Digital, digital, digital

The majority of the movies I receive to transfer are in an analog format. I turn that information into a digital format.

The process is pretty straight forward – I have a variety of methods of getting those analog movies into a digital format and into my computer.

After transferring my own movies to DVD a few years ago (and that’s how I got started in this business), I’m now reimporting them into my computer.

When I initially did them, storage was at a premium. Video files are huge – about 13GB per hour. There was only so much space available on my computer so I’d import, create the DVD then delete the file so I could import another movie.

Well the price of storage in the form of external hard drives has dropped thru the floor. Four and a half years ago I recall seeing a terabyte hard drive for the very first time. A terabyte is 1,056 gigabytes. “Who could ever need that kind of space?” I wondered and the cost was a staggering $750.

Today, external hard drives are practically a commodity. Now a terabyte of storage is about 120 bucks. I’ve got three terabyte drives attached to my computer and, frankly, I need more.

DVDs are great – durable, easy to watch, easy to transport and ship. The experts tell us a DVD will last 100 years before it degrades. But, you know, some day the DVD player will go the way of the VCR. Something will come along that’s better, cheaper, etc.

What I always, always, always recommend is that people hang on to these digital files I’m creating when I import their movies.

If I give you back the files on an external hard drive, you’ll always have them. Whatever the future holds, it’s going to be digital and you’ll be ready,

Bye-the-way, I think the future is already here – People are using products like Apple TV to stream their home movies from their computer to their HD TVs. In the future, we won’t bother with DVD or Blu-ray players, all that content will be streamed to your TV.

If you’ve got the files now, hang on to them, you’re probably going to want them in the future.

For more information about transferring your home movies to DVD or importing them to your computer, visit www.safeandsoundvideo.com

It’s All About Magnetism

One of the wonders of film movies – 8mm, Super 8 and 16mm – is that they last for decades without degrading. If stored properly, film movies are still beautiful 50 years after they were shot and developed. I have transferred film from the 1930’s that looked as sharp as they day it was shot.

Unfortunately, videotape is not as durable. After 10 years or so, you can see issues with most videotape. It doesn’t matter – VHS, VHS-C, 8mm or Hi-8. It’s a transitory medium.

If you want to preserve your home movies, you will have to do something with them someday. And sooner is better than later.

Videotape stores your movies magnetically. If you ever fooled around with magnets when you were younger, you may have noticed that, over time, a strong magnet will become weaker. The more you play with it, the faster it’s magnetism fades.

It’s the same with videotapes. The longer you’ve had them, the more you played them, the faster the images will fade.

What you begin to see are drop-outs in the footage. You’ll be watching a scene, and for a split second, the frame will go gray. It may last a few seconds or many seconds. The gray screen my come back at regular intervals – every 3 seconds you may lose a second.  The sound will probably still be there but the images – gone.

When you see that – you’ve already begun to lose your movies.

If your tapes were stored in either very hot or very cold conditions – they will age faster. If they’ve been in a damp basement – well dampness is bad for almost everything but mold and mushrooms.  ( I’ve had tapes and movies come in that have mold on them – it’s a mess and a huge problem).

Once the video has begun to fade – there’s not a lot to be done to recover what’s been lost. I have a variety of playback decks and sometimes one will play a damaged tape better than another. When I encounter a tape with drop-outs, I will try another deck and hope that it can read the magnetic tape clearly.

It doesn’t always work. Sometimes all you can do is ignore the blank spot or cut it out.

The best way to avoid losing your home movies is to transfer them to DVD and/or hard drive. Both is ideal because one acts as a backup of the other and, if you choose too, you can edit the footage on your computer too.

I’ve spoken to a lot of people who tell me “I’ve been meaning to transfer my videos for years, but I’m just now getting around to it.”

Hopefully, you’ll get yours done before little Billy’s first steps fade away.

