HEALING WITH HOME MOVIES

I have often told my clients over the years that one of the most often overlooked, but important reasons that you want to move your home movie archive onto a hard drive, sooner rather than later is to “BE READY”.  

While we often associate Being Ready with a planned event such as that 50^th anniversary party or retirement dinner happening sometime in the future, there are other times in life that you find you will want to be ready for something unexpected.

Our family recently had the tragic experience of loosing a family member quite suddenly.  In the shock and sadness of this also came the realization that we, as the keepers of the family archive would have only a few days to edit together a beautiful memorial piece that would be shown at the Wake. Instead of being a daunting task trying to collect material from various people and sources and rushing to get them hastily digitized, because we were ready, the experience was in an unexpected way part of our healing.  Because we were ready, we found that the process  of putting together this tribute piece offered us a feeling of comfort, and was a vital part of our mourning and grieving. As we scrolled through her life on film from baby, to child, to teen, to bride, to mother, and so much more, we laughed, we cried, and most of all we were grateful that we would be able to bring others comfort in their sadness with an amazing story of wonderful memories of our loved ones life, which we set beautifully to music. 

More importantly, we could do the editing ourselves, without the assistance of strangers or a company recommended by the funeral home.   Just about a year ago we encoded the entire family archive that was  gathered from several generations of different family members home movies  and put it on to file format.  This was a huge improvement from our prior version which was DVD.  You can not edit a DVD, so there was  no option for extracting clips.  This version has the home movies encoded to digital files on a  Codec called  Pro Res  422.   The entire archive was organized into playlists on several hard drives. This encoding gave us the ability to plug the hard drive into our Mac Computer  and we could quickly scan through each film and extract clips of our loved one throughout her life.   We were then able to  edit the clips to tell a story.  We are not experienced editors, but these new programs are extremely easy to use.  We used Final Cut Pro, but imovie, or any computer base editing system (compatible with the Codec you chose) will work.  We found appropriate music.  The process took about 6 hours to look through 1 TB drive worth of material, select our clips and edit them. 

We were able to burn our  10 minutes edited piece onto a  DVD to play on a loop at the Wake.  In addition, we  burned  copies to give to family members so that they would have this tribute as a permanent memorial to our loved one.  The power of this cannot even be put into words. 

 I think especially during those private moment of sadness and grieving, the ability to create a story without the assistance of strangers or a hired production company is so wonderful.  It is an extension of the love you feel for the departed, and allows you to  tell the story that you want to tell, the way you want to tell it as a visual eulogy.

I hope this post will help motivate you to be ready for whatever life’s events can be more fully realized through the memories and healing power that lie within your family films.  Our loved ones and their legacy live on and are sustained through our photographs and films.  Take care of them, and treat them with the integrity they deserve. 

"Mourning is one of the most profound human experiences that it is possible to have... The deep capacity to weep for the loss of a loved one and to continue to treasure the memory of that loss is one of our noblest human traits". (—Edwin Shneidman, 1980)

sample home movie scan in HD to Pro Res  http://vimeo.com/32595596   

Will Kodak’s Filing for Chapter 11 have an effect on Super 8 film?

-A personal statement from Phil Vigeant, President of Pro8mm

When I first worked at Super 8 Sound in the early 1980‘s the problems were the same for Super 8 film as problems Kodak faces with 35mm film today. The market for super 8 film in the early 80’s had dropped so dramatically due to the overwhelming success of VHS that everything crashed. We are not talking about a little dip in sales. We are talking about a crash in sales that resulted in a 90% drop in business. http://www.dtvgroup.com/Super8Sound/


At that time all companies involved in the super 8 industry either went out of business, filed for bankruptcy, or were part of a larger company that could absorb their losses. In this predicament, you have to make a decision: Do you believe in the future of your product or it is just time to call it quits?


I believed that there was a future for Super 8 film and so I went through the pain of taking the company through bankruptcy so that I could re-start the business. If there was no Chapter 11 then Super 8 Sound ™ could not have been reorganized. There would be no Pro8mm, and at the risk of sounding boastful, there probably would be no Super 8 film today. This is the point of bankruptcy. It gives you a chance at life; a new beginning for those that believe in their product for future generations. For us, it gave us the opportunity to invent super 8 negative film, Max 8, and complete workflows so that Super 8 film could be used as a professional production medium.


There are risks to all this and there will not doubt be lots of changes at Kodak. Sometimes the people that take over are not interested in the future of the company and are only interested in disposing of the valuable parts of a business. If you have watched the movie Wall Street (the original) you know what I mean.


We are already feeling some of these changes, which we must intern, adjust to.


