Colorlab in Rockville, Maryland specializes in not only restoring and transferring old home movies, but also preserving and restoring film from the Smithsonian Institute and the Library of Congress. Jake Kreeger, General Manager at Colorlab, answers some common questions about preserving your old home movies.
Why do people put off transferring their old home movies?
I don't think people put it off intentionally. They usually rediscover their past sitting in a shoebox and get curious. I think it's simply because they forget about it and then come back to it eventually.
What do you want to know from someone before they come to see you?
The two questions I always ask people when they contact me ahead of time is, "How old is the film?" and "How has it been stored?" If someone calls from the Deep South, I usually know the film is not going to be in very good condition. Environment is very important. The two evils of film are heat and moisture. If I hear someone say that their films have been in their father's attic for 50 years, I grit my teeth. The heat and moisture causes the film to become brittle and crinkle. In the Northeast or Midwest, environments where temperatures are moderate year-round, film tends to be in good shape.
So where should we store our old films?
What's good for film is cool and dry. When we do archival film preservation for the Smithsonian, we store the film in an environment where the temperature is in the twenties and humidity is in the teens. That environment can make it last for about 1500 years. The average home movie is not treated this way, but the best place in your house is where it's cool and dry--a dry basement, if you have one. (Definitely not the refrigerator!)
I just found some old home movies and still have a projector. Should I break out the popcorn and have a screening party?
By all means, watch your home movies, but do so with a great deal of caution. If the films are quite old, there could be film shrinkage. This means that if the film shrinks even a little bit, the sprockets won't engage properly with the film and this could damage your film. You can't see the shrinkage with the naked eye, so be cautious. If you start to hear the film chattering or making other strange noises, stop the projector-you could do more damage if you continue.
Once our films are transferred, what should we do with them?
Once we do the work, we tell people that the original film is the preservation element. It is NOT recommended you discard it unless there is nothing more to do with it in the future (meaning it is beyond repair and you will never transfer it again.). Film is a more permanent medium than any other medium introduced to date. All the digital media in the world will be gone in the blink of an eye technically speaking, as formats are always changing. But if your film is stored properly, decades from now you can take it out and still view it properly. You can't stop the aging process, but you can slow it down with some of our techniques we use in our preservation and transfer process.
What about old VHS tapes?
Storage is critical for VHS tapes and again, heat and moisture (which can create mold on the tape) are the enemy. It's hard to say how long an old VHS tape will last, but one thing that's different than a DVD is that every time you play a VHS tape, you run the tape across a head, which deteriorates the tape. It's best to transfer VHS to another format as soon as possible. One thing to realize, though, is that when you transfer VHS to DVD, the resolution (picture quality) will retain it's original 200 lines of resolution (versus 400 lines for DVD).
DMB Pictures is a boutique video production company specializing in producing broadcast-quality personal stories for families, non-profits and small businesses. The company opened its doors in January 2006 led by Debbie Mintz Brodsky, a three-time Emmy Award-winning television producer with more than 20 years of experience.
Visit us at http://www.dmbpictures.com/
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