To Guam and Back

I’m gong to revisit a topic I posted about a couple of years ago…..shipping your movies to someone to transfer them to a digital format ie DVD, Hard drive etc.

The focus is on shipping and where they end up.

I had a customer, I’ll call him John, a few years ago bring me his old 8mm home movies to transfer.

John had initially chosen another outfit to transfer his movies, one 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.The completed DVD was a birthday gift for his Dad. 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.

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 Guatemala.

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 Guatemala!

That’s why he brought the rest to me.

I have a real problem with companies not disclosing that they are farming their work out to others and shipping your irreplaceable movies all over the planet.

I was searching around the internet the other day and looked at a large number of companies that do what I do. I know for a fact that many of these guys are farming their work out to India, Pakistan, Russia – really anyplace where the labor rate is so low, they can maximize their profits.

Film and video transfers are incredibly labor intensive. That’s really 99% of the cost involved in getting the work done. If a company wants to ship your stuff to Malaysia that’s fine, as long as they are up front about it.

It’s the guys who are doing it without advising their customers first that I have a problem with.

If you are considering another transfer outfit, ask the right questions:
“Do they do all their work locally?”
“Do they do it themselves?”
“Do they farm it out to someone else?”

I can’t even try to compete with someone paying their workers 75¢ an hour.

If you like their price and you’re comfortable having your movies sent to Guam then go for it…..otherwise do business with a local company.

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

Easy To Outsmart

I have a sign advertising Safe and Sound Video on the back of my car.
At the time, I was commuting down route 93 every day, facing stop-and-go traffic each way.
One day, I recognized the car in front of me from the bumper stickers it sported – It struck me that I ought to advertise the video business to the unlucky souls stuck behind me day and night. Free advertising – how smart is that?
I did a little research, found a company that offered affordable magnetic signs. I measured the space on my hatchback where I planned to put it and selected the appropriate size. I was able to design and order it right from their website. I have a white car so I chose a bright yellow sign with red and black lettering. This was so easy. Total time involved – 15 minutes and the cost was about $30.
A week later it arrived and it was perfect – exactly as I had ordered it. It fit the space on the back of my car exactly as I had envisioned. I took it out to hang on the car and….plop……..It fell to the ground.
The sign was magnetic but, as it turned out, the hatchback of the car is made of aluminum. Aluminum is non-magnetic.
I outsmarted myself.
Now five years later, the well-worn sign is permanently glued to the back of the car. And as things always seem to go, I can’t identify a single bit of business that has come to me because of the sign.
Outsmarted myself again, I guess.

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

A Cool, Dry Place – Follow up.

A few weeks ago I posted about the importance of storing your home movies properly.

Here’s an example of hat happens when you don’t – you can ruin your home movies.

Don’t let this happen to you…..

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

On The Cutting Room Floor

From time to time a customer will ask me to edit out someone in their videos.

Everyone has had relationships go bad – girlfriends, boyfriends, spouses, relatives or friends that we just don’t want to see again.

For some people, it’s a real problem to see these people pop up in their home movies again and again. They usually end up focusing on the person rather than the event that was being filmed/taped.

It can be a real problem.

One customer brought me some old home movies from the 1950’s that they had never seen. They were planning a family reunion and thought it would be great to show the old movies and give everyone a copy. But, they wanted to preview the footage before I completed the DVD and made copies. Their reason – “Mom and Dad used to throw some really wild parties back in those days, so we want to make sure there’s nothing too racy in there.”

Another customer brought be a large box of 8mm movies – on film not video. He wasn’t sure what was what. There were almost no labels on the reels. He said If you see anything about a wedding, reception or anything in Hawaii don’t put it on the DVD. He wanted no images of his wedding and honeymoon.

It’s easy to just eliminate entire events like weddings and honeymoons but it’s really difficult to go through every scene scanning for that unwanted individual. And….I have to charge for custom editing for the time that takes.

So, yes, I can cut out people, places and events, but it can be costly.

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

A Cool, Dry Place

How often have you heard something should be stored in a “cool, dry place?”

Probably many times and there’s a reason – mold.

Mold will grow on almost anything. All it takes is a few spores and the right conditions and voila – green, fuzzy stuff.

There are thousands of different kinds of mold some are dangerous, some are beneficial and some are even edible. One thing they all have in common – none are good for home movies.

I don’t know what kind of mold it is, but when I see mold on old movies (and I’m talking about film movies – 8mm, Super8 or 16mm) it’s white and kind of powdery.

Once mold gets a foothold on a piece of film, there’s no going back. The mold damages the emulsion. Even if you were to clean off the mold, it leaves visible damage to the movie.

The problem is, even if you still wanted the damaged movies transferred to adigital format, the mold can be dangerous to handle.

I personally, don’t want mold getting all over my office, getting in the air, or getting all over my equipment.

I make it a policy not to transfer movies that have mold on them.

The best solution is to avoid the mold problem by storing your movies in a a cool, dry place.

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

DIY Media Transfer

Most adults over 30 have media (Pictures, music, movies) in an older analog format. Converting that content into a digital format opens up a whole world of options for preserving, sharing and enjoying their media.

As technology marches forward, many types of media are being left behind.

But, you can bring your stuff into the future with you. Just because you don’t have a turntable doesn’t mean you can’t have your collection of rare LP’s on your iPod. Same with grandpa’s old Super 8 home movies – no projector – no problem. And you can start enjoying your VHS movies even though you tossed your VCR out years ago.

Starting in October, 2011 I’ll be teaching a class at Northern Essex Community College on how to convert your movies, music and pictures into a digital format.