For more information about transferring your home movies to DVD or importing them to your computer, visit www.safeandsoundvideo.com

Mystery Tapes – Agatha Christie Meets Media

“I don’t even know what’s on these tapes,” a customer said to me recently. She was delivering a box of 8mm video tapes and had about a half dozen that had escaped her diligent labeling efforts.

She’s not alone.

Almost everyone has a box, bag or stack of mystery tapes. And the same applies to film movies too.

Another customer brought me several Super 8 movie reels and none of them were labeled. “I have no idea what’s on these and we have no way of viewing them anymore,” he said. He asked me to transfer them to DVD so he could show them at an upcoming family reunion.

Most of them were your typical family events and looked to be from the late ’60’s or early ’70’s. One reel, however was an old stag film. It was funny – silent, black and white, hand-written title signs – pretty awful actually.

When he came to pick up his DVD’s, I told him “I put all the family stuff on one DVD, and the other is an old stag film, so I put that on it’s own DVD.” He laughed and said “That’s right! I forgot about that movie.” He was very happy I had not mixed that in with the family footage!

The mystery tapes are a function of the changing technology of film and video. First there was 8mm film, then Super 8 – of course you could get a projector that played both formats so the transition wasn’t so bad.

With video things changed fast – we went from Betamax, to VHS, to VHS-C, to 8mm, High 8, Digital 8, Mini DV, Mini DVD and now your movies are stored on a hard drive or flash memory card – all in a span of 30 years.

We changed formats as the camcorders became smaller, lighter and the resulting video got better and better. But, except for the 8mm thru digital 8, each camera only played it’s own tape format so users were left with tapes they can no longer view.

And, labeling – you’d think that putting a sticker with some notes or dates would take the mystery out of things…not always. Labels often refer to the here and now, but things change over time. Tapes labeled “Jessica – school show,” for example made a lot of sense when Jessica did her first school show, but 11 shows later, who knows when it was shot – Jessica could be a precocious first grader or nearly grown up high school senior.

And, really, almost everyone has at least on tape that has no label at all – a mystery tape.

For more information about transferring your home movies to DVD or importing them to your computer, visit www.safeandsoundvideo.com

Beware The Disembodied Voice

One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is the disembodied voice.

It seems in most families there is one person who takes the lead with the video camera. It’s not gender specific – I’d say the video camera operator is 50/50 men vs. women.

What that means is the person who’s not operating the camera is often on-camera. And the person operating the camera is usually off-camera. For many folks, the camera operator is just a voice. You hear but don’t often see him or her.

I’m guilty of being that voice too. In my family I’m almost always the camera operator so I’m hardly in our home movies. You hear plenty from me – narrating or giving instructions to the family members in the shot, or making wise guy remarks.

For me this started to change when my oldest got to about the 6th grade. Suddenly he wanted to run the camcorder. Of course that still meant I wasn’t in the frame much until he learned how to hold the camera steady.

In the beginning, he held the camera at odd angles, swung it wildly from subject to subject and often turned the lens on himself – either in the bathroom mirror or holding it at arms length and aiming it back at him self. In those days, there was no image stabilization, and frankly, it probably wouldn’t have helped much – Dramamine would be been more helpful.

As soon as he started to improve, along came my youngest so we got more wild ‘n wolley home movies, except now we were also treated to audio of the boys arguing about who was going to use the camera.

Ultimately, I did make it into some of my home movies but learn from me – make sure someone else picks up the camera once in a while so your loved ones get to see and not just hear you.

For more information about transferring your home movies to DVD or importing them to your computer, visit www.safeandsoundvideo.com

Oh, The Place’s You’ll Go!

One of my customers brought me his 8mm and Super 8 movies to transfer a while ago. I’ll refer to him as “John” for anonymity’s sake. He had so many reels, that he was doing them in groups – about 1,000 feet at a time.

John had initially chosen another firm that he had found via Google search. Their price was very good, promised quality work. He said the samples on the website looked very good.

John sent off the first group of movies – of his Dad as a baby and young child – planning to give the completed DVD as a gift for his Father’s 80th birthday.

The promised turn-around time was 6 weeks, which would get his movies and DVD back just about a week before the family birthday party.

