Archive for April, 2012

Watching Your Children – And Grandchildren – Grow Through Digital Memories

Monday, April 30th, 2012

As a parent, especially a new one, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of “baby’s firsts” and you’ll probably want to document every moment. All throughout your child’s life, there are going to be thousands of reasons to celebrate and millions of perfect moments to capture and share. This is why it’s a great idea to start making home movies.

And what about Grandma and Grandpa? Of course they’ll want to see all the action too. Your children are growing and changing every day, what they are like today may not be what they’re like tomorrow, or even next month. Capturing and preserving these moments will provide you with a visual timeline that you can look back on for the rest of your life and one that you can share virtually with anyone.

Today’s technology makes it incredibly easy to create and save digital memories that can be shared for generations. There are more ways than you ever dreamed of to capture and organize memories, from digital cameras to photo-sharing websites and digital scrapbooks.

Digital cameras allow you to snap a large quantity of photos in a short time without caring what you’re actually shooting. So, if your children are doing something adorable, you can just click away, then look at the image and know immediately if it’s a keeper – if not, just delete it. Easy peasy. And by uploading the digital images to your computer’s hard drive, you can post pictures of the kids online or burn them to DVDs, making for simple sharing. The same goes for digital videos.

Videos are a fantastic way to preserve your favorite memories, since they capture every aspect of a moment, like the faces, personalities, setting, and dialogue. And you don’t have to invest in a fancy, expensive video camera, since most digital still cameras are quite capable of recording short stretches of video, although the image quality does differ.

Once you have your videos and photos, you can share them with Grandma and Grandpa, aunts and uncles, and friends via a number of online sharing options. If you want to share them privately, you can use Facebook or a file sharing site like Dropbox. If you’re looking for a more public platform, consider sites like YouTube and Vimeo for video-sharing options and Flickr and Shutterfly for photos.
Digital scrapbooking is becoming a popular method of preserving memories. Just like paper scrapbooking, but instead of prints, you take your digital or scanned photos and arrange them on your online scrapbook pages. Then you can easily add text and graphics to your unique design. Your completed digital scrapbook can then be shared online or printed. This is great because it’s pretty much a personalized photo album that can be passed on for generations.

Once you start a video archive of your family, the digital storing and sharing possibilities are endless. You will quickly and easily be able to look back on those special moments and celebrations again and again. And you’ll be making it possible for your entire family to join in the fun.

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How to Share Your Digital Videos and Photos

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

With the internet and its many, many social networking sites, it has never been easier to share digital videos and photos. For friends and family who don’t see each other often, but want to continue to be in each others lives, here are a few ways to share life’s most precious moments.

Up until a few years ago, sending photos via email was the norm, and while that is still an option, it is difficult to send many photos at once or even a short video because of attachment limits. A fantastic and reliable alternative is Facebook. It is the most convenient option for viewing photos and videos if everyone you want to see them is already on the network.

Video-sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo also make it incredibly easy to share videos. They’re also free, so anyone with a decent internet connection can upload and watch videos from all over the world. While YouTube is no doubt the most popular video-sharing site, there are really dozens to choose from, many of them offering specialized features, catering to all types of audiences and filmmakers. Today, many people even create their own video blog, where they embed videos into their own blogs to share globally.

There are also a number of file transfer services, like Dropbox, Wikisend and Videosprout, where you can upload photos and videos to share with your contacts. The advantage is that your friends don’t have to download anything, they can just open the file and watch the video.

All these options vary in limitations, so you’ll have to do some research to find out what best suits your sharing needs. If you prefer to keep your home movies and family photos offline, there is always the tried and true method of saving your digital files to DVD. This way you can give the DVDs to whoever you want and preserve your most valuable memories.

 

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Storing Your Digital Video Files

Monday, April 23rd, 2012

Whether you’ve taken the time and effort to transfer old film formats like 8mm or 35mm to digital, or have just started making digital memories, it is important to preserve those precious moments. When it comes to storing your home movies or photos, there are a few necessary steps to take and a number of digital storage options.

