Terry Ostrowiak’s father was a 16mm movie buff. “He had a camera that was this massive piece of iron,” Ostrowiak says. “He used to take it wherever he went. We ended up with hundreds of feet of celluloid film in a metal box.”

Setting up the projector and watching home movies was prime-time entertainment for Ostrowiak’s family, who lived in South Africa and had no access to television until the mid-1970s. But as the family moved apart, showing the 16mm films became increasingly cumbersome. Ostrowiak transferred the film to VHS tapes, but found that the image was less clear and the tapes quickly began to deteriorate.

He was back in the market looking for a better solution when he stumbled upon HomeMovie.com. A small company located in Winthrop, Washington, HomeMovie.com was started in 1999 when founders John Larsen and Lars Krumme were trying to save and organize their own families’ vast collections of videotapes and were unable find a good, user-friendly solution. They decided to invent their own.

Prices for these services are relatively modest. HomeMove.com charges $5 per tape or a sliding scale based on the number of feet of film to transfer, encode and upload videos. Online services – editing, archiving, and sharing videos – are free for the first five hours of video, and then range from $3.99 to $14.99 depending on the number of hours hosted. Burning videos to DVD costs between $15 and $19 a disc, depending on packaging.

Video in Bite-Sized Chunks

Ostrowiak mailed HomeMovie.com the master tapes that had been made from the original home-movie films. After the video was uploaded, he edited it using HomeMovie.com’s Afiniti video editor.

The Afiniti player is where the magic happens. One of the first things Ostrowiak did was to make it easier for family members to find the footage they wanted. With the original movies, “there might be five hundred feet of film,” he explains. “Even if there was only a little piece of them in the middle they had to go through this whole process. You could hardly even stop it in the middle or rewind it.”

“What HomeMovie.com enabled us to do was take little clips and watch them individually,” Ostrowiak continues. “I divided up the clips for each family and put them together.”

Editing the video into bite-sized pieces created a more enjoyable viewing experience. Now Ostrowiak can sit with his four- and five-year-old grandchildren and show them videos of himself at their age, playing in the garden or falling off his childhood Great Dane. “We can do it in small clips, one at a time, rather than wading through a long video,” he says.
 

Worldwide Video Sharing

HomeMovie.com’s greatest service may be letting customers share their memories with faraway friends and family. This was particularly important to Ostrowiak. “A lot of people from South Africa have emigrated and they live all over the world. We’ve been able to share this with them in eight or nine different countries. Of course,” he adds, “you have to have broadband – otherwise this won’t work.”

HomeMovie.com doesn’t allow unfettered access to private memories. Users must invite friends and family to share their videos.

Another advantage of storing videos online is that they are available wherever and whenever they're needed. When Ostrowiak visited Israel recently, he reconnected with family friends he hadn’t seen in 20 years. “I was able to show them pictures of themselves as children as well as video of their parents on an overseas trip with my parents,” he says. “They just watched with awe.”

And because his video is stored remotely, Ostrowiak knows it’s safe. “I just had a technical problem with my computer and I lost a lot of video and pictures,” he says, “but I still had all of my HomeMovie.com stuff.”

Many of HomeMovie.com’s customers have suffered events more traumatic than computer malfunctions, including house fires and Hurricane Katrina. Even though they lost original tapes and films, they still had access to the video they had stored on HomeMovie.com’s servers. Archived videos don’t deterioriate over time, either.

Editing and preserving his family memories has proven to be a profoundly emotional experience for Ostrowiak. “It’s given my granddaughters a feeling of who they are and where they come from,” he says. “They know who my sister is, who my grandparents are, the names of my parents – even though they were born in America and have never met any of my family.”