The movie industry’s most prestigious honor, The Oscar !  Award-winning films are well preserve in the STiL Casing Archival Containers. (more)

About The Academy Film Archive

Dedicated to the preservation, restoration, documentation, exhibition and study of motion pictures, the Academy Film Archive is home to one of the most diverse and extensive motion picture collections in the world, including the personal collections of such filmmakers as Alfred Hitchcock, Cecil B. DeMille, George Stevens, Fred Zinnemann, Sam Peckinpah and Jim Jarmusch.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences was founded in 1927 and began acquiring film material in 1929. The Academy Film Archive, established in 1991, holds all of the Academy Award-winning films in the Best Picture category, all the Oscar-winning documentaries and many Oscar-nominated films in all categories. ( more )

I came across this article today and wanted to share with you. It’s amazing how long Kodak has been a pioneer in our industry!

With a simple slogan of “you press the button, we do the rest,” the fabled Kodak company has given Americans memories to hold onto for 132 years.

whutchinson@nydailynews.com

Astronaut Neil Armstrong took pictures of the moon with a Kodak camera in 1969, and 80 movies that won Best Picture Oscars were shot with K
But now the “Kodak Moments” seem to have run out after the upstate Rochester company founded by George Eastman announced Wednesday it has filed for bankruptcy protection.odak film. Kodak 35 mm. film even inspired Paul Simon to pen the hit song “Kodachrome.”

With more than 7,000 jobs at stake, Kodak executives are hoping to pull out of a $6.8 billion hole. In recent years, the company has focused on home photo printers and commercial inkjet printers that are finally on the verge of turning a profit.

If video killed the radio star, then digital cameras and cell phones are responsible or the possible demise of a company that turned average Joe Shmos into photographers by introducing the Brownie and Instamatic cameras.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/132-years-making-memories-kodak-t-picture-a-pofitable-future-article-1.1008945#ixzz1k17lrGfW

By Bill Hutchinson / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

“Kodak played a role in pretty much everyone’s life in the 20th century because it was the company we entrusted our most treasured possession to — our memories,” Robert Burley, a photography professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, told The Associated Press.

It’s always a pleasure doing business with our customers and it’s with great honor that we welcome new ones to our happy family!

• Archives of Manitoba - www.gov.mb.ca -  Provincial archives are dedicated to the acquisition, preservation, publication and public exhibition of documents, parchments, manuscripts, records, books, maps, plans, photographs, magnetic tapes, or other materials, regardless of physical form, the preservation of which is in the public interest.
• ARTEX Fine Art Services - www.Artexfas.com - ARTEX is a fine art storage, transportation, packing and handling company primarily serving museums, galleries, auction houses and private collectors.
• LDS Church History Library- http://lds.org/churchhistory/library - The collections of the Church History Library and Archives contain materials chronicling the history of the Church from its beginning in 1830 to the present day.
• Living Archives - Pennebaker Hegedus Films - www.PHFilms.com - D A PENNEBAKER and CHRIS HEGEDUS form one of the most respected and unique teams of documentary filmmakers working today. Known for their unintrusive, cinema verite style of filmmaking, they follow their subjects using handheld cameras and available light with minimal interruption. The result is a candid portrait of a real-life drama in which the characters determine the action.
• Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee - www.cjccc.ca - They collect and preserve documentation on all aspects of the Jewish presence in Quebec and Canada.
• Sonuma S.A.- http://blog.sonuma.be/ - The Sonuma preserves, digitizes and enhances the audiovisual archives of the RTBF. A mission that begain in spring 2009.

Thank you for the confidence you place in our products and welcome you among the privileged that chose the best available product in the archival field!

This week I thought it would be nice to resume a few blogs and/or forums which I thought were quite interesting in our field:

http://archivesblogs.com/category/eng (regroups a various number of blog sites)

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/hfacollections/ - Harvard Film Archives

http://www.homemovieday.com/news/ - Home Movie Day

http://blogs.ina.fr/ - I.N.A. (Insititut National de l’Audiovisuel)

http://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/ - Indiana University

http://rihs.wordpress.com/ - Rhode Island Historical Society

http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/ - UCLA

http://centerhistorypsychology.wordpress.com/ - University of Akron

http://blog.sonuma.be/ - SONUMA

http://clc.yale.edu/blog/ - Yale University Archives

http://www.amiaforums.org/ - The AMIA (Association of Moving Image Archivists) Forum

http://blogs.archives.gov/online-public-access/ - The NARA (National Archives and Records Administration)

http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/ - Library of Congress

http://www.archives-records-artefacts.com/ - University of Dundee

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ - The BBC

http://www.archives.gov/social-media/blogs.html - Resumé of all the blog available for the US National Archives

http://blog.aaa.si.edu/ - Archives of American Art

http://si-siris.blogspot.com/ - Smithsonian Institution

http://www.blogut.ca/ - University of Toronto

http://www.genealogyblog.com/ - Ancestry

http://www.lib.uwo.ca/blogs/digitalscholarly/ - Regrouping of Western Ontario blogs

