Film Preservation Lab exists because the most common path for family home movies — mailing them to a warehouse, paying by the pound, getting a blurry digital copy back — isn’t preservation. It’s conversion. A different thing. This is a lab that does the other thing.
A short version of how this came to be — and why the name on the door is "Preservation Lab" rather than anything else.
This lab started with a box of family film no one knew what to do with — Super 8 reels from a grandparent’s drawer, mixed VHS tapes, a few 16mm cans with no labels. The mail-in service that scanned them sent back files that looked like a TV being recorded with a phone.
Background in technical operations and a deep respect for the institutions that actually do this work right — National Archives, Library of Congress, university film archives — made it clear there was a real gap. The technology to do preservation-grade scanning at consumer scale exists. The labs that understand the difference between scanning and conversion exist. They just weren’t serving the family with a single Super 8 box.
The problem that kept showing up: customers paying hundreds of dollars to mail-in services and receiving digital files that were projector-recorded video of their film — not scans of their film. A picture of a picture. No way to tell until the original was already shipped back, sometimes with damage, sometimes without a report of what had been done to it. The cheaper services didn’t know the difference. The more expensive ones didn’t bother explaining it.
FPL was built around the inverse: frame-by-frame scanning by default, transparent pricing displayed before payment, written condition reports on every order, and zero outsourcing of the customer-facing work. The same scanning standard applies to a single Super 8 reel as to a 10,000-foot institutional collection.
The name wasn’t a marketing choice. Preservation is the language used by the National Archives, Library of Congress, the Academy Film Archive, and every institution holding film collections. It signals a specific standard — one that the consumer digitization industry generally doesn’t meet. Naming the lab after that standard was a commitment to meet it.
Lab, singular. Not a chain, not a network. One place, one standard, for a Super 8 reel from a family vacation or a 16mm documentary original from a university archive. The lab is small because that’s the only way to hold the standard. It will grow carefully — or not at all, if careful growth isn’t possible — because the alternative is becoming something this lab was built to offer an alternative to.
The full thesis on why this matters — preservation as a different practice from conversion — is laid out in Preservation is not conversion. It’s the longer version of why FPL exists.
Stated plainly so you can hold us to them. These apply to every project — a single Super 8 reel from a family drawer or a 10,000-foot institutional collection.
Not projector-to-camera transfer. Not an automated pass that hopes for the best. Sprocketless frame-by-frame capture at your chosen resolution, with a human operator overseeing each reel. The Access tier uses the same scanning method as the Archival tier — the difference is resolution and output format, not the underlying process.
Your film is individually inspected at intake. You get a written report describing what we received, what condition it's in, and any work required before scanning — before scanning begins. If damage requires a surcharge, you approve it in advance. If film can't be safely scanned, you hear that too — and you pay only inbound shipping.
The numbers on the page are the numbers you pay. Scanning, handling, inbound shipping, return shipping — every line item displayed before payment. Final total locks at intake when actual footage is verified. No surprise fees at delivery, no "processing" charges, no per-reel additions that weren't quoted.
Most "about us" pages exist to make a business seem bigger and more established than it is. This one exists to do the opposite — to tell you exactly how the work gets done, where the equipment lives, and what we do ourselves versus where we currently work with partners.
At FPL, most of the customer-facing and operational work — order intake, condition inspection, film preparation, cleaning, splice repair, post-scan quality control, color correction, file delivery, original film return — happens at our lab, by our team. That’s where trust is built and where the brand standard gets enforced. It’s also where nearly every opportunity for a customer’s experience to go wrong actually lives.
The physical frame-by-frame scanning itself — the step where film runs through a Lasergraphics ScanStation — is currently performed through a dedicated partnership with an established lab whose equipment and operator expertise we’ve worked with for years. We’re transparent about this because the alternative (presenting the lab as larger than it is) isn’t how we want to build the relationship with you.
Over the next ~18 months, the scanning equipment will transition in-house under a planned handover. Until that transition completes, your film travels a shorter distance than most mail-in services require — we handle the entire front-end and back-end ourselves, and the scanning itself happens through a single known partner rather than an anonymous outsourcing network.
None of your film is ever handed off to unnamed third-party facilities, shipped to consolidator networks, or routed through overseas processing. The partnership for scanning is one specific lab, one specific operator, with chain-of-custody documentation at the Archival tier covering every hand-off.
The scanning spec, the condition reports, the output formats, the pricing, the FADGI compliance, the chain-of-custody documentation — all of that is the same today as it will be after the equipment handover. The transition is invisible to customers because it’s an operational change, not a quality change. Customers who order today receive the same deliverable they’d receive two years from now.
If you have questions about the partnership, the equipment, or the transition timeline, ask directly — we’ll answer specifically rather than vaguely.
A clear line on both sides of the boundary. Naming what's out of scope is part of how we demonstrate we know what we're doing with what's in scope.
If you have film that falls into the “refer out” list, we can point you to qualified partners. We maintain referral relationships with specialist facilities for every category above. Just ask.
The lab is early-stage. We're being transparent about where we sit on the timeline because institutional and professional customers reasonably want to know what they're signing up for.
Lab is operational. Services open for consumer film, VHS, and photo scanning. Institutional inquiries and pilot scan requests being accepted. Content and resources being published.
First pricing review (90 days → 6 months). Operational data from actual orders informs tier mix, shipping actuals, and rate stability. Google Business Profile and review base established. First institutional case studies drafted.
AMIA membership. Multiple institutional pilot conversions. FADGI compliance documentation published. Grant-funded project completions. First institutional case studies published. Regional referral partnerships established.
Planned transition of scanning equipment in-house under the existing partnership. Fully self-contained operation for the complete order lifecycle. Customer-facing experience unchanged; operational costs reduced. Capacity expands.
Evaluation of nitrate capability (subject to facility and insurance requirements). Possible expansion into additional formats. Continued investment in scanner capacity, LTO archival storage, and institutional partnership programs.
“Film exists because someone chose to preserve a moment. Digital preservation is the continuation of that choice — not a convenience. The lab exists to treat it that way.”
Chris Brannan · Founder, Film Preservation LabUse the wizard for an instant estimate, request a free pilot scan if you’re evaluating us for an institutional project, or send us a message if you’d rather describe your collection first.