Join LAC Group at AMIA 2018

LAC Group’s Content & Archive Services division is excited to be attending the 2018 annual conference of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), being held from November 28th through December 1st in Portland, Oregon. While known by many in the AMIA community as PRO-TEK, 2018 will be the first year we are participating as LAC Group, which acquired the PRO-TEK film preservation division from Kodak five years ago.

LAC Group serves clients in the film and media community as an archival partner, dedicated to educating and offering their guidance on managing and optimizing film, tape and digital asset collections, large and small. At the AMIA conference, we will have some of the most experienced film preservationists in the business available to answer your archiving questions.

And on Saturday, December 1st, the last day of the conference, AMIA is opening the doors to independent media makers, institutions and community groups for a Community AV Archiving Fair. We will be participating.

The Fair will be organized around stations for every step of the archiving process for which LAC Group offers services or guidance:

• Film inspection.
• Inventory techniques.
• Digitization and how to prioritize and prep media for digitization.
• Post-digitization file management and storage.
• Disaster preparedness and recovery.
• Digital preservation.
•  Curation and deaccession.

At the LAC Group booth

We are delighted to announce that LAC Group will have a booth in The pAVilion, AMIA’s new information hub that will bring vendors, experts and conference attendees together to promote skill-sharing and discussions.  

Conference attendees can find LAC at booth #39, where a raffle will be held to win free digitization service: 1,000 feet of 35mm film scanned at 4k resolution or 16mm film at 2k.

Visit our booth to meet me (Donna Holbeck, Director of Operations) and our Vice President, Tim Knapp. Multiple experts in film preservation, storage and digitization, including our facility supervisors will also be present.

In addition, representatives from the imaging systems tech company, Lasergraphics, will be in attendance at booth #40, conveniently next to our booth. Lasergraphics will have their latest technology on display and we are proud to have partnered with them on the first Lasergraphics Director 10K installation in North America in 2017 at our PRO-TEK Burbank location. We look forward to discussing our Director 10K experience with you and having meaningful conversations with Burbank scanning supervision at our booth.

As a major sponsor of AMIA, LAC Group will also be hosting a student mixer and has sponsored a student to attend the conference free. The mixer will be a wonderful opportunity to field questions from students who are looking to build a career in film archiving and preservation.

Sampling of AMIA 2018 educational sessions

LAC Group views session attendance as key for our team members, with many worthwhile sessions we all want to attend and get the most out of each of them.

Here is a small sampling of presentations that are on our radar:

• Describing Moving Images: Data Models, Standards & Tools: Focusing on cataloging and metadata concepts, this session will discuss data models, descriptive standards, controlled vocabularies and shared data authorities. LAC offers unique preservation and archiving value in that we deliver deep film expertise along with deep library expertise and experience in this area. Our film roots are in PRO-TEK, a name many AMIA conference attendees know as the film preservation business started by Kodak in 19XX and acquired by LAC in 201x.
• The Reel Thing: This annual session promises to address current thinking and the most advanced practical examples of progress in the field of preservation, restoration and media conservation.
• Comrades in Archiving: Preserving the Unedited Red Witness Interviews: Covers a highly unusual archiving project that details the process of locating a quarter-million feet of unedited film from Paramount Pictures’ movie Reds, the creation of digital files for this footage and the file-cataloging process. This one is of particular interest to LAC because we have experience working closely with Paramount’s archivists.
• Permanencia Voluntaria: Mexico’s Underdog Archive of Popular Cinema: Permanencia Voluntaria, a film archive in Mexico, has set out to preserve and restore neglected gems of Mexican popular cinema, in partnership with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Archive and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. The session will detail the restoration of two films and will address the ongoing sustainability challenges of a significant regional archive.
• Ten Years of Success: The Nitrate Committees Flicker Page: Covering the activities of a crowdsourcing Flickr forum called the Nitrate Committee, dedicated to identifying unknown films shot on nitrate stock. It boasts a 40% success rate in the identification of over 800 different unknown films that have been submitted. This panel is of particular interest to us, since LAC Group is one of the few remaining providers of nitrate film restoration and preservation services in the United States.

We offer a suite of film preservation and archiving services: long-term archival storage, film scanning and digitization and comprehensive collection of restoration and management services. Our clients include leading Hollywood motion picture and independent film studios, Fortune 500 companies, the Library of Congress, broadcasting organizations and libraries and archives located in the US and Europe.

We look forward to meeting you at AMIA 2018. See you in Portland!