And what to say about the list serves in which I am already a member, these help you keep up to date on what is going on. But mostly, answers many questions.. so many knowledgeable people on these!

http://www.amianet.org/participate/listserv.php

http://www.arsc-audio.org/arsclist.html

http://www2.archivists.org/listservs

We are happy to announce the arrival of a new distributor of our products; Gaylord Bros.!

Founded in 1896 by two brothers; Willis and Henry, since then all executives have worked hard to support people who are experts in their field. Meeting experts’ needs in their field, innovating already existent products, all dedicated to their customers.

They now carry our audio tape boxes as well as our Media & Photo Storage Box.

Feel free to contact them:
www.gaylord.com
PO Box 4901, Syracuse NY 13221-4901

To see our products online:http://www.gaylord.com/adblock.asp?abid=17841&search_by=desc&search_for=stil&mpc=WW&catalog=&target=

Their paper catalogue will be issued in December.  We will keep you posted in the future with the news of when they will start supplying the rest of our line of products.

We would like to welcome Gaylord Bros, “Your Trusted Source” within the STiL family!

The National Film Preservation Foundation is a  non-profit organization created by the U.S. Congress to help save America’s film heritage. They support activities nationwide that preserve American films and improve film access for study, education, and exhibition.

The process of the Board began in 1992, when Congress asked the Librarian of Congress to assess the state of film preservation. The report issued the next year under the direction of National Film Preservation Board, alerted Congress that motion pictures were disintegrating faster than archives could save them! The films most at risk were documentaries, silent-era films, newsreels, historically significant home movies, avant-garde works, industrials, and independent films-not the Hollywood sound features that had become synonymous with American film.  After 4 years of this process and research the NFPF was founded in 1996.

On their web site:  http://www.filmpreservation.org/preservation-basics/why-preserve-film

You can find helpful documents about preservation Basics:

• Nitrate Degradation
• Color Dye Fading
• Vinegar Syndrome
• Good Storage Practice

We have had many new clients in the past that were referred to us while reading the film-preservation-guide, since they knew that to be able to preserve for long-time storage they only needed to do this process once with the best cans that exist.. STiL polypropylene  film containers, the ones that have the top quality vented design!  This document is really good read and gives you all the information you need.

Technicolor is a color motion picture process invented in 1916 and improved over several decades.  It was the second major process, after Britain’s Kinemacolor, and the most widely used color process in Hollywood from 1922 to 1952. Technicolor became known and celebrated for its saturated levels of color, and was used most commonly for filming musicals, costume pictures, and animated films.

Technicolor’s Canadian operations provide post-production services for film projects, television, sound and software in North America. Technicolor not only offers its services to local and foreign productions produced in Canada. In fact, the Canadian operations of the company provide audiovisual services to a wide range of international clients. Low operating costs, an educated workforce and government incentives offered competitiveness to have such a facility in Quebec.

Technicolor Creative Services is totally owned by Thompson, a French company that offers products and services to the media and entertainment market. Thompson is a vertically integrated media, one of its subsidiaries, Grass Valley Group, is a factory of production equipment and studio used by Technicolor.

Technicolor is separated into several divisions according to the type of services they offer. Like any other production activity, the cinema and television can transcend national boundaries. The structure of Technicolor shows the various components of the process of film production in Canada. Technicolor services are separated into four categories and are distributed in two locations in Quebec, seven in the rest of Canada, three in Mexico, eleven in the United States and seventeen outside North America.

Technicolor’s facility in Montreal offers a wide range of service distributions while Mirabel specialized in the production of film copies used by theatres or for post-production.

Increasingly, the films we see in movie theatres are in electronic form. The good old 35 mm film or 70 mm is constantly losing ground for the past couple of years. This time the axe fell on the Technicolor facility in Mirabel. They produced copies of films for movie theatres. The reproduction of films in film in North America will be made by Deluxe now and Technicolor will only by distributing.

Technicolor has been one of our clients for almost a decade now; our hearts goes out to the 178 employees who are unemployed today, all top notch specialists in their field. Good luck!

When I was about twelve I had this old radio that crackled and made funny noises but it followed me everywhere I went. I remember hearing one day “I keep a close watch on this heart of mine, I keep my eyes wide open all the time..”  I fell in love! Right after I heard “Your cheatin’ heart will make you weep you’ll cry and cry and try to sleep…”  That was it! I then became a major country music fan. So what can I say.. I always have a little fondness when I sell film cans to the The Country Music Hall of Fame® and Museum.

