Digital Archiving

This past Saturday I attended a class at the Lowell Telecommunications Studio on digital archiving of analog moving images. Analog moving images are things such as video tape and and home movies. Digital moving images are moving images stored in a computer format. The method of transferring home movies was pretty simple: You point the 8 mm projector show the movie on a screen in a darkened room. At the same time, you set up a digital movie camera on a tripod, point it at the screen and record the image from the screen. You can plug the camera directly into a computer and completely bypass any film in the digital camera. The moving digital images take up an enormous amount of space on your computer and while that space is becoming cheaper every day, it is still expensive. There is an inexpensive, imaginative alternative, however, and that's a website called www.archive.org which you should check out very soon. It costs nothing to store your stuff there so long as it's freely available to anyone else. As someone who bought a Sony Betamax back in 1980 and who is in possession of a box of Beta tapes that will soon slide beyond my ability to view them, I'm a big believer in transferring this stuff into a contemporary format and storing it in a way that its accessibility will be guaranteed.