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   

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



Home Movie Collection Event For Jewish Homegrown History

For Immediate Release: July 13, 2009



The Labyrinth Project, with support from Pro8mm invite you to participate in a screening and collection event of home movies shot on regular 8, super 8 and 16mm film for a new project, JEWISH HOMEGROWN HISTORY.

What is Jewish Homegrown History?
Jewish Homegrown History is the latest multimedia project from USC’s pioneering research initiative, The Labyrinth Project, which has been producing award-winning installations, websites and DVDs for the past ten years.

What is the screening event?
Home Movie Collection Day for Jewish Homegrown History
is a community celebration of amateur cinema. Selected works will be considered for inclusion in Jewish Homegrown History, an exhibition opening at the Skirball Cultural Center in September 2010.

Where is the screening/collection event?
DATE: Sunday, July 19, 2009
TIME: 11:00AM - 5:00PM (drop in any time)
LOCATION: USC School of Cinematic Arts, SCA110



What are we looking for?

Jewish Homegrown History creates an interactive narrative of the American Jewish experience on a global and local scale. Starting with California, the team at Labyrinth has been collecting images, text and video to build a historical foundation for our online database and upcoming museum installation. There are three central themes we hope to explore: Immigration, Identity, and Intermarriage. Although archival material and published histories have been key in our research, what we really want are the personal accounts and homegrown details that bring these themes to life. We are interested in your home movies to help us tell these stories.

Your footage will be screened alongside passages from relevant literature, photos from digital archives, and interviews we have conducted with scholars, entrepreneurs and historians across California. The goal of this project is to create a productive dialogue between official history and personal narrative. We want to see how events publicized in traditional sources relate to the people who actually lived through them. We want to see the faces of the men and women who worked so hard and fought so bravely when the country went to war. We want to see the houses with picket fences and big backyards when families moved to the suburbs. We want to see the bride and groom together in love when larger forces conspired to keep them apart. Ordinary people doing ordinary things.

At the Home Movie Screening and Collection event, we will be looking for these kinds of images that enrich and contextualize the broader stories we are telling with our research. However, we also welcome divergent points of view. We expect what we see to both reinforce and challenge our own experiences and theories. We are less concerned with telling you how history happened, but rather how you can share your perspective with us. At Labyrinth, we believe that there are many paths to a destination, so for this story we encourage contributions from as many voices as possible.

We are currently focused on representing Jewish life in California, with special emphasis on Jewish neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, the Fairfax District, the Pico-Robertson Area, Hancock Park, and the Valley. We are also featuring Riverside County resorts like Murietta Hot Springs, Lake Elsinore, and Highland Hot Springs. We are especially interested in older films or videos but will look at anything up through the1980s. Additionally, we are seeking almost anything that represents Jewish life in California including:

• Worship at synagogues
• Holiday celebrations
• Dinner parties
• Recreational activities
• Places of business
• Portraits of neighborhoods and people
• Interfaith and interethnic relationships
• Political and social events


For additional information, contact:
By email: mkinder@usc.edu
By telephone, call: 213-740-5112
By postcard or letter, write:
The Labyrinth Project
School of Cinematic Arts, LPB 118,
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2211
Attention: Marsha Kinder

Feel free to visit our website at http://college.usc.edu/labyrinth/



FIVE GREAT REASONS TO PARTICIPATE:

1. Come and screen your old films.
In case you do not have a working projector for your 8mm/Super8/16mm films, we’ve got you covered. If you have been curious to see what is on those old reels, this is your chance!

2. Rediscover memories of your favorite people and places.
-Want to remind your husband how stunning you looked in your wedding dress?
-Want to go back to the house you grew up in?
-Want to honor the memory of a relative no longer with us?
Come share your significant moments with an audience of family and friends. Show us the things you care about.


3. Be part of history!
Participate in a nationally recognized historical research project! Your home movies could become part of our traveling museum installation, Jewish Homegrown History, which is scheduled for the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, the New Americans Museum in San Diego, and the Judah Magnes Museum in Berkeley.

4. Transfer your home movies to HD digital video with Pro8mm and get a significant discount off their list price for broadcast quality archiving. Representatives from Pro8mm will be on hand to examine your films and give advice on how best to care for the original reels. Pro8mm has been archiving the world’s most famous faces and events for over 30 years.

5. Learn how to post your home movies to social networking sites such as Facebook, put them on your iphone, or email clips. Sharing your favorite memories with your loved ones is easy when your digitize your footage.

*BONUS*

6. Get a tax write-off!
Contribute your digitized footage to the installation or to the USC Digital Archive and get a tax write-off for the cost of the transfer.

Above all, we want to encourage people to come out and have fun. Come anytime between 11:00 AM and 5:00 PM. Bring your films, no matter the format, and we will screen them. Bring friends and family too. Cinema is a shared experience and we would love for you to share yours with us. See you July 19th!

Pro8 HD 3 Ways to Check it Out!

3 ways to experience it!