This weeks post is about one of our loyal customers, just a brief description of who they are, for more information I strongly recommend you visit their website: http://countrymusichalloffame.org/

They are operated by the non-profit, educational Country Music Foundation (CMF). The mission of the Country Music Hall of Fame^® and Museum is to identify and preserve the evolving history and traditions of country music and to educate its audiences. Functioning as a local history museum and as an international arts organization, the Country Music Hall of Fame^® and Museum serves visiting and non-visiting audiences including fans, students, scholars, members of the music industry.

It’s in 1961 that the Country Music Association created the Country Music Hall of Hame, the first inductees were Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams & Fred Rose. So many throughout the years, just to name a few: Patsy Cline in 1973, Johnny Cash in 1980, Elvis Presley in 1998, Alabama in 2005 and to finish off in 2011 with Bobby Braddock, Reba McEntire & Jean Shepard.

The Museum is open every day from 9am to 5pm. I do believe I will have to make a visit to Nashville one of these days!

“Country music is still devoted to the lyric and to the telling of stories, which people love and people need. Country music artists took what they heard around them, material that was in the air and that was common currency, and they made something entirely new. This is a museum that preserves their memory so that they can continue to inspire creators in the future. It’s also a museum that honors the people who their music was made for. Those people are all of us, people who’ve ever been lost or confused or sad or felt excluded. This museum helps to preserve these tributes to our condition.”

- Garrison Keillor

Thank you for the confidence you place in STiL products!

We came across this press release this week and are happy to share this news of one of our loyal customers; Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroep (VRT).

Belgian Broadcaster Will Deploy New Managed Digital Archive of Content on Some 150,000 CDs

VIENNA, Austria - May 30, 2011 — NOA Audio Solutions, provider of the world’s most functional and effective audio archiving systems, today announced that the Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroep (VRT), the major Flemish-language broadcaster in Belgium, will base its new digital music archive on NOA mediaARC.  The installation — which includes mediARC with 10 clients, associated software including mediARC Web and MediaButler transcoding, as well as several NOA IngestLine CD-Lector migration devices - will be complete later this year.

“We were really impressed with the comprehensiveness of the NOA bid and with the technology they can provide,” said Tom Caljon, VRT project manager. “NOA’s unique knowledge of archiving and search best practices will help make it possible for VRT users to find what they are looking for in our database for years to come — even with millions of entries to choose from.”

VRT also cited NOA’s commitment to making specific features developed for VRT available as part of its off-the-shelf mediARC and IngestLine products, thus ensuring continued availability, support, and upgrades so the broadcaster can be confident its technology stays up to date. Along with superior cost-effectiveness, that was a crucial advantage VRT identified in NOA over its competition.

NOA’s flagship mediARC system combines precisely targeted metadata association and a powerful workflow solution to enable successful storage, distribution, and repurposing — including transcoding - of media content. The NOA CD-Lector is a high-volume, semi-automated system that extracts audio from CDs into digital audio objects, delivering optimal results even when the original is heavily damaged. During the ingest process, CD-Lector performs both algorithmic analysis and advanced metadata retrieval.

Click here to know more about the VRT!

A little while back, Albert Steg approached us to see our interest in sponsoring the Center for Home Movies and we were happy to accept!

The mission of the Center for Home Movies (CHM) is to collect, preserve, provide access to, and promote understanding of home movies and amateur motion pictures.
The activities of CHM include, but are not limited to the following:

• Continuing administration of International Home Movie Day, an annual event dedicated to emphasizing the historical and cultural value of home movies and education the public about moving image preservation
• Contributing to a strong community through efforts with local, cultural, historical, and educational institutions
• Forging partnerships with institutions and individuals worldwide
• Collecting home movies and related materials of national and international significance
• Promoting ongoing documentation of people and cultures through moving images
• Encouraging the use of home movies in multidisciplinary research, study, and publications
• Deepening our understanding of people and culture through exhibitions, programs and other activities

You can take a peek at their annual report by clicking on this link!

What is Home Movie Day?  A celebration of amateur films and filmmaking held annually at many local venues worldwide. Home Movie Day events provide the opportunity for individuals and families to see and share their own home movies with an audience of their community, and to see their neighbors’ in turn. It’s a chance to discover why to care about these films and to learn how best to care for them.

The board directors of CHM are Skip Elsheimer, Chad Hunter, Albert Steg, Dwight Swanson, Katie Trainor, Andy Uhrich & Molly Wheeler.

Thanks for letting us be a part of this!