by Entain Australia and New Zealand, the operator of the TAB and betcha betting brands and the Trackside broadcasting service.
Most of the tapes recorded horse racing, harness racing and greyhound meetings, primarily from the early years of Trackside broadcasting between 1992 and 1998. Some were themselves archive copies, footage dubbed from earlier formats onto U-Matic for posterity. Among the most treasured items recovered is footage of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip in the birdcage at Ellerslie Racecourse in 1953.
The tapes had been stored for years in old buildings with no climate control before being collated, leaving many in poor and unstable condition. TAB NZ's expectation was that perhaps 60 per cent of the content could be recovered, but at the end of the project, DAMsmart NZ achieved a 95 per cent recovery rate.
The technical challenge was formidable. U-Matic, introduced in the early 1970s as one of the world's first broadcast-quality cassette formats, is now a 40-year-old obsolete technology.
Functioning machines are scarce, spare parts are no longer manufactured and the few engineers able to maintain the equipment are 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. All tapes required "baking" in a controlled oven to stabilise the binder before being given a single pass through the machine and digitised.
The painstaking preparation, sorting, barcoding, cleaning, boxing and filing of the collection took close to two years
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, said the result exceeded every expectation the team had when the work began.
"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," Twentyman said. "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 (Trackside presenter and fellow archivist) and I and the whole racing industry are genuinely excited about."
Twentyman said the project had a deeply personal dimension for her as her father, the late race caller and administrator Jack O'Donnell, appears on the tapes calling races at Omoto racecourse, 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 gems from the 1970s captured by independent contractors who filmed racing around the country on an ad-hoc basis. Those libraries were later purchased by the TAB to form the foundation vision collection for the launch of Trackside. A small number of tapes were beyond saving due to advanced deterioration.
Salvaged footage is already returning to air on Trackside television. Coverage of jockey Kylie Williams' first victory in 1997 was broadcast when she rode her 1000th career winner, an example of the archive's immediate editorial value to the production team.
Silver Trak Digital and DAMsmart NZ were selected for the digitisation 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 NZ's largest commercial digitisation facility, Silver Trak Digital and DAMsmart 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 provides award-winning audiovisual digitisation, digital preservation and archive management solutions to institutions, broadcasters and content owners across Australia, New Zealand, Asia and the Pacific with purpose-built facilities in New Zealand, Australia and Malaysia. The team produces preservation and broadcast-grade digital content that meets global standards and remains usable, accessible and trusted for the long term.
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 and returns it to a condition where it can be browsed, broadcast and enjoyed by future generations of racing fans.
Picture credits
DAMsmart NZ recovering, restoring and digitising over 7,000 historic racing tapes for TAB NZ
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About Silver Trak Digital
Silver Trak Digital is a technology company providing content owners and media companies with innovative, software/cloud-based media logistics and distribution services. Silver Trak Digital is trusted by the industry's biggest names and is an important supplier to broadcast, media, production, distribution and corporate markets. Our experienced staff has a wealth of experience in versioning and compliance, content aggregation, media management and sales fulfilment. Through many Australian media industry firsts, Silver Trak Digital's media services enables content owners and media companies to address the complexities they face operating in a globalised marketplace.
www.silvertrak.com.au
www.mediaroom.com.au
About DAMsmart
DAMsmart is a leading audiovisual digitisation service provider. We deliver to you a dedicated and crafted service to digitise and save your videotape, audio or film archive. It's all we do - it's our passion. We set-up the business over ten years ago to make it possible for you and any other collection owner, to safely and professionally digitise AV content, so you can make sure it is around for years to come. We are not a duplication, media storage or post-production facility that does a bit of digitisation on the side. Digitising collections of moving image and recorded sound for long-term preservation and access is all we do, every day. We are experts and no other service provider in our region can demonstrate the same level of expertise or project success. For us, there are two absolutely crucial elements that are needed to enable us to safeguard your content for the future: access to the right technology to perform the task and the expertise and knowledge to use it. DAMsmart has both.
www.damsmart.co.nz