Cloud-based video editing startup Magisto will soon launch an iPhone version of its automated video editing app, the company announced today.

Magisto’s free (for now) service automates the video editing process for the untrained or lazy, making it possible for people to submit video clips to the service and let it do the work of cutting the video in an interesting fashion. Magisto scans the clips for noteworthy action and packages it with tricks like transitions and split-screens. Then users simply give the video a title and pick a soundtrack, and the video is ready to share on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or e-mail. And now, you’ll be able to do so on the iPhone in just a few weeks.

To find out more info, check it out here!

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With video editing, you have a couple of different options for your workstations. There are several advantages and disadvantages depending on what kind of system you plan to use for your project. Typically, you’d either be working on a desktop computer, or a laptop computer. However, recently, tablets and other mobile platforms have begun to support video editing software and apps.

Desktop Computer

Desktop computers have a variety of advantages when it comes to editing video. For one, they have the ability to hold multiple hard drives within the system. Standard definition video in AVI runs about 13gb per hour of video. As you can see, with multiple hours of footage from a video to hard drive transfer, you’ll need quite a bit of hard drive space to accomodate it all. When working with high-definition footage, the amount of space you’ll need gets even larger! With the advantage of multiple hard drive bays, you have the ability to swap out or add additional hard drives to your system with little to no modification.

Another distinct advantage of the desktop computer is the ability to swap out not only hard drives, but other critical components such as your processor, RAM, motherboard, or graphics/video card. Upgrading any of these components can dramatically increase your computer’s overall performance.

With a desktop editing system, you’ll typically have more space to work with. Your keyboard and mouse are at a good distance, and you can hook your computer up to one or more monitors to help with multi-tasking or editing multiple different things at once.

Laptop/Mobile computer

Laptops and mobile computers come with their own advantages and disadvantages over desktop computers. One of the main reasons people opt to purchase a laptop over a desktop computer is because they have a need for mobility. With a laptop, you can easily pack it up into a briefcase and work from wherever you’d like. The addition of a battery makes it so that you can finish your work where there is no immediate power source. However, the advantage of mobility brings forth a host of additional problems and disadvantages when it comes to video editing.

Another disadvantage of the laptop is the price. A laptop with comparable specs to a desktop computer will usually be higher in price. This is because of the smaller form circuitry and electronics, and the fact that laptops come equipped with a screen. Although laptop prices have dropped slightly in the last few years, it’s still very tough to find a laptop for the same price as a desktop with the same specs.

Due to the mobile nature of laptops, they are difficult swap out or upgrade any of the components because the form factor is so small. This can be problematic if you need a new processor or video card to handle your editing work. Also, laptops typically come equipped with only a single hard drive. This can be an issue if you’re working with high def video or raw video files that take up enormous amounts of data. Although you can purchase external hard drives, if they are not equipped with either e-SATA or USB 3.0, you’ll be spending may more time than you need just transferring data back and forth.

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The traditional way of life appears to be fast vanishing down the memory lane, thanks to modern technology.

According to a British study, things like writing a letter to reading a map are among the top 50 tasks that have been wiped out by technology.

Top of the list of 3,000 adults quizzed was the fall in ringing the cinema to check the times of films. Printing out photographs was the second least popular activity these days. While VHS (Video Home System) recording came third in the list, thanks to a reliance on recordable DVDs and catch-up TV, the Daily Mail reported.

The findings show how one in five people admit never being out of reach of an internet device, as an average Briton now has more than four computing devices at their home – more than double the number they owned a decade ago.

The study found the smart phones’ popularity has eliminated the need for telephone directories, address books, or reversing the charges in phone boxes.

Computers have led to a decline in the number of people with pen friends while most of us rarely buy TV listings, have no need to try on hundreds of pairs of shoes on the High Street, or go into banks to conduct their business, the study says.

Paying bills at the post office, checking a map before or even during a car journey are also falling by the wayside. Booking online has seen a decline in trips to the travel agents while using public telephone boxes, thanks to the proliferation of mobile phones, is also close to non-existent for most of us, it further says.

