Digitizing your family movies, tapes, slides or photos is a great way to do one project and have multiple people on your list taken care of. You get the digital files of your family movies or video tapes, and everyone can have their own copy. It’s fairly easy to make DVDs from those files for viewing on your TV, with today’s technology you are able to go directly from your computer to your HD TV using a DLNA enabled device like a blueray player. What you can’t do with DVDs is edit the movie clips. With the digital files you can take all sorts of events and people you can take clips of and make into a montage. Give a personal highlight reel to each family member. The video below is a commercial, but shows what can be done by taking clips from one season of the year over time and splicing them together. Notice they go from film to video, no sound to sound and have added some music.
Most people don’t have the old film projectors or even the slide projectors needed to view old movie film and slides to see what’s on them. At least with the slides you can hold them up to the light with a loop as see the image. With film it’s much harder to see what is really on that reel of film. You can gain some clues about what’s on that reel of film from the box or cover if there is an address, postmark, or other writing. Even if you get one reel of film done for Christmas this year, it may get the rest of the family excited about digitizing the rest of the reels. You may even find that there are more reels of film that other family members have in their possession. There can be a treasure trove of family history waiting for you to see.
We had a client digitize his family’s slide collection that hadn’t been seen in 20 years. The slides had gone through a fire with only smoke damage. He then had the images printed and gave sets to his parents and siblings. There were so many stories that came out as the family looked at those photos and remembered their family history. The next step for them is to make a book with the best photos and all the stories these photos have brought back to life for them so they won’t be forgotten again.
All those printed photos being scanned and the jpegs given on a CD or flash drive is another great gift. You don’t lose the originals and everyone gets a copy. We’ve also scanned whole photo albums and made them into photo books so all the family members can have grandma’s scrapbook or photo album.
What out dated media do you have that can be digitized and shared for the holiday? What conversations might they spark?
