Videotape Digitization Visit
Community Curation, Chicago, IL
DESCRIPTION
Bring your favorite home movie memories to have them digitized with Smithsonian staff members. Video Digitization will convert your favorite memories on obsolete, analog video formats into digital video files for easy playback and sharing.
- During each three-hour session we will spend approximately 150 minutes transferring your home videos to digital files. The other 30 minutes of the session will be needed for other supporting tasks.
- Please plan to arrive 15 minutes before your session starts for preparation of your material, and plan to be at the facility for about 30 minutes afterwards for us to complete all of the processing of your digitized materials. When we are finished we will give you a USB memory stick for you to take home with your digitized movies on it.
- To help maximize the number of items we can digitize during your 150 minutes of capture time, organizing your items ahead of time will help increase the number of items that we can digitize! Organize them by priority of what you would like digitized. Video digitization is a real time process! This means that 1 hour of video on your tape will take 1 hour to digitize. There is no way to speed it up! So, if possible, it is best to decide ahead of time what tapes you most want digitized. If need be, we can preview tapes for content at the start of your session, but this will limit the amount of time we will have for digitization.
- IMPORTANTLY, this digitization session will only be to digitize video tape formats — VHS, Betamax, Betacam, MiniDV, Hi8. We will not be able to digitize photographic prints, post cards, calling cards, movie film, audio tapes, etc., but there are other appointments that can do these items.
- We will not be able to digitize more than 150 minutes worth of content in any one session.