Media A&D Service Info

The Prelude

So here’s the thing about media ownership and consumption – it takes on many forms. It’s what you read & watch, what you listen to, and even what you play (let’s ignore this area here) – we named basically half of the human senses we experience.
Given these experiences, media in the forms of pictures, music, and videos, as well as written works make up a big part of our lives, chiefly in documenting our journeys though it and entertaining ourselves with…
Thus, there is great importance placed on holding onto what we value and what we find fun with these excepts of culture, bringing us a range of emotions among them laughter, sadness, and even confusion. Whether informational or merely a diversion from the mundane day to day routines, media is part of the human soul; so few live without. Yet, there comes challenges in maintaining media over time quantitatively as is qualitatively by those of us caring for the extra details. Here’s where we introduce digitizing to you. But first, read what we have to say on the media forms you and I most definitely know and own and what questions get raised that may lead you to wanting to work with us in digitizing your media.

Photos & Film

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Photography can be traced back to the nineteenth century. The earliest efforts to produce an image were done on metal plates before celluloid film and photo paper became the standard in printing whatever a camera or copying process will capture / scan of someone, something, somewhere.
The brilliant mechanisms of a camera (thanks to its reflective lenses and light manipulation) have made their everlasting mark on the world in over the past century, where many a person has visually documented an era of the world they lived in, through all the senses and emotions.
Countless formats of photos & film have emerged, and to varying degrees are still used (photo prints, film negatives, reverse film (slides)). But as time passes, many of these old ways we capture photos have been deemed obsolete in the mainstream and esoteric (practiced by a few devotees). Of course, there are decades worth of photo albums and negatives to have come out between the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Not that physical photos aren’t still being produced today, despite past the historic peak…
Challenges however continue (as had been prior) in how we handle photography, now in digital form, despite it being easy more than ever to produce images on the spot and in so many ways (by DSLR or by smartphone). The demand is higher than ever before in your extended family and friends requesting to see your galleries or a cool memory visually resurface on social media, with older folks and groups in particular being challenged to share memories (cue tagging!) coming from an era when pictures, maybe some not even in color, can be still held by hand. What do you do should you neither have the time nor the means to meet that playful demand?

Home & On-The-Go Videos

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The roots of film and videography can be traced back to photography itself – the recording of moving pictures (as footage), or frame by frame of a still object (in a film roll) in different but successive positions, thereby yielding a sequence of action. When played back, this is the magic of movie making. The earliest of these efforts began in the late nineteenth century.
Soon after, the movie industry was born (cinema) and it would take some decades before the consumer market for home movies to develop. In any case, if the words or acronyms Betamax, VHS, Laserdisc, DVD, and BluRay (and their many derivates and clones) don’t ring a bell to you (at least one of these) then we must not be living on the same planet.
Whether we watched them for fiction or for realism, viewing some kind of video content at home at least has been unavoidable since the advent of TV (introduced in the late 1920s but popular beginning in the late 1940s), with the means in creating them ourselves popular since bulky consumer made camcorders were introduced to the masses in the 1980s. Millions of people have had their lives recorded on cameras of variable simplicity and complexity, and millions more have owned a piece of broadcast media.
Being the case that some footage is common and some are rare plus never re-broadcasted, in the face of today’s streaming platforms, smaller shareable drives, and not a lot of space for some of us to hold on to these filmed adventures, many close to our hearts, what is the approach to take in bringing this media to the future? If the value is in the nostalgic enjoyment and /or education, the worry of neglect may be motivation to preserve some good old video. Another problem… if you have quite a bit of digital footage on your phones, tablets, and other portables, where does one start to look for a specific memory among many sometimes unnamed and undated video files? Sounds like a burden? It may look like one.

Spoken Audio & Music

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Mainstream listening habits of music and spoken dialogue as we know it began with the invention of the phonograph in the late nineteenth century. In the decades since, advancements in technology have both improved and expanded on the methods of how we consume audio with respect to convenience and quality.
No matter how you would like to play your music or comedy albums (or even listen to your own recordings as a kid or professionally as in adult in radio or on stage), the various physical formats over the last few generations have lost ground to digital streaming… not to say that vinyl and CDs are totally extinct, especially with the former making a comeback in recent years and newer material being released by today’s artists on this format.
Still, if you have held on to your parents’ delicate record collection or have a rare release on audio cassette that has never been re-issued on a newer format, what should you do with these era-defining sound relics of the past (other than enjoying the tunes) as time passes, the world continuing to evolve culturally and technologically with respect to how we interact with an artist’s expressive audio works?
Unlike video, audio takes up considerably less storage on shareable media formats (even if some of the equipment that plays them are bulky), that it’s all too common for folks to have thousands of songs in their physical collection, through singles, albums and compilations. Still, when talking about shear amount, it can be a lot to manage.