As for Super 8 film, Pro8mm has its own Super 8 film manufacturing process, and we have been making Super 8 film since 1992. Although Kodak is our premier supplier and we work very close together, we have other vendors. We have successfully been making super 8 films from Fuji film stocks as well as Kodak film stocks for 20 years now.

Since the big crash in the use of Super 8 film in the early 1980’s as a format for home movies and intro film classes, super 8 film has enjoyed a steady growth in other applications. Super 8 is not part of the crash of current 35mm film sales. It is in fact “it’s own thing.” We hope the leadership at Kodak has the right intentions for the future and will re-start the business, as we did at Pro8mm so generations in the future can enjoy their products.

Variety Reviews - It's About You - Film Reviews - - Review by Ronnie Scheib

Variety Reviews - It's About You - Film Reviews - - Review by Ronnie Scheib

Mellencamp Super 8 doc called "It's About You"... on Twitpic

Mellencamp Super 8 doc called "It's About You"... on Twitpic

Shot entirely on Pro8mm film with two Beaulieu cameras that we modified for MAX 8 and Crystal Sync, scanned in native 1080 HD to Pro Res.  Looks amazing!

MPI Media Group Presents

JOHN MELLENCAMP: IT’S ABOUT YOU (source Mellencamp.com News)

Directed by renowned photographer Kurt Markus and his son, Ian Markus

Opens January 4th in NY at the IFC Center
Opens January 6th in LA at the Music Hall

It's About You is a new musical documentary that offers a rare and intimate look at the life and music of Rock and Roll Hall of Famer John Mellencamp. The film premiered at this year’s SXSW festival and follows Mellencamp on his summer 2009 concert tour and during the recording of his most recent album, 2010’s universally acclaimed No Better Than This, the sessions for which took place at American musical and historical landmarks, including Sun Studios in Memphis and the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, GA. We see Mellencamp recording – with a single mike and mono tape recorder more than half a century old – in the same hotel room where legendary bluesman Robert Johnson created some of his most memorable work. Along the way, Mellencamp reveals a side not often seen by the public, in a film that becomes a soulful, highly personal meditation on small-town America.

Kurt Markus’ photography has appeared in such leading publications as Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, GQ and The New York Times Magazine, and he has shot cutting-edge ad campaigns for BMW, Armani, Nike and other companies. His unique vision has been brought to bear on It's About You, which was shot on Super 8 and whose vintage Americana look is the cinematic equivalent of a well-worn pair of jeans.
RT: 80 Minutes
Rated: NR

Tags: Its About You

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Life is Super Gr8

Last month Phil and Rhonda attended the second annual Super Gr8 Film Festival in Harrisonburg, Virginia, a charming little town in the Shenandoah Valley, and home to James Madison University.

Organized by two local residents and incredibly wonderful guys, Paul Somers (artist, poet, filmmaker and educator) and Tim Estep, (TimeStepFilms), The Super Gr8 Film Festival is a community-organized event that featured 48 super 8 short films (shown over two nights) made by local filmmakers. Many of the filmmakers had never made a short film before this event.


In August of this year, Tim and Paul asked Pro8mm if we could sponsor the event and attend the festival. We were thrilled and honored to do so, as this festival is one of the first to used Pro8mm workflows entirely. Paul and Tim bought 48 rolls of film ½ Super8/66 Tri-X and ½ Pro8/13 Tungsten for the festival participants, all processed and scanned on the M2 at Pro8. As a sponsor we also added The Power of Super 8 Film Seminar to the agenda the day before the festival. This pre- event was held on campus at J.M.U. where we were joined by award winning wedding super 8 filmmaker and photographer Kate Headley who drove down from Washington D.C. to speak to an enthusiastic and engaging audience.

All the short films, approximately 3.5 minutes in length were edited in-camera, with-out sound. Each filmmaker then created an original soundtrack for his or her short film. This in some cases included live performances during the screening. This festival is unique in that none of the filmmakers get to see their finished films until the night of the festival screenings.


The screening was held over two nights at the Court Square Theatre to a packed, sold-out house. The topics covered in the films were as diverse as you could possibly imagine and they were absolutely fantastic! The panel of judges voted, and then the audience also voted for an audience favorite. The first night featured the black and white films and the second evening color negative super 8 film. An after party and awards ceremony will follow the screenings each night.

