Monday, December 20, 2004

Digitizing Memories...

This Advent Season has been a bit more hectic around the Lopez household as we eagerly prepare to spend Christmas with family. One particular project of mine, that has increased my stress level, has been that of compiling our old family home movies into DVD format. After having our 8mm and Super 8mm film movies digitized earlier this year I set about to leisurely edit, enhance, and render them onto DVD. I had planned to have them done well before Christmas. A few weeks ago, however, with Christmas fast approaching, I found myself riding on top of a rapidly cresting wave (with a savage and rocky shore in sight). Even with the impending deadline I was able to complete the project and re-live many wonderful childhood memories as well. The digitized memories are now found on MiniDV tape and DVD disk, easily accessible and reproducible for all our family. Gotta love those shades...

2 comments:

Bonnie said...

What an awesome project, Rusty, way to go! My husband wants to do the same thing with his family's old footage. We'd probably need to have everything done professionally, though. Do you have any advice or recommendations?

Rusty said...

Bonnie,

You first need to get your old films digitized. There are companies across the country that offer this service, but I wasn't too thrilled with trusting the delivery of our family memories to the USPS (or anyone else, for that matter). Look for someone that offers this service that is close enough for you to deliver the film yourself. I found someone locally and had the film put onto MiniDV tape.

From there I edited the material via our PC system. That's what ended up taking so much time. But I was able to produce it the way I wanted.

If you don't want to do it yourself, or if you don't have the right equipment, then you can have the same service that digitizes the film put it onto DVD instead of MiniDV tape. You can also have them reproduce as many copies of the DVDs as you'd like.

I used Pinnacle Studio v 9 to produce the final DVDs, but there are other products such as Ulead that will also work.