Black Country Society movie presentation raises challenges for group members

On the afternoon of Monday 14 March 2016 MFAA members visited Cradley Then & Now history group to help David Galley, chairman of the Black Country Society, present a movie showing the manufacture of ladles and farm equipment at Churchill Forge Water Mill, Worcestershire.

An original home movie about workings at the forge was recorded on film early in the 1970’s. The film was transferred to VHS tape in the 1990’s and was later was digitally re-mastered onto a low quality DVD disc that David hoped to use at the presentation. However, use of a sticky label on the DVD to identify the movie had caused it to warp raising challenges for MFAA in showing the movie.

Sticky labels often warp digital disc, become damaged in use and even cause discs to jam inside the player. 2 other DVD discs of the movie also had sticky labels placed on them, were warped and could not be played on standard equipment. Therefore, the challenge to MFAA members was to find a piece of equipment that could be used to show one of the movies to the history group. Eventually following exhaustive test with all 3 DVD discs and using various types of DVD player by several manufacturers’ MFAA volunteers found one of the discs would run successfully on a Toshiba lap top belonging to a member’s wife, which was pressed into use after much persuasion.

With the presentation completed successfully MFAA have now undertaken the challenge of attempting to re-master the movies onto new DVD discs and multi-media for use by the ‘Friends of Churchill Forge’ group and Black Country Society.