Faded Photographs Archives

March 17, 2021 by David Leave a Comment

The Death of Cine Film

Recently a customer brought in a batch of films and unfortunately a number of them had suffered water damage and some had mould on them which, as you can imagine, has ruined the images. Whilst we were able to get some scanned images from them, the mould had left scars along the edges of some films making the film fade in and out and the water damage had meant most of the emulsion had disappeared from quite a lot of the film we were able to scan.

Having seen the damage here is a short post about the sort of problems you can run into.

No matter how careful you are in taking care of your old cine films, eventually, they will deteriorate. Cine film was not built to last, and the longer you leave your home movies sat in a cupboard or the attic or heaven forbid in a garage or shed, the less likely it will be that it can be saved.

Cine Film Manufacture

Cine film refers to the 8 mm, Super 8 and 16 mm film formats used mostly for home movies. The film is made up of various chemical dyes such as polymer, nitrate conversely acetate, and these are then finally coated in gelatine.

Why Do Cine Films Degrade?

Cine films can degrade over time until eventually becoming unwatchable. Light and sunlight breaks down the chemicals cine film are coated in which causes fading, making the film footage transparent and potentially losing the images for good. Central Heating, Condensation and Damp conditions all take their toll.

Some of the ways that cine film displays damage include:

Vinegar Syndrome

It is a condition that is the result of a chemical reaction that happens with cellulose triacetate film. Films were printed on an acetate base layer; eventually, this base layer degrades when the acetate reacts with moisture. As the acetate decomposes a byproduct is that it gives off free acetic acid. This gives off the smell of vinegar, consequently the name Vinegar Syndrome. Once the reaction commences it quickly spreads throughout the film. It can result in the film becoming crumbly and warped as the base shrinks faster than the remainder of the film. This shrinkage is sufficient to prevent you from saving your footage.

Moisture

Cine film is highly defenceless when it comes to water damage as it can cause mould; cine reels should be removed from a moist environment as soon as possible to minimise the damage.

Cine film can be severely damaged by mould, fungi and mildew. Films stored away in cupboards, attics and garages are places that cause serious and non-repairable damage to the emulsion of cine film. It causes streaks, blisters, spots and running on your memories. Mould typically wastes the image as it gnaws away on the covering of the film.

Ageing

Over time the typical ageing process causes cine film to become brittle and for the pictures to fade away and colours to change. Colours can appear further towards the blue or red hue and as the film becomes more fragile so it can tear and start to deteriorate.

Tips for preserving your films:

No longer project your films with a projector
Keep them dry – 20% to 30% RH
Do not use airtight containers vented reel cases can be used to allow air to pass in and out
Try not to expose the film to UV sunlight
Ensure that your films transferred to DVD or MP4.

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October 25, 2018 by David Leave a Comment

A Life In Words And Pictures

Documenting Family History Artefacts

I recently completed a sad but interesting and rewarding assignment. Sad, as it was what was left of a couple’s life and interesting and rewarding as I worked through the items to piece together these people’s lives and achievements.

I had documents including a 14,000-word Dissertation that was scanned, (OCR) Optically Character Recognised and saved as a PDF. Personal items (Medals and Badges) were recorded on camera and photographs were scanned. As luck would have it, many were identified on the rear of the photographs and so the double-sided scanner came in very useful providing an ‘A’ and ‘B’ image allowing researchers to see where and when the photographs were taken and quite importantly who was in it.

A Life in Words and Pictures

There were other items including the Wedding Album, invitations, order or service and table menu, various awards dinners and running orders, newspaper articles, family correspondence and funeral service cards. Even prompting cards for a speech.

As I worked through the various documents it became apparent just what lovely people they were, how they mattered to their family and community and also the very deep bond between the couple at the centre of the assignment. There were some lovely shots of them together and it was a privilege to work on this box of artefacts and document it so that future generations might be able to see who their relatives were, where they lived, what they got up to and it felt to me, after 2 days work in documenting it all, that I’d almost grown to know this couple.

Parts of the collection are being offered to interested parties including the Scouting movement and a Museum and the rest will remain in the hands of the family archivist. All the scans and documents are being made available to the wider family.

This was a different type of job as I was scanning everything from newspapers, menu cards, orders of service, invitations as well as my more familiar photographs. Many photos were in albums (which requires a different sort of scanning style) and the artefacts were photographed and where possible scanned as well. The Dissertation needed to be scanned page by page which took a lot of time but was worthwhile as it captured an interesting document for future generations.

Many family historians want to make their work available to a wider audience and scanning records and items of interest achieves this. An interesting project to work on and one which I hope will help them and future generations to learn about real people’s lives.

Our work isn’t just about scanning batches of photographs, in cases like this it is about documenting people’s lives and hopefully, by doing this, they and their wider contributions to their community and those around them will not be forgotten.

