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Archiving Home Movies?
Ronin Developer asks: "I've inherited a large 8mm and Super8 movie and 35mm slide collection. Some of the films date back to the late 40's and early 50's and are important family history. Unbelievabley, most of the films are still in decent shape but won't be forever. So, I'd like to find a way to archive them to CD or DVD. Can anyone point me in a direction where I can find software, hardware or professional services for this task without costing a small fortune?" If these things are expensive, how long do you think it will be before the market makes such services cheap enough for the average family?
Others have touched on stability problems of magnetic or optical media, although no one (so far) has said anything about format stability. (Do you have any idea how hard it is to find anything to play my 1/2" EIAJ-format open reel videotapes of Monty Python left over from the '70s?) Film has been around for a long time, there's a lot of it out there, and there should be equipment for viewing it available for as long as you need to worry about it :->.
Also remember that any scan of the images you have will probably result in some resolution/contrast losses. Video still isn't as good as film here. Black & White because color dyes can fade (exposure to light accelerates this, but they'll do it spontaneously), and a print to get rid of any crumby splices. A good film lab should be able to do a print for not a lot of $$.
If you're really into preserving a color film, you can have black-and-white separations made (one each: for yellow, cyan, and magenta.) Then you can always reconstitute the color balance later, provided you have all three prints. This is what studios like Disney do, but be warned that few labs are equipped to do it, and it's really expen$$$ive.
Finally, whatever you do, hang on to the originals. That way, if something new comes along in 20 years, you will still have them to use if that's possible.
Is there any (commercial or free) programs that can do what's necessary to burn VCDs? I've found some free MPEG1 encoders, but they do only video (not sound+video). And then comes the burning process, which I haven't found a thing...
Or are there VCD players for Linux? Ones I have burned in Windows only work for a track or two. After that they give read errors, so my DVD is the only thing I can use to watch them.
If you're obsessed about quality just play back at 1/3 speed and capture at 640x480 8fps. Use Quicktime JPEG at quality 80. Capture audio onto another track at 44100 16 bit seperately. Set the frame rate to 24 and render another Quicktime movie with audio and video. This resolution is overkill for 8mm film and Hi-8 video. 320x480 might be sufficient for home movies. If you can't play back at 1/3 speed play at full speed and capture at 10fps. Capture a second copy at 320x240 24fps and archive two movies at the different resolutions.
As long as there is UNIX and a C compiler you'll be able to play back Quicktime JPEG. Who knows what's going to happen with the Microsoft and MPEG formats. MPEG is heavily patented and Microsoft is Microsoft.
You might consider backing them up on some sort of tape after you turn them into MPEG. CDs and DVDs haven't been shown to last much more than 10-15 years unless in a cold, dry, dark environment; and even then, they don't last as long as some other formats. The government, for one, does not use optical media for storage for this reason.
If you need to point-and-click to administer a machine,
Sounds like you need to get a VHS copy first, and then run it through some sort of MPEG-1 encoder (unless you can get an MPEG-2 encoder :) and then burn it onto a CD-R. Alas, the CD-R won't last as long as the film has...
Also, definitely stick with some sort of MPEG format - since the specs and source code for sample implementations are available computers will be able to handle MPEGs for a _long_ time... unlike some other formats.
MO media is probably going to last longer - might want to get one of those drives.
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If you just want to get the films in a digital format, you can get a cheap television card for you're computer, and capture the videos in raw video format and then convert them to MPEG.
I don't know about spesfic software, but I know it's posbile to make an MPEG so that you can burn it directly to a compact disk as a "VCD" VCDs are popular in asia, and work in standard DVD players. CD-Rs arn't really as stable as regular CD-ROM disks. The data aria is right on the 'top' of the CD. Once, while trying to was the lable on a CD-R disk, i washed the data right of the disk!
Some CD-Rs are better. If the data is really that imporntant, you might want to make multiple copys of the CDs and keep those in a dark, dry place.
Its not really hard to get video and audio onto a computer
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I have the same problem with over 5 hours of film, some of which has already gone beyond hope, (60+ years old, stored poorly). Right now, I just had them transfered over to VHS, with several copies. I choose VHS over Beta since one of my goals was to allow relatives to enjoy the memories now.
It's important to scatter copies, because even if the quality is low, the probability of the film surviving and remaining in the hands of relatives increases proportionately to the number of copies.
I just found out about a company that will take your content and encode it to any format you want. They will provide it back as a CD or FTP (for smaller files). They will also host for streaming video. While they seem to be targeting the business market, I plan to see what they can do for my home movies.
http://www.encoding.com/sol utions/get_a_quote/main.html
will allow you to request a quote. The page is a bit confusing and I can't vouch for the quality of the work.
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