One of the fastest growing trends we’ve been seeing is more and more people creating unique gifts out of their old media and memories. Gifts ranging from custom family videos, compilation tapes and digital scrapbooks are among the more common things people do with their old media. All of these options make a great gift, no matter the occasion. Plus, since these types of gifts are so unique and personalized, people will cherish them forever! All of this stuff is possible just by converting your old video tapes, photos and film to digital formats such as DVD.

Custom video creation has really taken off in the last several years. With rise in popularity of tons of new websites such as Youtube, video sharing has become as mainstream as television. This has prompted millions of people to create their own videos and upload them so their friends, family and the world can see. Another feature of these sites is that they also offer privacy settings so that only your friends and family would have access. Videos can be created out of any number of ways. You can create from old slides, negatives and photos you’ve scanned into digital images, or out of footage you’ve recently captured on a digital camcorder.

For the full effect, I highly recommend some form of video editing. With editing work, you can add music, sound effects, visual effects, title slides and many, many other neat features to make your video much more rich in content. Most video editing suites come prepacked with thousands of features you can implement on your own. If you combine powerful software with a creative mind and some tutorial videos, who knows what you can produce!

Aside from creating personalized videos, you could go the other route and make an online photobook, or a scrapbook that details important events in your lives. These can also be uploaded on family photo sharing sites like Facebook and spread across to other family members on other networks. Many scrapbookers from around the world have taken to digital scrapbooking for the ease of use and sharing features. Digital scrapbooks can easily be formed from scanning photos, slides or negatives into your computer, or using pre-existing digital images.

Looking for a photo slideshow to be created for you? Try one of our local stores:

Denver slideshows
Los Angeles slideshows
Orange County slideshows
San Diego slideshows

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We can help you prepare for your next big event or gathering by helping you create a one of a kind video or slideshow to present to your guests. Slideshows can be used for a variety of occasions, most commonly Birthdays, Weddings, Company Meetings, Bar Mitzvah, and Graduation Ceremonies. Creating a custom video helps the audience visualize what’s being presented, and offers an additional form of media for them to enjoy.

In addition to creating slideshow and custom videos for groups or events, we can also help you craft a custom video for your family or genealogy project.

With our custom video production services, we can combine and incorporate any or all of your media (images, video, film or audio) into your custom video. Just imagine creating the perfect Family DVD slideshow in Los Angeles that can be passed down for generations! Custom slideshows are perfect for nearly anything, from birthday parties, corporate events and even online greeting cards, such as for the holidays. If you choose to sit with our in-house editor, we can even add professional quality voice-overs to any part of your video. We’ll even send you a preview video to make sure everything is perfect before the final rendering. Contact your Los Angeles DVD Your Memories editor for an appointment to create your next slideshow masterpiece!

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The new year is upon us and now Valentine’s day is just around the corner. Stumped on gift ideas? Well, it’s 2011 and time to think outside the heart-shaped box! Show your special someone how much you care by creating a video tailored especially for Valentine’s Day!

Have you considered creating your own special custom slideshow video for your Valentine? Instead of the typical chocolates and roses, why not light the fireplace and pop in a brand new, custom DVD filled with all your memories together. It will make her heart melt!

Don’t forget to add voice-overs to your video to give it an extra personal touch. Not only will it be very special for Valentine’s Day, but your video will be placed on a high-quality 100-year archival DVD complete with a compatibility guarantee, so you will never have to worry about your DVD not working some day.

Our talented editors are full of excellent ideas to make this the best Valentine’s day ever! Check out a quick sample of a Valentine’s Day slideshow that could be staring YOU! Don’t forget that we can create awesome videos like this for ANY occasion!

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Technorati Tags: custom slideshows, slideshow, slideshows, valentine video, valentine's day slideshow, valentine's slideshow

Create a Photo Montage Slideshow From Scanned Images

Bring life to your next family party or event by creating the perfect custom slideshow presentation for your guests! If you’ve taken advantage of our photo, slide, or negative scanning services, you are one step ahead of the game. The only part left to do is assemble your images in the order you specify, and then start building your slideshow! Our experienced in-house editors will create the perfect slideshow for your occasion or give you their expert advice as to how to create one yourself! Think of all the times you’ve been to big parties, or nicely organized events with a custom video slideshow presentation. Maybe you wondered how to create such a beautiful video using your own personal photos, slides and negatives.

With our custom video production services, we can combine and incorporate any or all of your media into your custom video. Just imagine creating the perfect Family DVD slideshow that can be passed down for generations! Custom slideshows are perfect for nearly anything, from birthday parties, corporate events and even online greeting cards, such as for the holidays. If you choose to sit with our in-house editor, we can even add professional quality voice-overs to any part of your video. We’ll even send you a preview video to make sure everything is perfect before the final rendering. Contact your local DVD Your Memories editor for an appointment to create your next slideshow masterpiece!

