My sister had a million gallons of mud enter her house, destroying half of Mom’s movie pictures, and half her history. So it is important to go ahead and get it done, and get it done now. You cannot postpone it if you care about the history. If you don’t care about the history, throw it in the trash can. Because that’s effectively what you’re doing. Your assets on video tape, and audio tape, and film are deteriorating rapidly. And eventually, when you get around to it, they’re not going to be there to digitize or protect.
Another thing that’s extremely important, I do a lot of education to teach people the right way to do it. When you decide you want to preserve your history, you’ve got to research the company. Make sure they’re going to do it right. Make sure they’re going to give you archive quality files. And provide a way that will preserve your history for all time. It saddens me that a lot of consumer companies will convince a consumer to transfer their family video that might be an hour long of their kids growing up to a DVD. That’s a serious mistake. A DVD is a compressed format. A video file on your one hour family video should be a minimum of 30 gigabytes in size, to as much as a hundred gigabytes in size, like we do for Museums, and like we recently did for the Kennedy Museum.