USPS "Manual, Mechanized, Or Automated - It's Your Choice" Video

Good friend of philately Mike Ludeman has uncovered and sent me a number of 1980s USPS VHS video tapes. Mike and I both feel that they are worth the effort to be recovered and preserved.

After setting up the vintage equipment to view them, I found that they are a mix of both internal (USPS instructional) tapes and external (USPS educational) tapes. Several contain excellent footage of the sorting, facing, and cancelling equipment and processing of the mail stream. I have not been able to find any information on these tapes and I believe that these have never been published before.

Being 40-year-old VHS tapes presented some challenges in converting them to a digital format especially in terms of video quality. VHS format was interlaced which means the video signal contains two fields of a frame captured consecutively. After a learning curve, the right equipment, and figuring out the best software configurations, I was able to generate a fairly decent quality level. But please remember that these are old VHS tapes.

I have released the first tape, it is titled "Manual, Mechanized, or Automated - It's Your Choice". I believe it was an internal USPS video positioned to be an overview on the importance of making mail stream decisions for USPS employees. Circa 1985. The video has some excellent footage of the equipment and handling procedures of US letter mail. Anyone interest in how US mail was being handled and processed in the mid-1980s should find this interesting.
Don

Fascinating video. Love seeing all of that "modern" equipment in action. I wonder how much of it is still being used today. Probably lots, it looks pretty fast and efficient.