Home Movie Depot Staff

Executive Bios

Gerald McKinney, President

Gerald's passion for video developed from desire to easily share movies of his children with family members living in Mexico. Gerald is, by trade, a scientist. He received degrees in biology and Spanish from the University of Missouri and published work as an electrophysiologist while conducting research at the University of Missouri. As a trained scientist, he researched the problem only to find no easy software or hardware solution for home movie digitizing and sharing. Thus, his entrepreneurial drive kicked in.

Gerald founded Home Movie Depot, Inc, in 2000, which featured technology that transferred footage from video tapes to data CDs. Under Gerald's leadership, Home Movie Depot's smart transfer technology, Memories3, evolved into a service that allows users to digitize, customize, and share their home movie memories via the latest digital medium, including DVDs, digital tapes, external hard drives, and streaming video. Home Movie Depot also grew to accept virtually every form of home movie media- 8mm film, Super8 film, 16mm film, VHS, VHS-C, beta max, Hi-8, slides, negatives, and photographs. Anything families can capture a memory with, Gerald has pushed to make sure Home Movie Depot can digitize and share. The corporate world soon took notice, and Gerald has facilitated relationships with Google Video, YouTube, and Kaltura, Inc. In 2007, Gerald established Home Movie Depot operations in Mexico to bring the Memories3 technology to Latin America.

Beyond Home Movie Depot, Gerald is active in his community, serving as the managing director of McKinney Properties, LLC, and has served as a Deacon and Business Adviser to International Community Church.

Nick Mahlin, Director of Engineering

Nick joined the HMD team in 2004 being challenged with applying scene detection algorithms to videotape transfer. Nick quickly proved his engineering skills through the development of Home Movie Depot's videotape, image transfer, and transcoding systems. Nick's projects showed that his true strengths were in innovation and leading projects to keep HMD up to speed in the fast paced world of technology. He worked his way up to Project Manager and then Director of Engineering. At Home Movie Depot, his responsibilities include providing technical vision for future product features, writing software for all levels of production and ecommerce, and serving as project manager for various tech projects in both the North and Latin America branches. Nick's most notable projects include the HMD Archive, developing systems to provide HMD customers with streaming video, scene detection algorithms, developing transcoding systems to handle HMD's volume, and establishing the partnership and the infrastructure for Google Video, YouTube and introducing the company to Kaltura.

Nick is currently leading exciting projects that will bring HMD's DVD / Movie editor into the Web 2.0 space. The completion of his projects will empower Home Movie Depot customers and partners to collaborate on the creation of DVD's, import videos / sound / images from multiple sources, create photo books, create audio books, narrate over their movies, pull images from film to be printed, and most importantly have fun with their memories.

Nick received his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with a minor in Computer Information Systems from Columbia College, and is currently pursuing his MBA. Nick is experienced in Project Management and programming languages such as Python, C, C++, Java, and PHP.

Chris McBride, Production Manager

Chris has been with Home Movie Depot almost from the beginning. Hired as a part time worker during a busy Christmas season, Chris has parlayed his dedication and managerial skills into his current position where he oversees the entire production floor. Chris brings decades of experience with computer tech to Home Movie Depot. His team is responsible for shipping, receiving, splicing, digitization, restoration, encoding, uploading, DVD burning, and producing all of the output media for all of Home Movie Depot's domestic orders.

Jeff McLaren, Customer Service Manager

Jeff has worked in virtually every aspect of HMD. He has spent time on the production floor splicing and transferring film. He gained his first phone experience while working as an Account Manager in the sales department. In spring of 2008, Jeff assumed the position of Customer Service Manager. He is responsible for fielding customer service calls and ensuring that all customers are given quality service. Jeff holds several degrees from Pensacola Christian College including a M.S. in Educational Administration. He is currently working towards his MBA in business administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.