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Technorati Tags: custom video, editing, slideshow, slideshows, video editing, video production

Getting certain types videos to play on your home computer can sometimes be a challenge. As computer techonology progresses and gets more and more complicated, the software that comes bundles follows the same path. The current Windows Media Player is a perfect example of a once decent media center turned into an almost unusable mess of features. Major developers seem too worried about packing as many features as they can while turning a blind eye to simple usability. As a result of this, we’re left with a product that doesn’t exactly do what we want, or has problems performing simple requests.

Windows Media Player has always been notoriously picky when it comes to playing DVDs. Sometimes it works fine, while other times it doesn’t even realize you have a disc in the drive. Sometimes in the past, people have even had to convert the video to a more native format before they can even watch it on their own comptuer! Other times, people were forced to download low quality, choppy video players infested with viruses and malware. Fortunately, there are great alternatives to the standard bundled media players or random shareware that you may already have on your computer.

Whenever one of our customers has difficulty playing any sort of video on their computer or laptop, I first recommend that they download a great, lightweight, and powerful video player called VLC Player. This piece of software seems to play just about anything, even corrupted videos (if enough data is present). We’ve rarely had any problems with VLC not playing videos or DVDs. Countless others have had proven success simply by switching to this program, and never having to worry about a video player again.

Another excellent player, with proven results is Media Player Classic. Media Player Classic started out as a project to preserve the simplicity and lightweight playback of the old versions of Windows Media Player while keeping codecs and features current for the present generation of video. The outcome is an extremely lightweight, free, portable, and self-contained video player that has built-in codecs for a wide variety of media playback. The upside of such a design is you can use it on a computer that doesn’t have the proper codecs installed for the video you want to watch.

With these new advancements in video technology it’s no longer necessary for a lengthy video conversion process just to watch a video. If you find yourself constantly frustrated while getting videos to play on your system, give one of these fine video players a try.

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Technorati Tags: video player, video to dvd, windows video player

A custom produced slideshow movie can be a great addition to your wedding party. Wedding slideshows are intended to briefly display the lives of both the bride and groom in a touching way. Typically, wedding slide shows are created in three parts. The first part typically displays the images of either the bride or groom, usually starting with baby pictures, and then more images of them progressively older. After both the bride and groom’s images have been displayed, the third part consists of images of both the bride and groom after they have been together, and will usually end with a shot from the wedding party. Many people create slideshows for weddings in order to remind them of their special day and to pass out to the families that attended as well.

The first step to creating a slideshow for a wedding is to get ahold of the images you would like to use in the presentation. If the images are not digitized, or scanned, you first must either scan photos yourself, or use a professional photo scanning service in San Diego. Once the images have been digitized, they’re now ready to be inserted into the slideshow creator. There are tons of slideshow creation programs available and most video editing programs come built with an easy slideshow creation tool.

The next crucial step of the wedding slideshow creation process is the music selection. Selecting the right music for the slideshow can really help make it that much better. With wedding slideshows, you generally want to avoid songs with controversial or irrelevant lyrics, such as a “break-up song”, or heavy metal music as it would probably confuse your audience and perhaps give them a headache! Just make sure the music is in good tastes, and choose a song that has significant meaning to the bride and groom.

When creating your first slideshow, it’s easy to get carried away and end up with a slideshow that’s just too long to be practically shown at a party. We’ve found the ideal length for a wedding slideshow to be 2-3 songs or 7-10 minutes long, and each picture should be shown for about 7-10 seconds each. Any longer, and you may start to bore your guests! It’s best to think of the slideshow as a small supplement to the party, not the main attraction.

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Technorati Tags: slideshows, wedding show, wedding slideshow, wedding video

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!

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Technorati Tags: irvine, office move, vhs to dvd irvine

A buddy of mine was having some problems creating  slideshows. He told me it just plain looked like junk. After delving a little deeper, I found out he was scanning the images and cropping them for high definition, but then burning them to DVD and using the player to upscale! Here’s basically what I told him:

Upscaling your slideshow after reducing the size manually is no good! No wonder you’re disappointed with the results. The software you use to create the slideshow SHOULD resize your photographs, however, because they will not be exactly the same resolution (unless you crop them). You’ll also have to crop them to DVD video resolution (~720X480), because that is what will actually be burned to the DVD, regardless of the upscaling (1920×1080). This is where your problem lies. Regardless of the original size, the burning software will scale the photos to fit the DVD resolution without stretching the image. Then, the BluRay player tries to increase the image size.

On video, its harder to notice upscaling. This is because video is constantly in motion, and our eyes have to continually work to notice the ever changing information. In a still frame, you have a long time to analyze everything about it. Ever notice how crummy a paused video looks? Video literally tricks your brain, since we’re not seeing actual movement, but a fast progression of images.

So- a solution! Try using DVD resolution for your images (make sure when you scan, you choose your output options carefully). If you’re still not pleased, spend the money on the Blu-Ray discs. It should be worth it once you’re ready to save it for good.

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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!

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