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!

To start of the New Year, I thought you might be interested in knowing a bit on how we manufacture our products. We use what is called “injection molding”.

Injection molding is a manufacturing process for producing parts from plastic materials. Material is fed into a heated barrel, mixed, and forced into a mold cavity where it cools and hardens to the configuration of the mold cavity.

The first man-made plastic was invented in Britain in 1851 by Alexander Parkes, calling the material he produced “Parkesine” Derived from cellulose, Parkesine could be heated, molded, and retain its shape when cooled. It was, however, expensive to produce, prone to cracking, and highly flammable. In 1868, American inventor John Wesley Hyatt developed a plastic material he named Celluloid, improving on Parkes’ invention so that it could be processed into finished form. Together with his brother Isaiah, Hyatt patented the first injection molding machine, this machine was relatively simple compared to machines in use today.  The industry expanded rapidly in the 1940s because World War II created a huge demand for inexpensive, mass-produced products. In 1946, American inventor James Watson Hendry built the first screw injection machine, which allowed much more precise control over the speed of injection and the quality of articles produced.  In the 1970s, Hendry went on to develop the first gas-assisted injection molding process, which permitted the production of complex, hollow articles that cooled quickly.

Today in 2011, the possibilites are unlimited! We only use inert polypropylene for all our products.

Our multidisciplinary team in development of product and in marketing is strong of more than ten years of experience in the conception of products intended for the industries of film and audio. It will assure the realization of your project, whether it is the modification of one of our products or the creation and the development of a new one. Our integrated solutions allow the manufacturing, the deployment, the delivery and the strategy of supply of your product thanks to an established distribution network worldwide.

We are happy to welcome a new customer at STiL Casing Solution!

HBO, a standard abbreviation for its full legal name Home Box Office is owned by Time Warner. In addition to its U.S. subscriber base, HBO also broadcasts in over 150 countries worldwide.

A bit of history about the company: In 1965 Charles Dolan, who had already done pioneering work in the commercial use of cables, won a franchise to build a cable system in Lower Manhattan, New York. The new system, which Dolan called “Sterling Manhattan Cable”, became the first urban underground cable system in the United States of America. Rather than stringing cable on telephone poles or using microwave antennas to receive the signals, Sterling laid underground cable beneath the streets of Manhattan because the multitude of tall buildings blocked television signals. In the same year Time Life, Inc. purchased 20 percent of Dolan’s company.

In 1973 Time Inc. bought out HBO. When Time merged with Warner Communications in 1989, HBO became part of Time Warner, which as of 2009 continues as its parent company.

On September 30, 1975, HBO became the first TV network to continuously deliver signals via satellite. The network broadcast only nine hours a day for its first nine years on air, from 3PM to midnight ET. In September 1981, HBO began broadcasting a 24-hour schedule on weekends, until midnight ET on Sunday nights. On December 28, 1981, HBO expanded its programming schedule to 24 hours a day, seven days per week.

In 1991, HBO became one of the first premium services to offer multiplexing to cable customers.  In 1993 HBO became the world’s first digitally transmitted television service. HBO.com, subsequently well-known for its online web shows, launched in 1995. In 1999, HBO became the first national cable-TV network to broadcast a high-definition version of its channel. In July 2001, HBO launched the first premium subscription video-on-demand enhancement in the United States of America, called HBO on Demand, to Time Warner Cable subscribers in Columbia, South Carolina.

Thank you HBO for the confidence you have placed  in our products!

I’m a winner, I’m a sinner, do you want my autograph? I’m a loser, what a joker, I’m playing jokes upon you while there’s nothing better to do!

Does this ring a bell?

Breakfast in America (Original recording remastered)

Digitally remastered and expanded deluxe two CD edition including a bonus CD containing 12 unreleased live tracks. Their sixth album, Supertramp’s most popular and successful work, Breakfast in America was released in March 1979, and reached #3 in the UK and #1 in the United States where it stayed on top for six weeks. It yielded the hit singles ‘The Logical Song’, ‘Take The Long Way Home’, ‘Breakfast In America’ and ‘Goodbye Stranger’. The second disc, Breakfast Around The World, contains 12 previously unreleased live recordings from Miami, London and Paris between October and December 1979. Mostly drawn from Breakfast In America, it also includes earlier stage favorites ‘Rudy’, ‘Give A Little Bit’ and ‘Even In The Quietest Moments’.

Do you know?  

Cups ‘n Strings are the experts in digitizing,

restoration and preservation of audio recordings in many different and varying formats. We boast an extensive range of equipment with the capacity to transfer just about every tape recorded, even those recorded in the most obscure formats. With our vintage playback equipment paired to state-of-the-art digital gear, you can be assured of professional quality standards. Be it a single master tape or a whole catalog

http://www.cupsnstrings.com/

Know where I’m getting at? Yes? We have the honor that one of our clients “Cups ‘n Strings” has digitally remastered Breakfast in America. Congratulations to Bruce Maddocks and all his team!

We also have the privilege of knowing that the original was put into Supertramp’s hands in on of our STiL CD/DVD Case! 

 Thanks for making us part of this.

I would like to give you only a little information about our multifunctional website.

Fast and easy-to-use!
Have you had the chance to try out our on-line tool “COST ASSESSMENT“?
You can get pricing directly on line on all our products and even add labels, hubs, more cans, etc.. whatever you are looking for and send us the quote afterwards so we will confirm the shipping fees and lead time.
For FILM / AUDIO / MEDIA: http://www.stilcasing.com/price_estimator/analog
For CD/DVD: http://www.stilcasing.com/price_estimator/digital

And if you wish to go ahead with ordering, our ORDER TOOL is now functional! The same steps as the COST ASSESSMENT but you can send us the order online or print it out and fax it to us, whichever you prefer. We then send you the order acknowledgement with the shipping fees included as well as the scheduled delivery date.
For FILM / AUDIO / MEDIA: http://www.stilcasing.com/order/analog
For CD/DVD: http://www.stilcasing.com/order/digital

Also! We do accept credit cards for payment; VISA, MasterCard or American Express.

Give us a call for more information!

The Carpenter Center is the home of the Harvard Film Archive

HFA was founded in 1979 by Robert Gardner and his colleagues in Harvard’s Department of Visual and Environmental. It first opened on March 16, 1979 with a screening of the silent film Lady Windermere’s Fan by Ernst Lubitsch.

 The Harvard Film Archive (HFA) is a film archive devoted to cinema located in Cambridge, Massachusettes. With a collection of over 9000 films and related documents, and regularly screens films in its 210 seat theater. It also  has a film conservation center near Central Square, Cambridge.

 The archive’s first curator was Vlada K. Petric, who expanded the collection and established the year-round regular screenings. He retired in 1995 and in 1999 Bruce Jenkins assumed the post. In January 2005, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences dean William C. Kirby announced that the archive would be absorbed by the Harvard College Library and managed by the Library of Fine Arts. This caused some concern within the Harvard community about the future of the archive and its programming. Jenkins resigned soon after the announcement.

In September 2006 film scholar Haden Guest became the new director of the archive. He has calmed fears that the archives’ absorption in the Library would affect its public film screenings.

 It is part of the archive’s mission to screen films, however, since film is perishable, regular showings take their toll on the film stock itself. Therefore, conserving and preserving the collection’s prints has also become an important focus.
At STiL Casing Solution, we are honored to count HFA as one of our loyal customers. Thank you for the confidence you place in our products and letting us participate in preserving your collection!