Written when there's something worth writing down. Mostly for our own reference, kept public because people find it useful.
Loft storage, warped edges, sound emulsion. Two of the nine reels were a different family's holiday — mixed up at some point in fifty years. We transfer everything and let the customer sort it out; guessing what's wanted has burned us before.
The sharp smell is acetic acid, and it means the acetate base is decomposing. It accelerates — one affected reel in a sealed tin will take the others with it. Six of eight transferred; two had shrunk past the gate. There is no process that reverses this, and anyone selling you one is selling you something else.
If you smell vinegar in a box of film, separate the tins and get the film scanned. That's the whole advice.
Fourth batch this month with dropouts through the middle third. The binder that holds the oxide to the tape is failing on a whole generation of camcorder tape from the late eighties and nineties. Some respond to slow, careful baking; most don't. Of everything in a typical drawer, Hi8 is the format with the shortest remaining life.
We keep six tape decks and two spares, and nobody has made any of them since about 2005. Ruth has got good at head replacement and we buy dead machines for parts whenever they appear locally. This is the real constraint on this trade — not demand, not skill, but machines.
Customers still ask for DVD and we still make them. But a burned disc has a shorter reliable life than the tape it came from, and no laptop sold this decade can read one. We do it, we say this, and about half change their mind.