If you are like most filmmakers, you are considering what is best way to move into High Definition. Skeptical or not, the format war on disk is over, and blu ray paves the way. Super 8 in 1080i or 1080p resolution looks so phenomenal from our M2 Scanner, that we know once you see it for yourself, you'll see the potential for your market. At Pro8mm, HD scanning is not "up-rezed" in a computer the way some places do it, using "line doubling" to get to 1080, but a true native HD scan off the original film. A client recently described Pro8mm HD this way.... "it is like getting a new pair of glasses! Everything is just so incredibly vivid! You really do have to see it to believe it! " We have 3 different ways for you to experience just how incredible Super8 looks on Blu Ray.

Test it for $108.00! We will give you a roll of Pro8mm film and processing for free, or send in one unedited roll you have already shot. We will prep and clean it and scan it to blu ray. A sweet deal!

New for 2009, our Pro8 HD Demo on Blu-Ray Disk has representative samples of many of the Pro8mm film stocks, shot on all of our different Super 8 cameras. The demo includes Max 8 footage, archival scans of regular 8 and super 8 reformatted from 4x3 to 16x9 in 1080i or 1080p. A $20 deposit will be taken on the disk, refunded when returned.

Enter our Think Big Shoot Small Film Festival Challenge, now in HD! We are currently accepting entries now through May 1st 2009. This is a great way for you to test for yourself how Super8 looks on HD. Make a short film on a single roll, selecting from any of our 15 Pro8mm film stocks. All editing is done in the camera without splicing. Send the roll back to Pro8mm to be processed and scanned to Blu Ray Disk on our new Millennium II HD Scanner. Entries will be judged by our distinguished panel. The highlight of the festival is the screening and party at an LA venue (TBD) on us in June 2009. Don't miss this opportunity to network with other contestants and have a great time on our dime!!! Entry fee $108.00. Great prizes! We will raffle off a camera! Forms available at http://www.pro8mm.com/

First Prize: 12 Roll HD Movie Trailer Package Second Prize: 8 Roll HD Movie Film Package

Third Prize: 4 Roll HD Movie Film Package

Honorable Mention: Several Gift Certificates for HD scanning.

By most estimates, there were roughly three million standalone Blu Ray players sold in the USA in 2008. ( A standalone player is one that just plays Blu Ray and standard-def DVD's, as opposed to a Play Station 3, which is a gaming console and Blu Ray player.) But thanks to lower prices and positive word of mouth, Blu Ray player sales will really start to boom this year. Combining Play Station 3 and standalone Blu Ray players, more than 25 million U.S. homes will have Blu-ray capability by the end of 2009. Be ahead of the curve and get your material on blu ray. You can't afford not to make your work really stand out !!

PRO8mm Now Offers 3 Distinct Scanning Systems

Pro8mm Offers 3 Distinctly Different Scanning Systems
* Millennium 2 (HD)
* Y-Front
*Rank




Beginning in March 2008 Pro8mm will begin offering 3 distinctly different Scan Systems. This will allow customers to choose between maximizing the Quality or the Economy of their transfers of 8 and 16mm film. Clients can custom build their transfers from the base price of each of our three systems by choosing which scanning system is best for them, Rank, Y-Front, or Millennium II HD. Then they can select options such as one light vs. full scene to scene color correction, scheduled vs. unscheduled, and from a variety of mastering formats, including hard drive. Each of these elements determine the per hour price. Additionally, options such as simul master, sync interlock, time code, a frame, and power windows are also part of the menu of choices.

For Maximum value, quality and efficiency, our extremely popular “ALL INCLUSIVE DISCOUNT PACKAGES” bundle together film, processing, prep and clean and transfer at one discounted price. These packages will be offered on The Y-Front and MM II. Purchased this way, scans on our new MM II scanner start at just $82 more for a 4 roll package than from under the old pricing ($278 for SD vs. $360 for HD) an unbelievable value for the quality and technology!

Our three scanning systems represent the progress in scanning technology over the past 30 years. Pro8mm has always been committed to offering state-of-the art products and services for our clients. Each scanning system we offer shows our alignment to the progression of scanning technology. Maintaining these older systems allows us to offer the widest selection of choices amongst all small format scanning companies so that we can accommodate the greatest number of client needs and budgets.

Rank Scan: This system uses a Digital Rank and daVinci Color Correction (4:2:2: Work Platform). This was our main system just 2 years ago and produces great images from Regular 8mm and Super8 mm reversal Film. The discounted base rate for unscheduled and unsupervised transfers will be $150.00 per hour.

Y-Front Scan: This system uses an Ursa Diamond with Y-Front technology and daVinci Color Correction (4:4:4 Work Platform). The Y-Front’s dirt and scratch concealment will improve the look of any film, especially modern negative film stocks that have expanded latitude. The Diamond has expanded gamma color space that is critical for achieving an optimum result with negative film. All present Pro8mm/Pro16mm Packages are done on this system. Base rate $255.00 an hour.

MILLIENNIUM II Scan: Using our Brand New Millennium 2 Scanner and daVinci 2K color corrector (1920 x 1080 HD Work Platform), this new system produces the most premium scan possible. It includes Y-Front technology for dirt and scratch concealment. By working in HD we can more precisely manipulate the information in the scan process even for SD transfer. Base rate $450.00 an hour

*All Systems can handle all film types:
All Systems offer Unscheduled Discounts and the option of doing scene to scene or one light.
Call one of our project coordinators for your custom quote.