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The Right Stuff
Daniel Smith • November 12, 2018
This is a photograph of our newly refurbished Umatic videotape player. It cost a lot of money to fix. It is one of the first videotape players ever built primarily but not exclusively for the commercial market- televisions stations and the like. It is impossible to find one of these machines in what could be called new condition. Its full of belts and rubber parts that get old, stretch and crack (like me, lol). And it has a lot of electric motors, fuses and springs that can fail.
Its even harder to find a technician that can or still wants to work on Umatic players. They are older than the machines. But we found one- Rick, who runs Obsolete Video in Arizona. A great guy, and the machine we got from him was clean, oiled and completely refurbished. Just in time to get a stack of Umatic tapes done before the holidays for a couple patient customers.
I don’t think we will every recoup our investment in this refurbished machine, so why do we do them? Because its important that we are able to rescue every precious memory that families have. The Umatic tapes we digitize are sometimes the professional work of a father or grandfather. And sometimes a wedding that was one of the first captured without a film camera.
And if we are going to be entrusted with a families keepsakes, it is important that we have the right equipment, the right stuff, to do our work for you. This is true whether it involves film, videotapes, photos, slides or negatives. That’s why we always invest in the best equipment to use and work with. And that’s another reason why you should come to Familyography.
There are a lot of companies out there trying to lure you into shipping your tapes, film and photos to get digitized. While we are skeptical about the quality of the work performed by some companies (based on the experience of some of our customers), this article addresses the math of these mail order businesses. Are you getting a good deal, or are you getting played?
I am writing this at the beginning stages of COVID-19 pandemic. The corona virus has made its debut in our country, but the real effects are yet to play out. It is really not a good time to indulge in crass commercialism, as we are still trying to sort out the new norms of behavior and are fearfully anticipating the impact of this disease on our loved ones. Yet, despite this, as a student of history, I feel compelled to say something. So here it is.
Those closest to me will attest that I have long held an affection for the poetry of Robert Burns. My engagement with Burns began when I was only 15 years old. We had just moved to the “inner city” of Cleveland from an outlying, wealthier suburb, 30 miles away. It was not a move that I welcomed. My parents had divorced. I was losing friends, and a girl that I had a crush on. Things were obviously a lot tougher economically.
My name is Daniel, and the very first man to immigrate to this country (from Scotland) was also named Daniel. Yesterday, I discovered a tintype photograph of Daniel and his wife Eleanor. I have never seen it, nor for that matter have I before seen any other image of these two pioneers. It was faded. It was grainy. But there they were. Looking back at me from over 165 years ago.
We get big projects. We get small projects. All the time. Recently, the executor of an estate brought in three large bins full of a parent’s photos, negatives, diaries and other miscellaneous papers. There were seven siblings, and they could not come to agreement as to what to save or who could have what. So the judge ordered them to digitize everything. It was not cheap, especially because it came to us unorganized and with many items in deteriorating condition. Nevertheless, after about 6 weeks of work, each sibling received a large capacity flash drive everything scanned and organized clearly and logically. Later, I was told that everyone was very happy with the results, and that all the siblings agreed that the whole of their parents’ memories was worth more than the sum of the parts, and that doing it was money well spent. A level of comity was arrived at between the siblings. Around the same time, a retired minister stopped in with an old negative that a cousin has mailed to him. He just wanted us to make print a print from the negative.. When he came in to pick it up, he pulled it out of the envelope, and gazed at it for a long time. Running his hand over the surface, he said, “This is my mother. I’ve never seen a picture of her as a young woman.” His age-worn face broke Into a smile as he looked up and said, “She was so beautiful.”So you see, we understand that every project, whether big or small, is important. But we also know that sometimes— perhaps even most of the time— the results we create will mean more to you than you can possibly know.
Now that I have crossed over into my 60s, I think often on how short life really is. It is too short, really, to learn life’s lessons. By the time we learn them, we are already old. At least that is true for me.
December is a month where I and my staff have little time for our families. We are busy around the clock working our craft to create gifts for others. Many people don’t understand how labor intensive this work really is. And how dependent it is on equipment that, regardless of how well taken care of, is as old or older than the stuff they play. It is a workplace in constant motion, punctuated with crises large and small- a computer crashes, a machine jams up, a belt wears out. And then there are the folks, nice though they may be, who come in at the last minute with orders, big and small, pleading for something to put under the tree. And sometimes thinking it is as easy as pushing a button.
Okay, Shakespeare I am not. But these days, this is the most commonly asked question by customers. And the answer is not as complicated as it may seem.
We won’t be competing on the British Baking Show, but we at Familyography do have a particular skill at baking— we bake tapes! Yes, tapes. Videotapes, to be precise. Audio reels too. You see, back in the day when videotape was the new tech, various companies experimented with how to manufacture their tapes. And some types of tape became “sticky” over time, because the glue used to adhere the magnetic overlay to the vinyl film would absorb water, and the water would rejuvenate the stickiness of the glue. This caused all sorts of problems. Sometimes the tape would break. More often, the stickiness would put such a stress on the videotape player that the VCR itself would cause it to jam up. We have found that humidity can make many different kinds of tapes play poorly, for the earliest Umatic tapes to the last of the tape technology -miniDV tapes. So when we run into problems with videotapes, we will literally bake them for a few hours in a dehydrating oven. Then voila! Out of the oven, into the tape player and your memories are safely restored. We should win some kind of prize for that, shouldn’t we? And if you are shopping around, ask our competitors, “Do you bake tapes?”
At Familyography, we will do our best to restore old film that has seen better days. But a while back, we had a customer come in with the most difficult challenge in my experience. Two reels of 16mm film were so degraded that they smelled the high heaven of vinegar, the result of chemical degradation that causes the film to warp and buckle. Worse still. the inner 4/5 of the film was actually finished its chemical decomposition and had dried out and was one solid block of cellophane, the film having all fused together.There is a specific (and expensive) liquid chemical that can restore the pliability of old film that is starting to deteriorate, but we have never used it on film in such bad condition. Still, making not promises, we gave it a try. We immersed the damaged film in a vat of this chemical, and then let it sit sealed up for a couple months. Yesterday. when we opened the vat and took out the film, I wasn’t sure how good the resulted would be. But we cleaned it up, patted it dry, put the film on a film-editing reel, and slowly - very slowly - tried to unwind the film. The film resisted being pulled away from the reel, and first I thought it was going to fall apart. But then the miracle happened. It started to unwind, and as it unwound, I could tell that it was in beautiful condition. Why is this important to you? Because what we learn in accepting the difficult orders also makes us better and digitizing the less difficult orders. This is true for any kind of media we handle— slides, negatives, film or videotape. We have a trained, critical eye. and we want to give you the best results possible. Its our core value, plain and simple. And in every case, that commitment ensures your satisfaction, guaranteed.
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