First of all, you should always make multiple copies of the same video or image and store it on different media. This way, no matter what might happen to one of those copies, there will always be another. Right away, you should consider storing to an external hard drive, DVDs, as well as an online storage facility.

External hard drives are great because they hold a ton of data. Well, not literally a ton, but terabytes, which is well… a lot. Since video files can get pretty big and take up quite a bit of space, having a high capacity hard drive can be extremely beneficial, especially if you record a lot of video with your digital camera or camcorder. An external hard drive can also be set up to automatically to back up your files and save newly added files as you upload them to your computer. The downside to an external hard drive, however, is that like all technology, it will eventually fail. This is a major reason to save multiple copies.

DVDs are one way to guarantee your digital memories will last. Sure, they won’t last forever, but if you use top quality blank DVDs to record your videos and images and store them properly, they will be around for many, many years. DVDs are also an inexpensive way to store your files, as long as you don’t have loads of images and videos, since they can’t hold very much data. DVDs are also risky, because one day DVD drives will become obsolete.

You should always consider online storage, since there are a number of web services that will safely house your digital files. Services like Dropbox use secure servers that are more reliable than an external hard drive. Online services also automate the back up process and allow you to share photos or videos with other users. This way, if your computer crashes, you will still have copies online.

No matter how you choose to store your digital memories, you should always have multiple methods. It may take a little longer than just a one-time upload, but you’ll be preserving the moments you definitely don’t want to lose.

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Today’s Easy and Accessible Movie Making Devices

Wednesday, April 18th, 2012

My, how things have changed. In today’s technologically advanced world, we are now easily able to shoot and record HD video with camcorders, phones, webcams, DSLR cameras and personal HD recorders.

In fact, many independent artists and amateur filmmakers combine different types of devices or use only amateur movie cameras for low-budget, artistic and creative projects, instead of a professional, high-tech, expensive movie camera. Nowadays, a well-shot movie can be made with a digital camcorder or even a camera phone. Mind you, the difference in quality will definitely be apparent, but depending on what you’re filming, the device needed can vary.

Today’s DSLR cameras not only shoot incredible photographs, they can record HD video that looks just as amazing. With digital camera image quality, most of our compact digital still cameras are able to catch high-quality video because they come equipped with a movie mode. Now, the still camera movie mode won’t be as good as an actual movie camera, but for the amateur or experimenting filmmaker, it’s a great function to have.

Just as the digital still camera can’t offer the video quality of a camcorder, digital video camcorders of today typically don’t have high-quality digital still capability. They can be good for capturing an occasional still picture, but nothing more. For home movie footage, however, digital camcorders are brilliant. That’s because with moving pictures the human eye does not need to see resolution, instead it builds in the resolution for you.

When it comes to capturing life’s most significant moments, a camera’s first duty is to simply be there at the right time, all other features are a bonus. Flip-style cameras are small and easy to carry, while smartphones provide incredible video quality now and can be taken with you anywhere. Cheap camera phones can’t produce very good quality images, they’re usually shaky, washed out and extremely blurry, but smartphones, like the iPhone, are fast exceeding the digital camera quality of only a year or so ago. With the right tools and techniques, smartphones can make stunning movies that can be stored and shared digitally for years to come.

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Reasons to Make Home Movies

Monday, April 16th, 2012

Today’s technology and the way we interact with one another is a far cry from the way our grandparents, or even our parents, grew up. While they spent many hours writing letters, like real letters on actual paper, having Sunday night family dinners, making and watching home movies of memorable, or not so memorable, events, and making the weekly phone call home, we are a time-saving and dare I say it, slightly disconnected, generation. Snail mail has been replaced by email, many people live too far from their families for frequent visits, let alone having relatives around to populate home movies, and heck, most people don’t even have a home phone anymore, so phone-based conversations are mostly limited to text messages.