As the expected return date came and went, John became anxious that the DVD would not arrive in time and sent off several emails asking for status updates. He was reassured that his completed project would arrive before the party.

And they did. The company he was doing business with lived up to their promise. The original movies and the completed DVD arrived a couple days before the party.

John reviewed the DVD and was very pleased with their work.

His movies and DVD had come very well packed in a heavy-duty box. As he was taking the box out to the recycling bin, he took a closer look at the shipping label and was surprised to see the originating address was in South America.

He was stunned. John told me he really hadn’t been 100% comfortable shipping them to Florida to begin with, but he never expected that his irreplaceable home movies would wind up in South America!

Now, there’s nothing wrong with having work done “off-shore.” I work in the software development industry and a lot of our programming is done in India. It’s a valid strategy for offering lower prices than could be provided by using US based software engineers (assuming you could find enough to begin with).

Same goes with many other services – like film transfers. The company John chose did good work, returned his project pretty much on time and did so for about 20% less than I would have charged.

The factors that brought John to me, even acknowledging that the first company had done very good work, was that he wasn’t comfortable shipping his movies out to begin with, never mind having them reshipped to South America.

I think the other thing that really bothered him, was that he had not been told his irreplaceable home movies would be forwarded to a foreign country.

He felt like he was duped.

He went back to the companies website and could find no mention of their “off-shore” processing. John felt that information should have been clearly included on the website. Of course,  had it been, he would have chosen another company to do his transfers – that’s how he ended up bringing – not shipping – his movies to me.

I do all my work right here in Massachusetts.

For more information about transferring your home movies to DVD or importing them to your computer, visit www.safeandsoundvideo.com

Include The Pets In Your Home Movies.

One of the nicest comments I have received after converting someone’s video or film to DVD was because of the picture I chose to use for the cover of the DVD.

A little background – When I transfer video or film into the computer, I scan thru it looking for nice shots I can make a still out of. I use these stills for the menus and for the cover of the DVD. I usually default to face shots – I try to ID who’s who in the family and choose the best of the pics for the cover.

This customer had given me a host of 8mm video tapes and I’d transferred them all to DVD. In one of the tapes, the best “face shot” was of their pet beagle. So, I saved a still of him and used it on the cover and in the menu.

When my customer came to pick up the tapes and DVDs, I showed her one – just grabbed one out of the box and it happened to be the DVD with the beagle on the cover. She burst into tears.  I’m a man and I just never know what to do when my wife cries – usually I just apologize for something and hope it helps. So, I’ve got this stranger standing in my den with tears streaming down her face and she’s apologizing to me. I was very confused.

What I didn’t know was that they had just lost this dog. He’d had a long and happy life but, just like in “Marley & Me,” they had to let him go at the end. She was so happy that I’d included the dog in the DVD.

Honestly, I did it because there were really no great face shots of the humans in that footage. Dumb luck on my part but she loved it.

I learned something – include the pets.

It makes sense. Our dog, Lexi, is part of the family and she does all these cute and dumb and annoying and endearing things. I’ve got to get them on tape because someday all we’re going to have is our memories of Lexi.

I’m thinking about doing some research on creating pet tribute videos. As I’ve told this story to my friends and family, they have commented how great it would be to have a nice little movie of their dogs and/or cats. Especially, after they’ve passed away.

Something to think about…

For more information about transferring your home movies to DVD or importing them to your computer, visit www.safeandsoundvideo.com

Lexi the laundry dog

Rip Off

One of the questions I am often asked is “Can I pull the content off the DVDs you create and then edit it?”

The answer is yes – but there’s a better way.

When video is encoded and burned to a DVD it’s highly compressed. There are hundreds of codecs for encoding video but ultimately, they all highly compress the footage by shedding some of the data.  Once that data is lost – there’s no getting it back.

Think of video ripped from a DVD like orange juice from concentrate.

