You can't buy a ticket for these profoundly stirring home movies, rescued from dusty attics, damp basements, and the trash. To see them, you have to be a member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), a uniquely well-preserved army of film restorers wrapping up their 20th annual convention here today.
For the last five days, 650 AMIA members, alongside their counterparts from the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA), have watched movies, listened to recordings, shared best practices. Much of the advice is just as useful for family archives as for the Library of Congress.
Panels dealt with the myriad ways of preserving film in the digital realm, the real-life challenges of refreshing and digitizing 3,500 hours of The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson, and how technicians are transferring 35 years of quarter-inch analog tapes for Fresh Air With Terry Gross to computer files.
"We're on the forefront of technology that trickles down to the home user," explains Tom Regal, director of audio preservation and restoration for Universal Pictures. "Everything we learn here, we pass on."
Don't think that if you've transferred Grandma Sonia's photo albums or Uncle Howard's home movies onto digital files that you've preserved them, says Katie Trainor, head of the Museum of Modern Art archives, a repository of 26,000 films in Hamlin, Pa., just east of Scranton.
"Because of the quick obsolescence of equipment, who knows if new technology will be able to 'play' an old movie in five to 10 years?" Trainor says.
"The physical DVD or CD is not a stable, long-term media for preservation," says Grover Crisp, senior vice president of asset management for Sony Pictures. "One of the few ways to make sure you have files for the future is to constantly access them, make sure they work, and migrate them to newer and, hopefully, better media."
