How to find what you want and get the transfers you need
You’re working on a documentary and you realize that a piece of footage that will help tell your story might be available through the National Archives. How can you get a digital copy of it? Henninger Media Services has been transferring film for the National Archives for over 25 years. While we typically enter the picture once you’ve found the materials you need and have an approved Item Approval Request List (IARL), we hope to make the whole process a little more transparent, from start to finish.
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) oversees a vast collection of records including historical documents, photographs, films, videotapes and audio recordings. There are many research projects that might bring one to NARA, but we’ll focus on film, video and sound recordings since those are our area of expertise.
Great footage may be lurking in boxes, storage closets, and media libraries. But old videotapes can start to degrade in quality over time, and many organizations don’t have the machines required to view and digitize these materials. A company might choose to digitize their video library in an effort to preserve company history and free up space. For a university or museum, the benefits might stretch well beyond the organization itself. Materials that have been digitized can be shared more freely with researchers and academics around the globe. For decentralized work teams, materials can be shared and used much more easily when digitized and stored in a cloud-based system. The age of video digitization is upon us.
At Henninger, we pride ourselves on helping filmmakers at every part of their journey, whether they’re early in their careers or well established, just planning filming or close to distribution. Film festivals are an excellent way to find an audience but being accepted for screenings typically requires submitting to a number of festivals, and each entry involves navigating slightly different submission guidelines. If you’re accepted, you’ll need to provide materials that meet each festival’s specifications for screening.
We worked with a filmmaker who had a “wish list” of 25 festivals to which she was planning to submit her short film. In order to give her the best advice we could, we looked at the submission and exhibition guidelines for all of them. What we learned can save filmmakers some headaches (and possibly some money).
We are proud to announce that Henninger was awarded two TIVA Peer Awards this past fall. In the “Education/Training - $25,000 and under” category, the team was recognized with a bronze award for “D.C. Courts: Landlord & Tenant Court.” In the “Public Relations/Marketing - $25,000 and over” category, the team was recognized with a gold award for “Center or Democracy and Technology 25th Anniversary.”
Are you in the midst of putting your heart and soul into a documentary project and see PBS as a likely distribution platform down the road? Perhaps you’re applying for a grant for your project and want to be sure you include PBS deliverables in your budget. Maybe your documentary is already finished, you have interest from a PBS station and it’s time to prep the show to meet their delivery requirements.
What does the process look like?
What do you need to budget for?
What are the common pitfalls?
We help producers deliver programming to PBS stations across the country and can help…
When it comes to video production, Henninger Media Services remains one of the top dogs in the industry. Located in Arlington, Virginia, we are a team of talented individuals dedicated to producing top-quality videosthat showcase novel creativity.
Author: Henninger Media Services | | Categories: Captioning
Video is everywhere these days and appears in many different forms. It can be uploaded directly to different platforms or shared from other places. Many people watch video in a social media context without having the audio on, so if your video features someone speaking, it’s in your best interest to use captions so that the message of your video comes across loud and clear.
We like to refer to color correction as magic. It can make a big difference in the quality of your film. Color correction involves adding a color treatment or enhancing the tones and shades present in an image to better interpret the script. Subtle forms of color correction give interview subjects nice, even skin and a healthy glow. A more dramatic example would be changing a cloudy day to a sunnier day or making a hard-to-see, dark scene in the shade of a tree visible again.
The Baltimore Museum of Industry (BMI) collects, preserves and shares the history of business and industry throughout Baltimore and Maryland. The Museum’s archives included a number of film assets that hadn’t been evaluated in a long time. The BMI team turned to Henninger Media Services to help organize, screen and transfer these materials, ultimately making them more accessible.
Video is rapidly gaining in popularity. Everywhere you look, you’ll see video content taking center stage for being engaging, entertaining, and insightful. Lots of the video content we consume these days is created quickly on someone’s phone for social media…and much of it is great! For certain distribution channels however, maintaining a specific level of quality is vital. In those circumstances, you should consider using quality control evaluation services.
The Ford Foundation is launching the $50 million CARE fund to build a comprehensive, transformational care infrastructure that works for all. Henninger Media Services is proud to have contributed color correction to this project.
Our Senior Colorists, Dave Markun and Lauren Meschter, are now Dolby Vision Certified. While there are a few routes to producing HDR (or High Dynamic Range) content, Dolby Vision offers advantages that result in better quality images no matter where you’re watching content…whether that’s on a new TV equipped with HDR technology, an older TV, a phone, a tablet, etc.
The documentary FROZEN OBSESSION follows the 18-day, 2,000-mile Northwest Passage Project expedition through the stunningly beautiful and extreme Canadian Arctic Archipelago aboard the Swedish research icebreaker Oden. Stream on PBS Digital or check your local listings for PBS air dates.
