Preserve old movies, photos, music with Digital Technology

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This last Saturday my local News Paper printed a pretty good article in the Homes section regarding preservation of old films and photos stored away in peoples attics closets etc.

Of course this article is very near and dear to my heart and actually is a good cause to write about. Recently my father passed away at 90 years old. He has a ton of old photographs many of them from vintage periods of his hey days in the 30’s 40’s, 50’ 60’s etc. So what to do with all of these photos ? Very simple for me since I am in the business of not only creating memories for clients but also in the preservation of those memories.

They are in the process of being scanned, cleaned up and categorized. In the case of my fathers photos, I will be using them as part of a documentary project on the Merchant Marines serving in WW II and the US foray into the war with our entry into the campaign in New Guinea, for which my father played an active role.

“The campaign on New Guinea is all but forgotten except by those who served there. Battles with names like Tarawa, Saipan, and Iwo Jima overshadow it. Yet Allied operations in New Guinea were essential to the U.S. Navy’s drive across the Central Pacific and to the U.S. Army’s liberation of the Philippine Islands from Japanese occupation.”

Did not mean to digress off track here, the point that the article makes as well as the one that I am talking about merge into the same theme. You see as we age, so does the media on which we’ve stored our memories and moments of the past. The older storage medium of film and photographs is referred to as Analog and the new medium of computers and DVD’s is referred to as Digital.

If you still have old film footage lying around: be it old 8 mm, Super 8 or 16mm film or even old phonographic albums – LP records old 78’s or 45s!, or even fading black-and-white snapshots, not to mention color slides and prints and lets not forget VHS tapes, then the time to transfer that over to a DVD for long lasting storage is now.

The longer you wait the more the material degrades to the point that very soon it may not even be salvageable. Basically, the preservation of old film footage should be done as soon as possible.

You might have a few questions regarding the process and cost and that is understandable.

Lets’ see if I can help here:

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Video for a New Media Generation

With all the opportunity in online video, it is interesting that many traditional Videographers or Production Studios do not really get it. Oh they know how to create video but in todays on-line world you have to improve upon your craft and become very Web 2.0 savvy. You also have to ensure that the content you create is accessible across a wide array of platforms.

Understanding the medium is but one aspect.

The winners will actually be those video content creators and distributors who build platforms that are compatible with both Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight video codecs and of course, their respective ad formats. And if you can monetize the content by turning it into add revenue, you just may have touched the holy grail of online video.

Of course advertisers love the idea of social networks: delivering specific ads to people based on personal information posted on the site or passed along to friends.

There’s also talk of video pervading the Business to Business markets, the corporate communications market and new realms of the business-to-consumer market with even new in-roads in the consumer-to-consumer market. ABI Research even released a new estimate that, by 2011, the market for online video will be $1.87 billion.

Virtual Interactive Systems is dedicated to spreading information about audio and video podcasting, blogging, and other new media technologies to the masses. We specialize in creation of Video for the New Media Generation, we get it !