Your personal photos, films, videos and audio recordings are the details of your life’s special moments. Although you haven’t watched the movies and slides in years, unfortunately, heat, humidity and improper storage cause videotapes and slide films to deteriorate, decaying the magnetic particles that represent your precious family memories on video tapes, or due to fading colours on slides and cine films you can loose all details, where once there.

By converting those old media to digital form, you can effectively stop the deterioration. It also allows you to edit and share with your family and friends.

When you decide to digitize all your family memories you have to follow certain strategies and choose vendors who really are specialist and they know what they are really doing, after all you are digitizing to increase the life of your precious memories, not for loosing them.

I am owner and operator of the Digital Butler, I have a formal education in Photographic and Electronic Imaging Science and before starting Digital Butler in 2005, I worked over 25 years in Professional Studios doing what I do right now.

In next few articles I am going to explain what you have to look when you digitize your family treasures to make sure you are doing right at once.

In digitization process your first goal must be to save your files as uncompressed files, in most vendors out on the market specially when you transfer your VHS or other video you will receive only a DVD or CD but not the original uncompressed file, your guess should be better than mine coming years must be bringing new technologies and new restoration ways therefore for the best archival result you must insist to get uncompressed files on a hard drive and keep them safe for feature.

On my first article I am going to explain what to look for archival AUDIO transfers.

Transferring audio from analog to digital can be done with many equipment varying $50 to $20.000 if you looking archival quality this requires professional high quality equipment, as the quality of the equipment has a direct correlation on the quality of the sound file you will receive from the transfer. For audio preservation, it is important that your originals transferred at least 24 bit/96 kHz uncompressed audio file, e.g., WAV, instead of a compressed MP3 file.

Audio originals specially LP’s are very fragile and it will be difficult to package and send out and hoping to get the vendors location and return without damage during shipment, therefore, I recommend using a local vendor like us and delivering and picking up by yourself, as no one else will appreciate the value of your originals as much as you do. Also don’t worry I now by hart how valuable they are for you, and I will handle and look after them as mine.