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?

Comments

CD/DVD doesn't last very long

[Knight]

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,

Re:CD/DVD doesn't last very long

[spinkham]

CD-R longevity reports CD-ROM's (the stamped ones) will last basically as long as you want them too, IIRC. CD-R's (the dye based cd-rom workalike) is claimed to have about 95% reliability at 75-100 years, depending on the brand if stored in a dark place at about room tempature (25c, about 75F). CD-RW's are worse, from what I've heard, but this is mearly hearsay.. Also to keep in mind, if you keep you disks in a light place, a humid place, or in a hotter place, the disk life would be much much shorter. Check out Kodak's permanance page for more info on how temperature, light, and humidity affect CD-R's. There is other good info in their other sections you can reach from this page too. However, in 10 years you will probably consolidate your collection onto a whole lot less of whatever format we have to replace DVD-Rs (or on high capacity DVD-Rs for that matter..), so reliability beyond that is not really an issue. At worst, if you plan on recopying every 35 years or so(1/3 to 1/2 the claimed reliable shelf life), you should have no problems. (BTW, all info for this post was found by doing a search for "cd-r permanence" at www.google.com. A little searching goes a long way ;-)