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October 12, 2018 by David Leave a Comment

Cine Film – Transferring Your Treasured Memories Before It Is Too Late

Cine Film Basics

Cine Film Projector

By Cine Film we normally mean the popular (Standard) 8 mm and Super 8 and less frequently seen 9.5 mm and 16 mm, motion picture film formats used for home movies. I will concentrate on the more popular 8 mm sizes as that is what we see the most of when transferring them to DVD. The film is called 8 mm as it is (approximately) eight millimetres wide. It exists in two main versions — the original standard 8 mm film (also known as standard or regular 8), and Super 8. Although both standard 8 mm and Super 8 are 8 mm wide, Super 8 has a larger image area because of its smaller and more widely spaced perforations (see diagram).

8 mm and Super 8 Comparison

Both are easily transferred to DVD using a frame by frame process that individually scans each frame and then assembles them as an MP4 format film available to play immediately. However, we use a film editing programme to check the scanned film and where necessary correct any colour cast – this is a tint of a particular colour, usually unwanted, which affects the whole, or portion, of a photographic image evenly. It can be caused by the chemical process in development and the fading of pictures over time or exposure to UV light or other extremes – temperature for example – often Cine film ends up in the loft or attic and is subjected to extremes which is why getting it transferred as soon as possible is a must.

Using video editing software allows us to review and correct the speed of the Cine Film. The frame rate can be anywhere between 18 and 24 frames per second. Our scanner produces an MP4 file at 30 frames per second (fps). We, therefore, need to adjust this to make the film playback normally and not as if playing at double speed which it can sometimes look like. Here is a link to our Cine Film Transfer Page.

Example of a photo with a uniformly green colour cast due to differential absorption of light before reaching certain depths at sea.

The same photo with the colour cast corrected

Reasons to transfer from Cine to DVD

The enjoyment of rediscovery – precious memories that have been lost for many years. Transferring Cine Film to DVD can lead to the unearthing of long-forgotten Weddings, Birthdays, Anniversaries, Christenings, Holidays and major events.
Easy viewing – to view a Cine Film can be complex and time-consuming, even if you have working equipment it has to be assembled and set up and the room darkened. Often the equipment doesn’t work that well, and servicing old projectors can be costly and time-consuming. Getting the framing right and not scorching the film are all big problems. With DVD footage, on the other hand, it is easier to watch, pause and replay, and to enjoy at leisure.
Degradation risk – Cine Film, degrades, discolours and gets hard and rigid and unable to be played at all. Surprisingly, Cine Film lasts longer than video film but still fails over time. This is partly a result of its chemical composition but also due to the effects of time and any damage incurred by original viewings can lead to the film quality degrading.

Now is the time to act as Cine Film use started to decline in the 1970s and so many films we see are getting on for 50 years old or more. Our Cine Film Transfer Service Page gives prices for transferring from Cine to DVD.

Approximate Guide to how much Cine Film you have

A shoebox of Cine Films stored in your cupboard or attic/loft may well contain 10 or more reels of film but just how much is on a reel? The table below gives you a rough idea of how much film is on a reel:

Cine Film Running Time Table

Do Not Put Off Getting Your Films Transferred

We see a lot of films where the splices (connecting one scene to another in a film) have broken requiring us to reconnect these to get the film to transfer. The colour cast problems mentioned earlier will not correct themselves and whilst we have tools to correct this, the earlier the film can be transferred, the better. Films fade and details and resolution are lost as the pictures fade away. We have seen a number of films now beginning to show signs of chemical decomposition, these present themselves as a sticky film (stuck together and totally destroyed). As a white musty dust along the edges of the film which we have been able to work with but is an obvious sign that the film is breaking down. Additionally, we have seen film that has hardened which is very difficult to work with as it can easily snap and break.

With most film over 50 years old and not having been stored in the optimum of conditions, now is the time to hunt out those boxes of film and get them transferred. You never know what treasured memories you will unearth and you can save them before they have gone forever. Our Cine Film Transfer Services Page shows our prices.

Fish Photographs courtesy Wikipedia creative commons

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October 11, 2018 by David Leave a Comment

When Did This Journey Begin?

When did this journey begin?

The start of the journey

As an old colleague of mine recounted being pulled over at the side of the road by the Police for a traffic census some years ago (you don’t see the census points these days). The Officer asked “Where did this journey begin?” my colleague answered, “West Ham Maternity Hosptial!” apparently the Policeman did not have a great sense of humour!

Someone asked me how we got started on this journey ending up in the scanning business? Considering I was originally an Electrical Engineer, it’s a strange journey. I was in at the very beginning of the computer age and feel lucky that I grew up with technology from the earliest days when the computers I worked on were programmable controllers. As I started on that part of my career I met a lady who was researching the family name and I got involved in genealogical research way back in the day before there were any personal computers, the internet was 10 – 15 years away then and we used to go to records offices to undertake family history. The nearest thing we had to a scanner was a photocopier. The paperwork involved filled a substantial chest and the card records were a major undertaking until I was able to transfer most of it to a database.