Documents & Application Files

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It is in human nature to record anything first on paper. We’ve been doing this for thousands of years from tablets (no not the digital ones, the clay kind) to papyrus to eventually modern paper. We have evolved too in how words and sentences are recorded: engraving, inscribing, painting, stenciling, writing, typing…
Much of these textual (and artistic, inclusive of photo) works have been produced as files, historically physical and within the last few decades, digital (on a computer). Both through reproduction (older records) and production (newly created records and even software), files significantly serve to guide us in our work and personal livelihoods. Applications more so provide tools to help us further reach our goals, allowing us to solve problems, produce products, and express ourselves.
And since the invention of the printing press, the world has been teeming with knowledge and leisurely escape in books, previously painstakingly handwritten for centuries. Today each complete book is a file remarkably, but pages on their own can be files as well. Being reminded of all this is good and all but with the constant connection to the internet and countless platforms that remind an average adult of (skimmed through / missed / ignored) emails, messages, spreadsheets, invoices, doctor’s lab results, and so much more, do we really have the patience in absorbing all this information at any given moment efficiently?
Are we in possession of numerous program files on our many computers, small and large that go by any name today, that we are destined to forget what we paid for and what we still are paying? Would there be an increase in productivity should one have all their files organized systematically? Or is this a time waster and an inevitable part of the systems in place we follow between home, work (and / or school)?
Read everything? If not, please be sure to do so. Or at least some. Here’s our verdict.
Person who is reading this: Do you have any home movies, family photos, old recordings, or important papers that you worry about one day will go missing, degrade completely, or simply will be forgotten? Do you find yourself having issues storing and managing the many media items you have and fear that a fire or earthquake will destroy your valuables?
Are any of these problems relatable? Here’s the all encompassing solution: digitize. As bonus, archive. And we’ll even mention extraction.
Digitizing old media is the way to go about handling your media needs moving forward in the twenty-first century. We carefully utilize several and specialized processes to copy any media in any of the previously described forms.
Digitizing media does not necessarily mean replacing the media, though it can. You may choose to use digitization to create a digital library that you may share through cloud services, online platforms and /or removable storage drives. Or backup your libraries in an archive (which is basically what happens when you do digitize). Extraction comes in where media is spread across several devices (mainly digitally and can be accessed by us easily) or is otherwise synonymous with digitizing unless doing any capturing in real time. The preference rests on where to start, how much to do and when…. Whatever the purpose is, we will help you preserve and make sure your personal and professional media is presentable to the highest degree.
We really would love to help! Please visit the individual media pages to educate yourself on what media formats we currently digitize / archive. Yes, there are types of media but there are formats too (i.e. an audio cassette is a format of music which is a type of media that exists for consumption). Or simply, scroll to our pricing section for a quick overview of what we do.

The Pricing

Information to come
[Note 1]:
Beyond digitizing old media, we may be able to help with some restoration and creation as an added service. Examples include combining PDFs, resizing photos, audio clean up, and video editing. Please checkout pages referring to graphic design, audio & video work, and photography for more details.
Organizing services are generally part of the digital archiving process and an associated spreadsheet will be supplied to you during the project. Efforts are neat, dedicated, and meticulous so to ensure that dozens of media formats are readily accessed in an universal one and via a universal source.
We are also able to consult and bring forth knowledge, tips and recommendations on how to use your archived media (i.e. tagging on social platforms, which is your responsibility).
[Note 2]:
The elephant in the room that we haven’t discussed concerns copyrighted materials in all media forms. Primarily, we service anything that was created and owned privately by the possessor of the media (personal photos, personal videos, personal records, personal documents). “Personal” is the keyword.
Concerning copyrighted materials, such as the media you have had to purchase, it is illegal to distribute copies of such if copied in the first place. The law is technically vague on digitizing and extracting methods and the practice of it so as long you do not distribute said media.
By law, a purchase of media means that you have the ownership right to play it / consume it but not the right to own outright (as in the ownership privilege to profit on copies). Therefore, a written legal agreement (MNDA) will be enforced between us should you be interested in having this kind of media digitized where you and only you can access your purchased (archived) library of copyrighted works.