With digital technology advancing so rapidly, our everyday lives are following suit. If we’re not careful the simplicity of precious human moments that we crave will be left in the dust. I mean, do virtual roses even have a scent? But, you know what I’m getting at.

Digital technology has also made old media formats like 8mm and 16mm film unnecessary. Now, anyone can just convert photo negatives and home movie footage into digital files, making past memories easy to share with friends and family. And, more importantly, it is now possible to record video and send it across the globe in just a few moments. The advantage of modern technology is that it is incredibly easy to stay connected, no matter how disconnected we think we are.

So, the point is, no matter how advanced our world becomes, it is important to maintain old traditions, like making home movies. There’s a great article by David Pogue in The New York Times about why we should make home movies. He points out that the process has nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with emotion, family and memory.

No one wants to sit around watching old footage of a distant aunt accepting an award at the local garden club, but watching movies of your children growing up can be pretty entertaining. And documenting and saving these videos means that they will be around for generations. Not only can you continue to watch them as you get older, but your grandchildren and even their grandchildren may be curious to see what life was like long before they were born.

There are so many moments in life worth capturing. And with today’s technology, those moments can be shared with the people who mean most to you with just a click of a button. Making home movies makes it possible to share baby’s first steps with Grandma and Grandpa in Canada, your wedding vows with your old college roommate, or even your son’s Halloween costume while Daddy’s away on business.

These are the small moments that matter most. They deserve to be remembered.

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What to Do With Old Slides

Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

Do you have boxes of old slide carousels sitting untouched and forgotten somewhere in your house? Lifetimes of family memories that are too precious to throw away but too much of a hassle to ever view? You probably don’t even have a projector to view them on anyway, even if you do have the time to set one up and pile around the projection screen, or wall, to click through the endless slides.

It’s time to take the old-fashioned film negatives and transfer them to digital. Once you digitize the memories of past holidays, vacations and special events you can efficiently manage files, or transfer to DVD, making it easier to find and share your favorite moments. Basically, there are three ways you can get those old photos onto your computer: you can use a slide duplicator on your DSLR, scan them manually, or hire a professional slide imaging service.

Slide Duplicator

A slide duplicator is a cylinder that attaches to your Digital SLR’s lensmount, using a T2 mount, that holds slides in place so you can photograph them. They usually sell for about $85 and are easy to use since they have image adjustments. The slide duplicator has a lensmount at one end of the cylinder and a sliding gate that holds two slides at the other. The duplicator, or duper, uses an internal lens that has a fixed aperture and focusing distance to magnify the slide’s image onto the camera’s imaging plane. Most dupers also allow you to zoom in or out and move the slide gate so you can crop the image.

To start, you should dust each slide with canned air and set the camera up so it either faces a light source or uses a flash that can be taken off the camera and pointed back into the duplicator. The easiest way is to work on a bright day and use the sun as your light source. Once you’re set up, use the camera meters and shoot. Change your settings manually and use the auto white-balance feature to get the best exposure; continue to use those settings as guides.

While a slide duplicator is relatively inexpensive and fast, you may lose sharpness of the image. The images will be sharp enough when viewing on a computer monitor or TV, but not when you print them. So, if you just want to be able to look at the pictures digitally, a slide duplicator will probably suffice, but if you want to make prints, you might consider using a film scanner.

Film Scanner

Considerably more expensive than a slide duplicator, at least $250 for a decent unit but can be up to $1500, a film scanner will make a big difference if you have a large quantity of slides to scan. They also offer a resolution of at least 3,000 dpi, giving you sharper images that can be printed at larger sizes, like 11×14.

Most film scanners are plug-and-play and very easy to use. Better units come with dust-removing and noise-reducing modes, which will minimize editing time, but you should still have a good image editor like Photoshop or Elements to clean up imperfections. Typically, a film scanner will save you many hours if you have thousands of slides to scan, but can be pricey. If you have only a small amount of slides you would like to digitize, it’s probably best to find a slide imaging service.

