DVD Your Memories - Home Movie Transfer » 01-Photo Scanning

DVD Your Memories Irvine Office, New Location!

Chris — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 18:06:59 +0000

We’re celebrating our relocation to Irvine!

We are pleased to announce that your local, professional and specialized Family Media Transfer Technicians are now located at 18226 McDurmott W., Suite D, Irvine, CA 92614. The Costa Mesa store has been moved and all orders can be picked up and dropped off at our Irvine office as of Monday, June 28th. We will continue our mission to provide the highest quality video transfer service in Irvine and film to DVD in Irvine.

We moved everything out over the weekend and took it on over to Irvine at our brand new office location. We hope our new location will make it easier than ever to digitize your family’s memories! Stop by and ask how we can restore your old film and create a perfect gift with our great media transfer services such as 8mm to DVD transfer in Irvine.

Come on down and check out our new office location, and don’t forget to Like us on Facebook to receive additional news, offers, and deals!

Digitizing Your Scrapbook Pages

Chris — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:33:52 +0000

Scrapbooking is a hobby that, in recent years, has been growing in popularity. The basic idea is to preserve memories in a more fun and creative way. The pages often contain multiple forms of media such as print, photos, newspaper clippings, to help the viewer get a better understanding of the mood and feelings associated with the memories. Scrapbooking is a relatively inexpensive hobby that can certainly brighten anyone’s day.

Recently, digital scrapbooks have also begun to gain popularity amongst people of all walks of life. Creating digital scrapbooks versus traditional cut-and-paste scrapbooks can save you some time and expense, as well as provide a much easier route to share with family and friends through the internet. However, many people who have been scrapbooking long before the internet was around, have many books and pages that they would love to get digitized, but have no idea where to start.

One of the common problems with getting a scrapbook digitized is that when a scrapbook is created, in order to create enough space for all of their cherished memories, scrapbookers will often use a larger-sized paper, such as “12x”12 pages, which are just a bit too big to scan on many traditional consumer flat-bed scanners. In recent years, more and more people have been scrapbooking on 8×8 paper, which makes it much easier to digitize later, if needed. If you do have a larger format scrapbook, and you happen to have access to a large format scanner, digitizing your scrapbook will be much easier!

If you don’t have free access to a large format scanner, don’t worry, there are still other great methods to scan those larger pages in. If you have a flat-bed scanner, one common method involves photo scanning a half of a page at a time, and then taking both “halves” of the page, and digitally stitching them together using image editing software. Auto-stitch is a great, simple program that can easily handle all of this. There are a few tweaks you should be aware of before starting with this. First, if the top and bottom of your page look warped or bent, try disabling the “Auto Straighten” feature in the options menu, as this has mostly to do with creating panorama images. Also, make sure to set everything to 100% scale. If you have the equipment, and time to scan the pages, this is a cheap, yet effective way of digitizing scrapbooks.

If you do not own a scanner, nor have any access to one, there is another method that you could use to digitize your scrapbook. You would need to obtain a digital camera, preferably a high quality model, and then simply take the highest resolution photo you can of your scrapbook page. Taking pictures of your pages with your digital camera is often the quickest and easiest way to digitize, but can also suffer from quality loss. Many factors can hamper the quality of your digital image such as lighting, poor quality camera, dirty lens, movement, etc. For scrapbook photo taking, it’s best to line up the page as squarely as possible, with no angle, and make sure to go with bright, indirect light, with the camera’s flash turned off.

If you are a busy person, or in a rush, or if cost is not an issue, there are many professional San Diego image scanning services who will scan the pages using their in-house large format scanner, which in turn, would provide the highest quality image for you to share or archive. If you do need a scrapbook digitized, do a little bit of research, and discover the best method for your particular needs.

Recommended Photo Scanner

Bryan — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:44:58 +0000

I know Canon makes scanners with excellent multi-scan single-pass functionality. This means that you put 2 or more pictures down, scan once, and it digitally crops without having to do multiple passes. This is a HUGE time-saver. I know the 8800f model does this. Sometimes it cuts the photo scanning time in half or even to a quarter. I have 2 of them, and have used them to scan literally tens of thousands of images. They are generally $200, but the time saved is well worth the $50.

Photo Scanning/Organizing With Corel Photo Album 6

Bryan — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:10:07 +0000

Janet is a friend of my mom’s. It seems when you work in this industry you’re expected to know everything! Thank goodness for Google, since I knew what the problem was and how to solve it, but not the specific steps for Corel Photo Album 6. Picasa as well as iPhoto have similar formats of how they handle what they show you in the organizer.

“Hey Guru, help me out!

I’ve begun to scan photos on my own, and in the meantime, have installed Greeting Card Factory. My issue is that ever since, when I try to organize using Corel Photo Album 6, all these weird images from that program come up! How do I get rid of these?! It’s messing up my slideshows!

Thanks,

Janet”

So here’s the deal- Picasa and Corel Photo Album (not all inclusive) only show you what they’re programmed, or told, and sometimes this is not what you want. The way to change this is to change what folders they are searching for the media they show.

The way to do this in Corel Photo Album 6 is:

-Open Corel Photo Album.
-On the Corel Photo Finder dialog
-Click the Custom Folders option, and then click the remove button for every folder you do not want cataloged (the folders created by Greeting Card Factory or any others you do not recognize), and add those that you wish to include.

For Picasa, it’s:

-Open Picasa.
-Go to “Tools” then “Folder Manager”
-There should be a list here, in the bottom right, of all folders ALWAYS watched for new media. On the left is the explorer representation of your folders, including the ones in the list. Remove and add folders as you like, and it will start updating as soon as you hit OK.

There are plenty of other programs that work the same way.

Hope this helps you out Janet.

The DVD Your Memories Blog

admin — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 05:03:48 +0000

Congratulations! You found our blog! This is a place where we will post answers to common (and not so common) questions, interesting information about different products and technologies, and lots of other audio/video stuff. As “The Leader in Family Media Transfer,” we can help you take the guesswork out of getting your media transferred, whether you have us do it to save time and hassle, or decide to do it on your own in order to learn the ins and outs of the process.

Of course, we’ll include suggestions on editing and creating a beautiful slideshow, neat cassette to CD tricks, camcorder tapes and VHS to DVD tips, and film to DVD recommendations. We’ll try to talk about our equipment for slide scanning, how the same equipment can be used to scan negatives, what attachments you’ll need, and what to expect when you start using them. We’ll also go into photo scanning, why “flatbedding” is better than fast/batch scanners, and recommendations for balancing quality and your budget.

Some entries will be based on questions we answer on our forum, or other forums. When we are cruising the internet and come across questions about film transfer, we can’t help but jump into the conversation! We’ll also answer questions relating to computer problems (if they’re related to media transfer) as well, and some software and hardware recommendations. So keep watching!