Super Gr8’s mission is to bring the community together through film. It was amazing to me how in this small Shenandoah Valley college town, everyone, everywhere we went stepped right in and got totally behind Super Gr8. Actors, filmmakers, crew and fan club were all a part of the festival is some way. This was a community labor of love unlike I have seen before. Tim and Paul spent endless hours finding cameras, getting them repaired, lending them out to contestants, and training them how to use them. They contacted local merchants to sponsor the event and local artists to raffle off their work as a fund raising effort. Even the trophies were unique, one of kind objects of art hand made out of old super 8 cameras, mounted on a stand. It was clear to us that Tim and Paul were very well respected King Pins of the community.


For me, I have to say with absolutely honest, this Super Gr8 festival was the high light of my year. Never have I met people more appreciative, warm, and friendly as I did in Harrisonburg. It affirms what I have always believed. Give people a creative opportunity, make it affordable, accessible, and add in a chance to collaborate with others without competing for anything other than a chance to totally immerse themselves in something enjoyable and enhance a sense of community pride, and you have the perfect recipe for a life that is Super Gr8!

http://www.supergr8.com/
Photos by Josh Gooden
Festival Organized by Tim Estep and Paul Somers

Kate Headley speaking at The Power of Super 8



The Super Gr8 Film Festival 2011 in Harrisonburg, VA



 

Phil Vigeant talking about the tiny Super 8 format



Tim Estep and Paul Somers, Super Gr8 Festival organizers

James Chressanthis uses Max 8 in TNT's Mystery Movie Night: HIDE

Last night I watched in awe the remarkable use of Super 8 film in the TNT made for TV movie HIDE. Based on a thriller mystery novel by Lisa Gardner, the film was directed by James Gray and beautifully shot by cinematographer James Chressanthis, ASC. Hide marks their reunion, as they have collaborated on other projects such as Ghost Whispers and Brian’s Song.

The deliberate choice by Chressanthis to shoot full Max 8 to punctuate the numerous flashback scenes by different characters in the story had a strong aesthetic punch. Never did you feel as if you were watching a home movie, but rather a vivid porthole into the memory of painful events that these characters were being asked to retell investigators. 

Chressanthis chose our MAX 8 1014 XLS camera with crystal for the Super 8 sequences. Shooting was done with  Pro8/19, a Kodak Vision 3 200T film stock that is highly versatile for both bright and low light conditions. The film has 13 stops of latitude, extremely fine grain, and an ultra wide exposure range. It captured both the shadows and highlight details so well that  in some shots you could actually see the skeletons of the mummified bodies inside the hanging body bags down in a low lit  underground pit.

We scanned the film in native 1080 to ProRes 4:4:4 HQ with 3 separate passes at different frame rates. "We shot mostly at 9FPS on the Max 8 camera. Editorially they used all the frame rate transfers:  24, 12, 6 fps.

I shot the various frame rates to speed up, slow down and blur the image and also to increase the grain.

That's because normal Super 8 is so clean that it can look like good 16mm but we wanted an edgy, grittier 

look in representing the deep memories of the characters. It looks fantastic! " says Chressanthis.

Plot Summary: Carla Gugino (Californication, Entourage) plays Boston Police Detective D.D. Warren, who is called to the grounds of an abandoned mental hospital where a buried chamber is discovered. Inside are the mummified remains of six young women, who have all been missing for years. The case leads D.D. to Annabelle, played by Bridget Regan (Legend of the Seeker). Annabelle is a young woman who spent her childhood moving from city to city, from identity to identity, hiding from someone or something totally unknown to her. D.D. uses clues from Annabelle's secret past to unravel the mystery behind her twisted family history. Mark-Paul Gosselaar (TNT's Franklin & Bash, NYPD Blue) and Kevin Alejandro (True Blood, TNT's Southland) also star. Hide is written by Janet Brownell (Eloise at the Plaza), directed by John Gray (Ghost Whisperer, Helter Skelter) and executive-produced by Stephanie Germain (The Day After Tomorrow)  (summary from TNT website)

Chressanthis has used Pro8mm workflows is such projects as No Subtitles Necessary (2008)and Brian's Song (2001). He is a three time Emmy Award Nominee, and has been a member of the ASC since 2002.

If you missed last nights premier, check for an opportunity to stream it  directly from TNT’s website http://www.tnt.tv.

The Master vs. The Playout: Archiving and Playing your Film the RIGHT Way

While digital has presented itself as great way to watch and edit film, it has also caused lots of confusion for home movie archiving. Having worked on thousands of home movie archiving projects over the past 3 years in high definition, the colorists at Pro8mm have had a few solid revelations about this process.

One revelation is that there has not been a solid solution to the quest to find one universal digital HD format that works well for both playing movies and for archiving them. Unfortunately, what is good for archiving is not the best format for easy playback. This means that in order to have the best access to your home movies you need to see it as two formats: one for preserving your movies and one for watching them. For name sake lets call one the “The Master” and the other the “The Playout.”