With oranges, the growers squeeze the juice out, extract most of the water so it’s in a handy form for shipping. Later, when the concentrate gets where it’s going, they just put the water back in and, like magic, its juice again.

But, it’s never as good as “100% not from concentrate” orange juice. Reconstituted is never as good as real.

The better way is to save the files created when the footage is imported into the computer. Now, these files are huge. An hour of video is about 13 gigabytes. If you’ve got a typical 2 hour video, you’re looking at over 25Gb per tape – and most folks have more than a few tapes.

Fortunately, external hard drives have come way, way down in price. Four years ago I remember seeing a 1 terabyte (1,000Gb) external hard drive in my local Apple store. It was about the most ridiculous amount of storage space I could image and it was priced at about $700. Now, you can pick up a 1Tb drive for about $120. And a drive that size will hold about 80 hours of video – 40 hours of HD footage.

Think of the flexibility you would have with all your home movies digitized and readily available for you to mix and match in any way you see fit. You could easily put together a movie of all the children’s birthdays, highlights of family vacations, or a growing up movie to celebrate a graduation.

So, instead of ripping your own home movie DVDs, simply keep the digital files. I think you’ll appreciate the “real” over the “reconstituted” version.

For more information about transferring your home movies to DVD or importing them to your computer, visit www.safeandsoundvideo.com

Do You Still Have A VCR?

Do you still have a VCR?

Do you still use it?

There was a time, not very long ago at all, that over 90% of  Americans had at least one VCR in their home. Many families had several. But, with the explosive growth of DVDs, VCR ownership is falling every day.

I remember the first time I rented a VCR and a couple of movies. I rented the VCR because they were too expensive to buy. It was such a novelty to watch a movie without commercials in your own living room. Shortly after that, I rented a VHS video camera for a weekend to record my oldest son’s first haircut.

When my father-in-law gave us his VHS camcorder, we started making home movies in ernest. We lugged that huge, heavy camera everywhere and shot everything. I still have a large indent in my right shoulder from that camera.

In 1984 about 40% of US families had a VCR – we were one of them. Over the years we kept getting better VCRs and paying less for them each time. The quality was getting better, more and more commercial releases were available, it was the happy time for the VCR.

By, 1997 the VHS formated VCR that had defeated the Sony Betamax and Laser Disc and could be found in almost 90% of US homes. Victory was complete.

1997 is important because that was when DVDs were introduced.

Fast forward to 2003 and the home video landscape had changed. The major studios were releasing their movies in both VHS and DVD formats but, for the first time, DVD rentals exceeded VHS rentals.

In 2006, the major studios ceased releasing new movies in the VHS format.

Over 90% of US homes have a DVD player. And now, the percentage of homes with a VCR is declining. This is the happy time for the DVD format.Will the DVD follow the same pattern of the VCR or will it hang on longer?

What’s next?

Blu-ray? Digital downloads like those offered by Netflix or iTunes?

Time will tell.

When I talk to prospective customers about transferring their home movies to DVD, I encourage them to have the video files put on an external hard drive. That way, they’ll have them in a form they can easily use when the next big thing comes along.

For more information about transferring your home movies to DVD or importing them to your computer, visit www.safeandsoundvideo.com

You Just Never Know What You’ll See

For the most part, what we all have on video tape and film is pretty similar – birthdays, holidays, graduations, first steps and so on. But once in a while, I come across something that is unique and memorable.

The first time I was surprised by what I saw on a client’s video tape was about a month after my wife and I had arrived home from our first Caribbean cruise. We sailed on the Carnival Miracle out of Tampa and we have an incredible time. We could have walked off the ship and gotten right back in line for another week – it was just the absolute best time. So, fast forward 30 days and I’m working on a video and I hear the man shooting the footage say “That’s the new cruise ship Carnival Miracle being built over there.” And sure enough there was our ship still on the builder’s ways in Norway. Very cool.

A few months later, I spotted our drinks waitress in another client’s cruise video – not the Miracle but on another Carnival ship.