Slide Imaging Services

Hiring a professional photo imaging service is probably the easiest way to get your slides transferred to DVD. Pricing varies for each service, so you’ll want to compare companies based on your needs, but also make sure the service you choose cleans and enhances the image of every single slide. Try to avoid batch scanners, as they won’t provide nearly as clear images as individual scanners. While you have less control over image quality, hiring a scanning service means you don’t have to do anything but wait for your digitized images. You can even mail your slides to a slide imaging professional, who will send you back DVDs that are separated into subject folders, as long as you batch and label the slides beforehand. This will make it much easier to locate certain images in the future.

By digitizing analog film formats, you can preserve your family’s most precious moments. So choose your method wisely, and happy scanning!

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Easter Traditions

Monday, April 9th, 2012

Happy Easter, Everyone!

We hope you are enjoying your holiday, eating lots of good food (chocolate!) and keeping up with family traditions and rituals. Thinking back to our own family traditions, we couldn’t help but wonder how Easter is celebrated in different cultures all over the world.

Because of its Pagan, Christian and Jewish connections, Easter is celebrated world-wide with some of the oldest and most unique rituals of any holiday. With so many different cultures celebrating the holiday with practices unique to their communities and families, the customs of Easter are as varied as the customs of Christmas. Some of the most common traditions include chocolate bunnies, hunting for eggs, bonfires and parades.

Easter egg hunts are probably the most popular Easter tradition. We’re big Easter egg hunters here in the U.S., but the UK, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Australia, Brazil, Malaysia and the Phillipines also take part in the egg hunting ritual.

The Easter Bonnet Parade is also a big deal in the U.S., Australia and the UK. Children go to school and march through the streets wearing hats decorated for the holiday with bunny ears, Easter eggs and chocolate. The Easter Bunny shows up every year to bring these same children, and many more from countries including Canada, Germany, Austria and Switzerland, chocolates and candy, left neatly in an Easter basket.

How and when that basket is filled is different for every family. Traditionally, the Saturday before Easter is spent painting and decorating Easter eggs, so they’re ready to be hidden throughout the house and garden for the big hunt on Sunday. The children then search for them and collect them in an Easter basket. Other traditions involve an Easter basket that has been filled by the Easter Bunny with chocolates bunnies, eggs, Peeps and other candies, which the children find waiting for them when they wake up.

Egg Tapping is another popular custom. Competitors pair up and knock the tips of two hard-boiled, decorated eggs together. If your shell cracks, you’re out and the remaining competitors continue the process. The last person to have a fully intact egg wins. It’s also believed by many that the person with the last, unbroken egg will have good luck for the rest of the year.

In northern and eastern parts of the Netherlands, some parts of Sweden and in large portions of Northern Germany, fires are lit on or before Easter Sunday. For many people is these areas, attending a huge bonfire every Easter is one of the greatest and most cherished childhood memories.

In Scotland, the north of England and Northern Ireland, the tradition of rolling decorated eggs down steep hills is still a popular one. Egg rolling is even big in the States, but we’ve changed it a bit. The North American version of this tradition began on Capitol Hill in Washington around 1872. At that time, Washington children would roll a hard-boiled egg down the hill; the child with the egg that went the furthest without breaking it was the winner. Today, the annual Easter egg roll still takes place at the White House, but kids now roll their eggs across the lawn with giant mixing spoons. The one who gets across the finish line first without breaking their egg is the winner.

In the States, we love to celebrate Easter with a visit from the Easter Bunny, an Easter egg hunt and an Easter Parade. Many of us are easily transported back to a time when we were the ones waiting for the Easter Bunny, but passing those traditions on to our own children are just as wonderful and more rewarding. It’s important to continue these traditions and keep making memories!