Claire Galbois-Alcaix of online back-up specialists www.mozy.co.uk, which commissioned the research, said: “These findings show that Brits are using technology to replace many of our traditional ways of life, as we move to a more digital world.”

Read more about this story here

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There’s always times when we have a want or need to send large digital files over the internet to another location. Trying to email a large file rarely works, as many email companies impose file size limits on email attachments. For some people, this can be quite a nuissance, especially if your file is just above the limitations that they give you.

In the early days of the internet, this wasn’t usually to big of a problem simply because data transferred so slow back then. People typically opted to standard mail diskettes or hard drives that contained large amounts of data.

As the internet speeds around the world quickly rose to that of DSL and cable modem speeds we know of today, the time it took to transfer large amounts of data shrunk to a few hours, versus several days. This now allowed people to send or upload several gigabytes of data in a relatively short amount of time. However, this is right around the time where lots of places began to impose their file size limits, to help manage their own bandwidth usage.

To counter this, several companies soon rose up to handle the problem of having no reliable way to send large data over the internet. One of the first of the major file sharing/hosting sites was called RapidShare, and they are actually still around today and remain one of the largest file hosting platforms in the world. They can even support up to three million users simultaneously! RapidShare works like this: You first specify the file you’d like uploaded to their servers. When the upload is complete, you will receive an email with a download link to download your file from their servers. You can send this link to whoever you’d like, so they can also download your file.

Since RapidShare, tons of other companies have popped up and offer similar services.

Here is a pretty comprehensive list of available file transfer services, and their file size limits for free accounts. These services are especially useful to send uncompressed audio, video, and images to family and friends. Feel free to try one of these fine services after you have completed a video transfer, or audio transfer order with us!

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You may have noticed that it was hard to find a deal on any hard drives this past Black Friday, or any deals at all in the last couple months. Some stores have even started limiting customers to one drive per person. So, what’s the deal?

The reason behind the price markups and limited on-hand quantities is that there is currently a world-wide shortage of hard drives. One of the primary factors that caused the mass shortage was due to the deadly flooding that has plagued regions such as Thailand for the past couple of months. Industrial facilities, including those where many of the assemblies for the world’s output of hard drives are made, were seriously affected.

Since the flooding began, the prices of hard drives started to rise dramatically. The price increase could even affect companies like Dell, Gateway, and Apple’s prices on their pre-built computer systems, who will be forced to pass the cost on to the consumer. Many suppliers are estimating that they will be 35% short on supply this quarter alone. The cost of a 500GB internal hard drive has risen from $45-50 before the flooding to $60 now, and could even rise to $70 by the end of December.

Some makers are starting to feel the effects of the shortage. Just today, Apple has said that iMacs with 2TB drives are currently at about a 5-7 week shipping delay, which is a huge increase over it’s usual 1-3 day shipping times.

Industry insiders are suspecting that hard drive vendors will push up prices even further in the first quarter of 2012, which will drive up the cost of components for PC makers and individual buyers.

Seagate, one of the biggest makers of hard drives, has lowered its target for shipments in the quarter to between 40-45 million units. It could take between nine months and two years for hard drive production to return to normal!

If you do need a hard drive in the immediate or near-future, you should plan to get one ASAP, before the prices increase even higher!

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Have you ever looked at an old family photo and wondered, who is that person?

Discover your family history with the San Diego Genealogical Society. Established in 1946, the San Diego Genealogical Society (SDGS) promoted interest in genealogy and family history. The SDGS has dedicated itself by assisting its members and the public with their genealogy and family history research and providing educational and research opportunities for genealogy and family history researchers. The SDGE even maintains a genealogical research library and is passionate about collecting, preserving, and publishing San Diego genealogical and historical records.

On November 12, the San Diego Genealogical Society held another seminar in conjunction with Ancestry.com at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in San Diego. DVD Your Memories contributes to the Genealogical Society in hopes of helping people of the world reconnect with lost relatives and find their roots, and helping people convert their old family media through methods such as photo scanning and slide scanning.

If you’re interested in becoming a member, or learning some new information, check out their membership page.

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Once your whole collection of slides has been processed either through a slide scanning, or slides to DVD order, you may often wonder what you should do with your old slides. Often times, people don’t want throw away their old media, especially important family slides or photos.

