Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies

I suppose there's a component of citizen journalism and historical preservation in my thinking, too. This work isn't just for families, but also serves to document the history of a community, too.

I would jump at the chance to do work in this space full-time. What little I have done, helping friends and with my own family, was fun and rewarding. I've never been able to figure out how to finance it.

The lab described in the article and others like it handle the digitization part, but there's still the the "forever problem" of kicking data down the road onto new storage technologies / services, too. The digitizing is the easier problem. Once the material is digitized I feel like it's in a lot more peril for catastrophic loss.

I think something like "digital cemeteries / memory gardens", financed by endowments that allow them to continue to operate in perpetuity, should be "a thing". I haven't thought deeply about how to make it work, but the "shallow" thinking I've done says it's financially unsustainable.

I lean toward not-for-profit because I'd like to provide the services for as close to free to the clients as possible. I think preserving family memories and records should be accessible to everyone-- not just those with significant financial means.

While I think what libraries do with these labs is laudable, I worry that the self-service aspect raises the bar too high for some people. I think having a service component, at a reasonable price, to do the digitizing and to work to preserve the material in perpetuity would be a great thing.

A quick python script around dvcam lets me drop a tape in and type in the label on the tape, and it rewinds, captures the raw tape, transcodes it with ffmpeg, and adds it to a jellyfin library for family to view.

I also have a Sony DHR-1000 DVCAM/MiniDV deck I've been using for all the minidv tapes, but suddenly it started ejecting tapes with an error whenever I insert one. Does anyone know any good communities online that might be able to help me get the deck working again? I'm hoping it's just something that needs adjusting or cleaning, since it worked fine until now (though it is probably close to 30 years old now).

A very useful on is workshops - older folks are often the keepers of the family archive and aren't comfortable using technology at all, so teaching them not just how to use the equipment, but also safe-keep the digital product (backups, etc) is important. Additionally teaching concepts like infinite free reproduction is helpful because many older folks I've talked to stress about how to divvy up the archive among the children/grandchildren/etc, and are delighted at the idea of "everyone gets all of it", and are also delighted at the idea of "make a family archive that includes a more extended group of people and their archive combined".

Other cool things we've explored and/or are planning to explore:

* making collages and memes and digital scrapbooks for the family as a way of telling the family history/story, doubly cool because you don't have to sacrifice the only copy of a picture to do so. People feel liberated to do some really interesting things.

* having digitization be a community process by hosting regular memory-lab nights. Digitizing everything is a daunting task sometimes. There may be a lot of material. There may be a lot of context that one wants to capture with the material (labeling photos, explaining the photo, etc - I've heard some great stories from the old-timers as we digitize their photos). Not all memories are good ones... sometimes someone will get to a photo and it brings up bad memories. One woman was very glad we were there when we got to a section of her photos of her child who had died and we were able to give her a hug and let her cry and talk about it, and help her work through a difficult thing while preserving the memories.

* I've often heard tech people say "sometimes its hard to do skilled volunteer work with my tech skills...", particularly in a way that is also social and community-building. Helping in these sorts of community digitization processes is a nice way to use your skills and also bond with community members.

Possibly a 3D printed rig with a semi-transparent mirror + some crowdsourcing and this could really work.

It's in my backlog.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CB6BW6X4

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ClXrffkN3M

If you have an AVR with composite or s-video in and HDMI out that could also work in place of the converter. In either case you'll downscale the footage back to 640x480 before encoding.

You have to monitor the process start to finish if the tapes are bad, there's nothing around that.

For MiniDV and Digital8 you should straight up get a lossless copy using a cheap Firewire card.

SSDs as far as I know are known to fail when left unused, optic media degrades and readers become less common, cloud storage can be hit by account issues if you end up as a false positive for misbehavior.

Is there any "fire and forget" way of storing memories? Ideally something that can be updated regularly without much hassle.

I would be interested to know what capture hardware they're using. As someone who took on this project for my own family's videos, I ended up using the Canopus ADVC-110, which captures composite (or S-Video) NTSC (plus stereo audio) and generates DV, which you can then capture over FireWire.

It worked well for me since it didn't require any non-built-in drivers on macOS (though I hear Tahoe drops FireWire support entirely -- boo), and it therefore was easily interoperable with FFmpeg, VLC, and custom AVFoundation code I wrote.

Unfortunately, I don't think the ADVC-110 is made anymore, and my experiments with various USB Video Class devices (which would be similarly interoperable), mostly based on MacroSilicon chips like the MS210x, were utter failures in terms of quality.