Perhaps 15 years ago I was beginning to use scanners to digitise family documents and photographs but found that the scanners were small and anything above A4 was difficult to work on. I purchased a larger scanner and was able to offer my services to digitise family history documents to start with. As time moved on, the need to document more things such as photographs and photo albums started to gain importance. The business grew up from humble beginnings scanning family history documents to the business as it is today. It is worrying how quickly photographs fade and how fragile they are and scanning them makes sense to protect them from further degradation and in the worse case complete destruction. We had to scan a number of pictures that had been left in a shoe box and some mice had got in. The damage was major and many pictures were totally destroyed, gnawed into tiny fragments. We rescued the remainder and saved them from further damage.

About 5 years ago we made a major investment in production computers, a website, scanners, printers and audio, video and cine transfer equipment so that we could have a professional setup and to retire some of the equipment that had passed their “sell by” date. Growing out of a family history background where over 40 years had been spent identifying circa 3,900 members of the wider family and documenting them back to the 16th Century provided for the experience to run the genealogy side of the business which is a small percentage of the day to day work. We’ve been involved in some really interesting work including War Diary research. The majority of our work is scanning and cine and video transfer. We get some audio work and this year had the great delight in transferring an audio history where the narrator had been involved in WW2 and escaped to the UK.

This is a most enjoyable business to be in as by its very nature you are helping to preserve things for people. Old tapes (both audio and visual), cine films, photographs, negatives, photo albums and all manner of memorabilia – we scan artworks, certificates, handwritten documents and many other things apart from photographic items. It is lovely to see the reaction when old photographs are enhanced and repaired.

So that’s where it all began.

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October 2, 2018 by David Leave a Comment

Sorry Google PhotoScan – A Phone App is Not A Scanner Replacement

Scanning Old Photos – Use A Scanner NOT An App!

I generally enjoy reading articles in Familytree magazine but this one actually made me do a double take. You see it suggests that Google PhotoScan is a “Game Changer”. Now call me old fashioned but “A Game Changer” should be something that changes the game or it is better by far than what we have today. The trouble is, that the App and the technology and everything else Google PhotoScan offers is fine if you want to snap up a few photos, correct them (for light bounce etc) and store them in the cloud but hold on, since when did a lens on a phone come anywhere near to the granularity of a high-end scanner? NEVER that’s when.

So, I’m being scathing here and whilst they say it’s cheaper than using pricey scanners well, there’s a very good reason for that too. You only have to consider that the scanners I use can scan at resolutions up to 12,000 dots per inch to start to realise that there is a huge difference that a tiny camera lens, which could also be dirty, would have no chance of achieving anything like the resolution you would need to accurately pick up the image and lift it clearly off without blurring and having colour problems. My Scanners are accurately calibrated regularly to ensure that the image scanned is as accurate as it can possibly be.

Perhaps a useful article to read about why you should always defer to having photographs scanned properly is here. In this blog by Alison Taylor, Alison makes some key points about why you should not use the App as follows:

WHY YOU SHOULD NOT USE PHOTOSCAN TO DIGITIZE AND ARCHIVE YOUR OLD PHOTOS

Very low image quality makes these “scans” useless for anything other than a quick social media post.
Low pixel count (only 2000 x 1500) means it’s only good for the web. (My 3-year-old phone’s camera takes a pic that’s 5312 x 2988; I could print a decent 9 x 17 at least.) But what’s worse:
High compression means you’ll see weird color shifts and blocky artifacts if you ever want to enlarge or print this photo.
Distortion of your photo. The app uses your phone’s flash to take the picture, and then combines further multiple shots to remove the glare that is created by the flash. When it stitches all these pictures back together, your dad’s head may not be the same shape it used to be. Just sayin’.
Over-sharpening and contrast obliterates fine detail. This amount of sharpening and contrast actually makes the photo easier to see if it’s zooming by on a tiny phone screen. But if you are capturing this photo to save forever, share, print, or view on a large screen, the file will be damaged beyond repair. For instance, if you are capturing a photo with a lot of people in it and their heads are pretty small, it’s a good bet that you may not be able to recognize these people when zooming in on the PhotoScan result.
It takes 4x longer to capture an image using PhotoScan than it does with your phone’s camera app.

Alison has also shown various scans to back up her assertions and certainly, it makes for a graphic explanation of the huge differences between scanning and photographing old photos. You can see the whole article on “GOOGLE’S PHOTOSCAN APP IS A NIGHTMARE FOR YOUR OLD PHOTOS. HERE’S WHY.” here.

I would also recommend that you check out this post “5 Best PDF Scanner for Android: Apps for Document Scanning” which looks at some of the best PDF scanners for Android by Joyofandroid.com .

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