However, there are a few things you can craft out of your old, unused slides such as a unqiue window shade. With a little bit of ingenuity you can create wonderful pieces of art, even from 35mm slides!

If creating something similar, keep in mind that constant exposure to sunlight can cause fading and color loss over time of your slides, so it’s best to save your most cherished ones, and keep them in a dark, cool place, just in case something happens!

And it doesn’t end here, the options are endless really, like lamp shades made out of your old slides! So, the next time you’re thinking about finally taking care of your 35mm slide scanning, you can now have an awesome project create out of them!

For details on construction of the project, check out this link!

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Natural disasters can strike at any time. Unfortunately, Japan knows first hand as they dealt with the devastating earthquake and tsunami that devastated the country early this year. Thousands of people lost their homes, possessions and even their memories. Thousands and thousands of photos, slides, negatives, film and video were lost to this disaster, erasing years of memories for some families. Some media was recovered, although heavily damaged.

Over the past several months, All Hands Volunteers, a Massachusetts-based, nonprofit, has done everything from repairing homes to cleaning drainage ditches along the coast. The organization has also hand-cleaned more than 55,000 photos. In some cases, professionals from around the globe have even restored images digitally.

They will actually take a damaged photo, perform high-quality photo scanning, and then restore the photo and upload it to a server that survivors wil have access to in order to retrieve their images.

Check out the full story here!

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What looks like the world’s biggest videotape collection, is actually an artistic display presented at the Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2009.

The work is entitled “Life Span” and displayed in a small church on Garibaldi Street, this giant block full of VHS videotapes is the work of Australian artists Claire Healey and Sean Cordeiro. It features a total count of 195,774 tapes with a total recording time of over 66 years! Imagine if a VHS to DVD transfer was involved!

Life Span is a physical representation of what a human being can see from its birth, to the day it dies.

Read more here

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October is a great month for taking pictures. Autumn has arrived to bring us cooler weather and beautiful landscapes across the country, a great combination for photographs! Today we’ll be giving you a few tips for generating the most perfect photographs on this extra spooky day — Halloween!

Taking the perfect halloween picture can, in fact, be somewhat complicated for the amateur photographer. Although it’s pretty easy to get the image you want in your shot, there are a few tweaks and tips you should abide by to make the most out of your Halloween pictures. After all, it only happens once a year!

For starters, you might want to check out our earlier post about three easy tips to taking a great photograph here: http://www.dvdyourmemories.com/blog/tips-great-photographs/

Using these three tips, also known as the NYI guidelines, you’ll be on the right track to taking great photos in no time
Know your subject
Draw attention to your subject
Simplify your image

However, for special times like this, the Three Guidelines are only part of the story on how to get great Halloween photographs. The second key is to capture the “spirit” of Halloween. The spirit of Halloween can incorporate many things such as fantasy, fear, paranormal, and eerie. How can we capture this “spirit” in our Halloween photographs? Not surprisingly, the best way is actually using the proper lighting. Since nighttime ghouls are so central to the holiday, this often means shooting at night or in dim light to capture that extra ghoulish effect.

You should also avoid using your flash on Halloween, it tends to focus less on the dark and mysterious with a huge flash of light all over the image. For halloween you should be using ambient lighting, placed in different spots for the best effect.

For photographing trick or treaters or halloween costumes

Halloween is very popular in America just for the fact that it’s the one day of the year where you can dress ass whatever you want! Costume sales are continually on the rise which means more and more opportunities to take wonderfully scary photographs! When capturing your children or guests in their Halloween costumes, first decide what the best part of the costume is — whether that be the whole costume or just the mask — and then fill the frame with what you think is the most important aspect of the costume.

You should also make sure to take a photo of your subject with their mask off as well! That way in the future there is no question of the identity behind the mask. Don’t forget to try being higher and lower than your subject to make the image seem a little more scary.

Don’t forget that Halloween is also the perfect time for your halloween slide scanning, photo scanning, and negative scanning projects! Convert your old Halloween pictures to digital images on DVD and upload them to the internet to share with friends!

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