One gentleman called to tell me he’d sent me a video tape with some “intimate moments.” Sure enough, a few days later his tape arrived. The entire video consisted of him prancing around in front of the camera – naked. I transferred it to DVD – making sure not to put my business name on the disc and sent it back. A few days later he called “Man, my girlfriend loved it, I sent you another one today.” This second tape was a full-fledged amateur sex video. If two people can do it, they did, and recorded it. I never did figure out why he was wearing a Home Depot nail pouch the whole time…

A Cambridge, MA family gave me scores of VHS tapes to transfer to DVD and they contained a few seconds that I will never forget. One of the highlights of their Florida vacation was repeatedly postponed by cold weather. Day after day they waited until it they could wait no more. They were at the airport shooting some going away footage when someone off camera exclaimed they were “launching.” The camera turned just in time to catch the space shuttle Challenger arcing high into the Florida sky……and……..exploding. We’ve all seen the NASA footage of this horrible event but this was different, it was shot from a completely different perspective. Sadly, it ended the same way.

Another client gave me his father’s old 16mm films to convert to DVD. His Dad had been the recreation director of a Connecticut town and was able to use the town’s movie camera for his home movies too. The son asked me to separate the town and the personal events. As I as scanning through the footage, there was a short clip of a bearded man with army fatigues walking down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He looked very familiar. “Nah, can’t be,” I thought. But after a quick google search, I discovered my first thought was correct. Fidel Castro had, in fact, visited Washington, DC and this man’s father was there – to capture it on his home movies.

In this business, you never know what you’ll see on the next tape or reel and I think that’s pretty cool.

For more information about transferring your home movies to DVD or importing them to your computer, visit www.safeandsoundvideo.com

Can You Add Music To My Silent Home Movies?

The vast majority, something like 95%, of 8mm, Super 8 and 16mm home movies are silent, so this is a question that comes up pretty frequently.

The answer is yes, but I don’t recommend it.

When the VCR became as common an appliance as a Mr. Coffee or a toaster, a huge number of people rushed out to have their film movies transferred to VHS. And almost all those tapes have music. And, the results are, well, disappointing.

The music and the action on screen never line up – inevitably you’ll have some serious moment – like a wedding or christening – and the music will sound like something from a looney tunes cartoon. Or, you’ll see kids laughing and playing while a depressing funeral dirge drones on. Plus, most of the music that I hear on these tapes is pretty hokey. Maybe it sounded great in 1988, but it’s pretty bad to my 21st century ears. I’m confident that what sounds cool as a soundtrack today, will sound equally hokey in 20 or 30 years.

What I suggest to my customers is one of 4 things.

• Leave it silent. These home movies are a silent medium – that’s how they were shot, that’s how you viewed them years ago. Leave ‘em alone.
• If you must have music, play a CD while you watch. Maybe play a CD that reflects the music of the era in the movies. You can play different CD’s anytime you want.
• Add a commentary by one or more family members. This is a great way to hand memories down from generation to generation. Your parents or grandparents will remember the events and people and can really provide fun and interesting comments on what you’re watching. I did a VHS to DVD transfer a couple of years ago and the original footage was a home-made film to video transfer. The quality was awful but the owner’s 90+ year old grandmother had done a commentary. She had long since passed away but her colorful memories were saved forever.
• Edit the music to match the action on the screen. This is not an inexpensive option, but if you really, really have to have music, let’s at least have it reflect what’s happening on screen.

Of course everyone has their own ideas of perfect solution is to the silent movie problem. One customer asked me to lay in the sound of a projector whirring in the background. He was trying to authenticate the experience of watching the old movies. The best sound I could find was a great recording of a real projector but it was only about a minute long, so it repeated every minute for about 2 hours. For me, that soundtrack would have put me right to sleep, but he was thrilled at how real it sounded.

To be truly authentic, I think we should have dropped in some choice language to replicate Dad responding to a blown bulb or a screen that wouldn’t stay up. But those are just my memories.

For more information about transferring your home movies to DVD or importing them to your computer, visit www.safeandsoundvideo.com