Rhonda with home movies on her iPad

A master digital file is going to be the best in terms of future protection of your images because a true master is going to provide you with data in the highest quality you might require and give you the flexibility of creating different playout versions.  The best digital master must serve your needs today, tomorrow and even to generate playouts for past systems. By having a master, you will always have a way of creating the highest quality playout file to a format that is most convenient for that times. For example, today it is ‘cool’ to watch your movies on your iPad or stream them to something like Facebook, but it was not that long ago we were using DVD’s and not that long before that we had VHS. Playouts will continue to change, but the great evolution towards HD mastering has stabilized. Hard drives may get faster and cheaper, but the fundamentals of HD are now securely planted.

The master is great as a film preservation medium but having the capacity to use it as a good playout is often very frustrating.  Many things must be in sync, coded correctly and you have to have the capacity to play large file types to use a master as a playout.  Computer files can be easily be down converted to what you need for a specific playout application.  This can be done while scanning or after you do some editing to the mater files. The cost to create these specific playouts is small. So the best system is to have both a master and playout files for the various ways you want to watch your films. At Pro8mm, we can create a specific playout file for DVD viewing, Blu-Ray, your iPad or even a format to stream your home movies on YouTube or Facebook.  These Playout files are specifically formatted for these devices so that you can have correct playback speed and framing for a playout that is different from the master.

SD Masters & Playouts

For almost 20 years we used Digi Beta Tape as the masters format for storing home movies. Over the past 3 years we have experienced the evolution to HD mastering and have seen first hand the great improvement HD mastering offers for Home Movie Archiving.

There are three areas of tremendous improvement with an HD File master over Digital Beta.

1) You no longer need Ghost Frames: Whenever you create SD video from film, you have to have 30 frames per second. This is how video works and there is no changing it in a Standard Definition NTSC system. If you shot film at 18 or 24fps, you needed to create the additional frames to make a 30 frames system work.  These extra created frames where often referred to a ghost frames because the where created out of two frames of the original film. In SD, they were rarely noticed because of the low resolution of the system.  The only time you could see these frames is if you played back the video frame by frame. You would then see these added frames that often blurred part of the images in the frame. However in high definition, because of the increased resolution the ghost frames are noticeable and can be seen when you playback the video. These extra frames did nothing but take up space, create unwanted artifacts, and reduce the quality of your master.   But they where needed to make the system work.  Today, with HD scanning we can store the images frame-by-frame in the digital mastering. We no longer need these extra ghost frames to make the system work. 

2) You now have more digital to define your film: The second  improvement of HD digital mastering is having more digits to describe your frames. Typically in HD we use a 1920 X1080 standard 16x9 Mastering format. In SD,  NTSC we used (640 X 480). With HD, there is 4 times more digital to describe the detail in every frame of film from SD.  This gives you the opportunity to store more color space and finer details about every frame. A lot of detail and color can fit in 4x more space.



Lacie Rugged Hard Drive



3) The Hard Drive: The last improvement is the storage of your images. The hard drive provides you with unprecedented access at very little cost. There is no longer a need to have those very expensive tape decks to maintain masters. With SD you needed multiple tape decks because different kinds of digit was put on different kinds of tape. If you wanted to have your data in both Digital Beta NTSC and for Europe Digital Beta Pal you would need two $40,000.00 tape machines to have access to your masters. Today with hard drives,  you can store both files on a single drive. Oh and by the way, you no longer need to have two masters because you can create both a Pal and NTSC payout from a single HD Master.   Second, you can compress the data, copy the data and manipulate the data with a simple consumer computer and the right software.  You can make 2 copies of the master for preservation, you can compress some files for theI internet to stream on Youtube, and you can make the grandparents a DVD.  You now have access to all your materials, both master and playout without the cost of expensive, multiple format tape decks. Hard drives will keep getting faster and cheaper, so you can migrate your data to what ever new system of storage presents itself.

To learn more about home movie preservation and digital asset management, we are hosting a free live event and teleseminar the second week of November called “Don’t Delete My Memories: The Home Movie Conundrum Made Simple.” Learn best practices for preserving and protecting your home movie digitally and understand the ways of using your home movie archive in modern applications. We will also be announce some amazing holiday promotions just for home movie preservation. Learn how to create great holiday gifts and memorable holiday events with your home movie archive.

Click here to Register for the LIVE event in Burbank, CA - Tuesday, November 8 from 7pm - 9pm

Click here to Register for the VIRTUAL event - Wednesday, November 9 from 4:30pm to 5:30pm pacific