Olympic College Historical Videos

Olympic College Historical Videos

A highlight of this collection is a 26 minute long video (divided into three parts) with clips of students in Olympic College's Mountaineering and Campcraft classes on backpacking trips, hikes, and snow climbs. The video also contains beautiful moving images of flora and fauna and aerial views of mountain peaks taken from a small plane.

The Olympic College historial videos in this collection were likely made between 1946 when "Olympic Junior College", now Olympic College, was established and the 1960's by Olympic College students or instructors. The original videos were taken using 16mm celluloid film. Although we have no confirmation, we believe each film was spliced into reels from shorter films because the scenes take place in different locations. There is a possibility they were taken in different years as well although we have no documented information about when they were taken. We have made our guesses based on the images captured in the films.

We believe the films might have been kept in the Olympic College photography department that existed in the time the films were made. According to Roger Nick, Olympic College Libraries' long-time media specialist, in 1990 an individual, who by then had the four reels of film at his home, brought them to Mr. Nick at the Olympic College Library Media Services Department. By this time the films were already about 40 years old.

Mr. Nick then digitized the old 16mm films onto VHS cassettes using a film chain, a Panasonic video camcorder, and an Amiga Video Toaster 2500 which, at the time, was a state of the art device and, according to Mr. Nick, was the first video computer workstation that could be bought. Mr. Nick patched the video camera into the Amiga to digitize the film. The video digitized what the camera saw inside the film chain.

Years after this first conversion done in 1990, Mr. Nick did a second conversion from the VHS cassette tapes to Windows Media format. Mr. Nick estimates this second conversion to Windows Media format was done between 1997 and 2000 when Mr. Nick's office was in the mobile buildings behind the library. The library roof collapsed in a snow storm in December, 1996* and the mobile offices were being used as temporary staff offices until the new Haselwood Library was completed in 2000. In late 2012, the film reel that we think depicts Olympic College and surrounding areas in the late 1940s and early 1950’s was sent to a company back East for professional restoration because it was disintegrating and in extremely fragile condition. In 2014, another conversion was done to put the videos in mpeg4 format for loading into Olympic College Libraries' Digital Archives.