That means I can do it for you, or if you take the class, I’ll teach you how to do it yourself.

To sign up for my class visit the NECC website.

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

Houston, We Have a Problem

You ever meet someone who gives advice but never seems to take it himself?

I plead guilty.

The hard drive holding all my own family movies seems to have given up the ghost – gone to that big storage device in the sky – . I have lost all the home movies that I imported from my video tapes.

I did not have a backup.

I tell everyone to backup, backup, backup but never had my own movies backed-up.

Duhhhhh.

I actually bought a drive to backup my home movies, but then the time machine drive on my wife’s computer died, so I used the new one for that.

Now, to be fair, I do have the tapes so I can import all the footage again. It’s not a disaster. It’s an inconvenience but, at least. I can do it myself as time allows. And on the upside, it gives me the opportunity to reorganize them as I import them.

This time, I will have a back-up to depend on.

Do as I say not as I do.

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

Two Worlds – Professional & Consumer

There are really two video worlds existing at once. The consumer and the professional.

The consumer world is where most of my business comes from. Home movies recorded on consumer video formats – VHS, VHS-C, 8mm, High 8, MiniDv. Once in a while I’ll get a call from someone from the other video world – the professional world.

Their formats are wildly different. The most popular is the Sony U-matic videotape. It looks like a super-sized, jumbo VHS tape. These tapes are around twice the size of a VHS tape. There are, of course, variations on the theme just like in the consumer side, but the vast majority of professional tapes I see are the Sony 3/4” U-matic size.

I have a U-matic player – a huge, heavy machine that I keep stored away and drag out when I need it. It must weigh 50 pounds and it dates from, and I’m guessing here, the early to mid 1980’s. It may be older, I really have no way of knowing. But the quality of the video signal is excellent. I just did a transfer for a local museum from a tape recorded in 1986 and the quality is outstanding. These tapes really hold up over time.

And the difference between consumer and professional video dating from that era is incredible. The professional stuff is sharp and clear and the colors are spot on. The consumer footage from the 1980’s is, well, in a word – awful. If it was shot outdoors it’s okay…pretty fuzzy, the colors are usually pretty washed out. Anything shot indoors on a consumer rig from that era is terrible – dark with a red shift. Ugh.

But, of course, consumers were paying $1,000 for a video camera and the pros were paying twenty to fifty times that.

You can really see the difference.

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

Don’t Forget The Second Unit Footage

You’re watching a movie and a man is looking for a lost dog. As he searches the images cut from him to some footage of a stormy sky, then back to the man searching in the woods, then to some footage of a dangerous cliff and back to the man again. Those are called cutaways and the footage showing the sky and the cliff is second unit footage.

You can think of it as footage that does not include the stars of the movie. Movie makers use second units to get all the shot’s they’ll need to better tell the story. The close-ups, the establishing shots, the cut-away shots etc.

It’s a common and effective way of telling a story.

You can use this technique in your home movies too. You can create your own second unit footage to better establish a scene, or offer detail in a family activity.

For example, you visit Six Flags or Canobie Lake Park. Shoot the park entrance and sign – thus establishing the location.You can use multiple establishing shots. Once you’re in the park, you can get a shot of the line at the tilt-a-whirl, introducing your kids favorite ride.

Get some close-up shots – maybe the gears of the tilt-a-whirl and some nice footage of your child’s wide-eyed face as she whirls past you.

When you edit the movie of your day at the amusement park, you can reorder the shots as needed, insert background music or lay the audio from one clip over another.

You’re the director, you’re telling the story, you have complete control of the final product, but you have to have enough raw footage to play with.

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

Why Isn’t There Video Of My First Steps?

I think people are pretty much the same in most respects. We all shoot the same kinds of home movies. Your home movies look pretty much like mine with different faces. The big events – weddings, new babies, first steps, first communion, birthdays, Christmas morning – are the ones most often captured on video.

I just finished a project for a family and it highlighted something I see a lot when working on a family’s home movie collection.

The first baby is born and the parents videoed everything. They shot every day and burned through tape at an amazing rate. A VHS tape held up to 2 hours of footage and new parents filled that in as little as a month or two. They kept up that pace for the first year or two so, when they bring me their movies, they’ve got five tapes that blanket the first year.

By the time the second child rolls around, they’ve got more on their hands so they video less. They still shot a lot, but the pace drops so that 2 hour tape covers about 4 or 5 months. That’s when you see the major event pattern begin to emerge – birthdays, Easter, vacations and day trips, 4th of July, Thanksgiving, the Christmas season.

Once the kids start school, a whole host of new activities begin to show up – first day at school, baseball, dance recitals, school plays and concerts and graduation ceremonies.

The parents were busy – they had a couple of kids, maybe one was in school and doing karate and Little League every week and the other was taking dance. It was run, run, run all the time.

Along came the third, fourth or fifth child. The pattern of videotaping morphed again. The parents were really just shooting the major events and they used about a tape a year.

Here’s the harsh reality: the parents were busy and they’d seen it all before, so the last kids got short-changed in the home movie department for a while. They got their fair share of footage later, but usually they don’t get the ton of footage the first couple of kids got.

In the extreme, the first five tapes cover just a few months while the last five tapes cover five or six whole years – sometimes it’s just Christmas that got taped and then the camcorder went away for a year.

When the older kids started heading off to college, the footage is dominated by the younger kids so, in the end it does kind of even out. Of course, it’s usually the youngest kids who are bringing me the family movies, so if there’s any editing to do, they’re making the decisions.

Revenge is a dish best served cold….

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