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The History of Movie Cameras: Part 2

Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

After the first motion picture camera was introduced in 1889, inventors and scientists started coming up with different film stocks for recording and ways to view the film. The most popular film stock had to be 35mm, but throughout the following decades, 8mm and 16mm film were introduced to appeal to the amateur filmmaker. It was the amateur filmmaking market that paved the way for hand-held portable cameras and the digital formatting that is necessary today.

The Super8 camera was a hit in the 60s and 70s, but the 8mm film still needed a projector for viewing. It wouldn’t be long before compact video cameras and new film formats were invented, eliminating the need for the bulky projectors. In the mid-eighties, companies like Sony, RCA and Panasonic began producing a variety of compact video cameras. The VHS and Video8 formats would only inspire smaller, high-quality image-capturing devices and in the mid-nineties, the same companies started competing for the digital market.

Digital Camcorders meant that images could be recorded, independent of film, and stored on a computer. This was revolutionary. Once the potential to record video this way was released to the public, the onslaught of faster, higher image quality cameras was astounding. Video camera technology erupted and today, pocket-sized cameras capable of recording clear, crisp images that exceed early digital cameras, are the norm.

In 2006, the Flip video camera was released. The tapeless camcorder is about the size of an average cell phone and can record 720p video. The high-def video camera can also store up to 8 GB of memory. There was once a model, the Flip SlideHD, that included 16 GB of storage, but since the company behind the Flip, Cisco, decided to shut down the project, the SlideHD is no longer available.

The folding of Cisco’s Flip just goes to show how cut-throat the multimedia market is. They bought the company from Pure Digital Technologies in 2009 for $590 million. Less than two years later, smart phone technology made the Flip look like a joke.

Today’s cell phones, like the iPhone and Android, now come with built in, HD video cameras, so there’s no need to carry two separate devices. The old school Flip also requires a wired connection to a PC to transfer video files. Since your smart phone is capable of connecting to the internet, it makes it easy to store and share images and videos online.

Many camera phones are just a few megapixels less than standard point and shoot cameras, making it possible to take high-quality video. With the ability make calls, browse the internet, listen to music and now shoot crisp movies with the click of a button, smart phones have a clear advantage in the multimedia market. We can’t wait to see where they take us next!

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Spring Memories

Monday, April 2nd, 2012

It’s finally here. It may have officially arrived a couple weeks ago, but with April here, Spring is making her presence known all over the country with sunnier days, the sounds of children playing, birds chirping and lawn mowers motoring, and, of course, the wonderful sights and smells of blossoming flowers. It is a welcome sight, especially for those who experience the full, four-season weather changes.

Spring is a precious time and, for many people, holds some of the best, most memorable moments. Remember being a kid and running outside on the first nice day of the year? The sky never seemed so perfect, the grass never so green. It was a different time for many of us, when playing in the streets with neighbors or standing knee-deep in mud beside the local creek, breaking up the ice of the first thaw were the cool things to do. Rolling down a grassy hill, pick-up baseball games, pedalling your bicycle as fast as you can, faster than you’ve ever been able to ride. Sigh. These are the moments when life was less complicated.

Spring memories often take us back to a beautiful place and time. Over the years, however, many of your childhood memories may have receded, but with a little prompting they can come back to you. A unique Spring scent or returning to an old stomping ground may trigger a particular memory. But, a photograph or home movie will preserve that memory forever. For many families, some of the most precious moments are captured on film.

Sometimes though, or more often than not, these cherished moments end up stored away in an attic or basement. For those of us who grew up in the era of Super8 and slide carousels, it’s easy to lose track of boxes and albums of long-forgotten negatives and reels. But, these memories can now be easily accessible, ready to view and share with friends and family.

The next time you come across an old box of photos or home movies, maybe soon during your Spring cleaning stint, consider transferring those 8mm, 16mm, and Super8 films to DVD. A DVD transfer will turn your most favorite moments into digital memories. Preserving these memories will also create a wonderful legacy to leave your children and grandchildren.

 

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