A FEW NOTES
on the PRESERVATION and DIGITIZATION
of HOME MOVIES:

PRESERVING THE ORIGINAL FILM:

Nothing lasts forever, but Gustave's films have survived remarkably well considering their age. He always stored them in metal cannisters inside a basement cabinet away from excessive heat, light and humidity. Also, the majority of his color movies were made with Kodak Kodacolor, a stock well regarded by professionals and amateurs alike for it's color permanency.

Unfortunately, while the color dyes used in Kodacolor were durable, in some cases the acetate stock that held the dyes has yellowed with age, resulting in greenish-brown skies and jaundiced skin tones. Thank goodness, only a few of Gustave's movies suffered from yellowing such as this:

Also, once or twice, Gustave used an inferior, non-Kodacolor film that within a few years of processing underwent a "red shift" in which all the color dyes, except for red and black, faded away to leave a purple-ish image. I have in possession a commercial short documenting the 1964-65 World's Fair that, I remember, was originally as colorful as this.

But now, forty years later, resembles this:

All of Gustave's black and white 16mm movies are in very good shape, save for one brief sequence dating from 1929 that was apparently filmed on a smaller-sized stock and then somehow enlarged and reprinted onto 16mm film. (Gustave probably went through the trouble because it contained the earliest scenes of his baby son, Warren). In it you clearly see the ravages of "starch separation" in which fine starch grains, used to hold the black dye, separate from the acetate stock and clump together:

It reminds me of those scratchy and grainy movie clips one sees on The History Channel. In contrast, a 16mm movie of the same baby taken the same year, looks pristine:

Despite all these potential problems - yellowing, red-shift and starch-separation, the majority of Gustave's home movies are in nearly as good a condition as the day they were made. Will the same be said for today's CD's and videotapes, seventy years down the road?

DIGITIZATION:

My first attempts at transferring home movie footage onto digital tape used the simplest method possible - aiming my camcorder at the movie screen while projecting the film. That would have worked, except for one very annoying technical problem that a novice such as myself could not have anticipated - FLICKER. Due to the discrepancy between the frame rate of movie film (18 to 24 frames per second) and video (30 frames per second), the taped footage repeatedly faded to dark or black every few seconds.

I tried increasing the film projector's speed to match the camcorder's frame-rate (my vintage 16mm film projector had an adjustable speed dial), but the cranky, old projector could not hold it's speed steadily enough to allow more than a few seconds' worth of acceptable recording.

Clearly, this was a matter for a professional studio. I took my reels to DuART Studios in Manhattan where they used a device called a telecine to record the footage onto professional beta-data tape, which was then transferred to miniDV camcorder tape for my personal usage. From there on I used Apple's iMovie software to edit the footage on my computer, and good old Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Dreamweaver to create the website.

(By the way, at the DuART Studios I saw on display an actual OSCAR statuette - a technical award the studio received for film preservation. That certainly boosted my confidence in choosing DuART!)

Robert Martens, November, 2005