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Do you have historical video footage worth preserving?

We now have the capability of dealing with most common video tape formats including Betacam, VHS, DVCPro, MiniDV, 8mm, Hi-8 and Digital-8, plus 16mm film. If you have old historic video footage or film (of aircraft or any type of historic machines) in any of these formats which you don't know what to do with, get in touch with us and we can discuss whether your footage is worthy of preserving and if we can help do it.


Still frame of a Russian Polikarpov Po-2 biplane, taken from an old 16mm training film.  Photo: © Historical Aviation Film Unit

We've recently installed a literal wall of new old hardware in our editing suite so that we can deal with just about any old historic video footage (plus we also have the capability of dealing with 16mm film in-house too).

This update was initiated when we recently took possession of a number of Sony 8mm video tapes that were filmed in the mid to late 1990s. The owner of these tapes (and the cameraman), had a Hi-8 camera back in the day, but that has long since disappears—these tapes have been sitting on a shelf for literally decades without any hardware to play them back, and have therefore become of no use to anyone.

Yet, when we've gone through these tapes, we've found quite a bit of what we consider to be historical video footage, which we think should be preserved. If we'd not made the effort to check out these tapes, it's likely that this material would have simply been thrown away, and forever lost.

If you've got any material like this sitting around, on perhaps DVC-Pro, Mini-DV, Hi-8, BetaCam or even VHS tapes, or if you had one of the cameras that recorded movies straight to DVD, and you don't know what to do with it, by all means, get in touch with us. Let us have a look at it and we'll see what we can do with it.

And you may potentially help us rescue and preserve some footage, which is historic. And at the end of the day. That's what we're all about. It's great that the footage was shot, but if nobody can see it was a bit of a waste of time. So let us make use of all of this hardware. Dig out your old tapes. Let us know what you've got. And let's preserve it together.

We now have the capability of dealing with just about every common video tape format: Betacam, VHS, DVCPro, MiniDV, 8mm, Hi-8 and Digital-8.



We're going even more RETRO! We've recently started investigating some old 16mm film reels (yes, real film), and we've found some footage of a crashed top dressing aircraft in New Zealand, which is at least 60 years old, if not older. Help us save material like this.



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