DVD Your Memories is one of the few companies primarily built for our local customers who wish to transfer their old memories and convert them to a more modern format, such as VHS to DVD, slide scanning to DVD, and transfer audio cassettes to CD. VHS tapes in particular was a very popular format for recording priceless home movies. Often times, these tapes can run in excess of 6 hours or longer! Many of us would find it stressful to send such important items away in the mail, when there are more convenient local options available.

Peace of Mind – Keeping your media local will ensure that your media will not get lost in transit, or misplaced at any point during the shipping process. Since we handle all of our orders directly in our offices, you’ll know where your precious media is at all times. Once you leave your memories in our hands, they will remain safe until you come in to pick up your new DVDs.

Customer Experience – DVD Your Memories is set up to allow one on one interactions with the technician working on your order. This starts with the initial order-taking process. If at all possible, we will match your order type with the technician who will be doing the bulk of the work on the order. (For instance, if you had order of film to DVD in San Diego, our san diego film technician, Ilo, would be the one to take your order that day). This same technician will also be contacting you throughout the transfer process to indicate when the order had been completed, or if any additional information is required. In turn, our customers are encouraged to contact their technicians through phone or email, if they think of anything else they’d like to add or otherwise change their initial order. This will help ensure that your order is processed to your exact specifications and details.

Fast Turnaround – When dealing with local companies, you will often get a much faster turnaround than if you were to mail it off to a processing facility. Depending on how much media you bring in, we can sometimes have your order finished within 24 hours. This alone will save you not only time, but massive shipping and handling costs.

Visit our store locator page to find the DVD Your Memories around your area.

San Diego:
8305 Vickers St. Suite 206
San Diego, CA 92111
(858) 503-7965
sandiego@dvdyourmemories.com

Orange County:
18226 W. McDurmott Street, Suite D
Irvine, CA 92614
(949) 679-7333
orangecounty@dvdyourmemories.com

Los Angeles:
3710 South Robertson Blvd Suite 205
Culver City, CA 90232
(310) 836-1403
losangeles@dvdyourmemories.com

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Buzz it up
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post
• Tell a friend
• Print for later

Technorati Tags: irvine, local, los angeles, san diego, vhs to dvd

The problem of cutting out commercials or other unwanted material from your recorded TV has been tough to do. Even with the advent of modern DVRs and video recorders, they aren’t perfect at detecting scene changes, or where commercials begin and end. In the old days, you either had to sit there and pause the recording over the commercials, or fast forward through them when it comes time to watch it. However, isn’t it more convenient to simply cut them out entirely? This is especially true if you plan to send out the video as gifts to friends or family.

People will record television shows that has some sort of meaning to them. Either they were on the show themselves, their family was, or the show contained subject matter of great importance. The process of eliminating commercials isn’t a quick process, but it will make your video much easier to watch without fumbling through the fast-forward button. The most sure-fire way to accomplish this task is to convert your video to a format that can be edited through the computer. If the video is on a video tape, you’ll need a video tape to hard drive transfer. Once the video capture has completed, the raw video file will now be placed onto your computer’s hard drive.

Once the video file is on the hard drive, you can begin to edit out the commercials. The easiest way to accomplish this would be to load the video onto a video editing platform, and run through the timeline and mark where each commercial begins and ends. You can then use these marks to easily delete the portions of video you do not want to keep. Once the editing has been completed, simply re-render the video into the format you’d like. If burning to a DVD, render it to an mpeg-2 file for easy burning with most DVD authoring programs.

Having trouble? We convert video to hard drive and video to DVD in Los Angeles, San Diego & Irvine. Come stop by and DVD Your Memories!

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Buzz it up
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post
• Tell a friend
• Print for later

Technorati Tags: commercials, vhs to dvd, video to hard drive

Most VHS tapes just do not look as good when played today as it did 20 years ago. They can suffer from all sorts of symptoms such as color loss or degradation, warping, flickering etc. Often times these problems can be so severe, that it can distract from the video itself. Thankfully, with a little bit of knowledge and equipment, you can still get the most our of your old video tapes.

The fist step to improving the quality of your VHS tapes is to start at the source, and make sure your tape is cleaned, and in good condition. Sometimes you may find that you need to repair your VHS tape and put it in a new shell. You’ll also need to find a good quality VCR. Transferring your tapes in a poor quality VCR will be much much harder to restore with software. It’s always recommended to get the highest quality initial transfer as possible.

Sometimes I’ve found that the VCRs from the 90s will play old tapes better than a brand new one from the store. VCR’s are not all created equally and so sometimes it’s a gamble to find a really good piece of equipment. The types of VCRs that will give your the most improvement on your VHS to DVD transfers would be a professional name brand or broadcast quality VCR with a built-in or standalone TBC, or time-based correcter.

Once you have a good working VCR in order, you shoud also look into obtaining a color correction unit. These nifty devices receive the video signal from your VCR and allow you to finely tune the colors of your video so that you can get very close to the original colors on the tape. Again, this step of correcting the color at the transfer source will save you editing hours later on. Sometime different scenes will shift to different colors, so it’s wise to monitor your video so that you can make any adjustments needed as it’s recording.

Once the video has been transferred to your computer, the last step is editing the video clip through a software based video editor such as Final Cut Pro or Sony Vegas. With these programs you can touch up the video and remove any remaining blemishes, as well as clean up the audio if needed. If you follow these basic steps, you will dramatically improve the quality of your VHS to DVD or VHS to hard drive transfers.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Buzz it up
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post
• Tell a friend
• Print for later

Technorati Tags: analog video, dvd transfer, improve vhs, vhs, vhs to dvd, video, video tapes

Since our move to Irvine back in June, we’ve been helping people from all walks of life transfer their family’s VHS to DVD, film to DVD, audio tapes to CD, as well as our other great services. With our services extending to the great city of Irvine, DVD Your Memories has quickly risen to the local leading media transfer center for nearly all of Southern California! We dedicate ourselves to providing our customers with a wonderful, emotional experience as we bring your fading memories back to life again. Now that the holidays are fast approaching, what better way to spend the new year than with your family and friends? Now you can have all your memories with you for the next holiday season, on DVDs!

We encourage you to help spread the word so that other families will not lose their memories as time goes on. For many people around the country, the thought of converting their videos to DVD is still buried deep in their subconscious. Our VHS to DVD in Irvine will transfer all of your VHS tapes onto our 100-year archival discs, to ensure maximum lifespan.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Buzz it up
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post
• Tell a friend
• Print for later

Technorati Tags: irvine, vhs to dvd, video, video conversion, video to dvd

10. Ease
With the advancement of technology at the consumer-level, it’s now cheaper and easier than ever to get your old video tapes converted to DVD, photos scanned, and film digitized. Nearly all work is now captured directly into a computer’s hard drive, which allows for relatively easy manipulation of your video, images and audio with no quality loss from the original. You can now think about adding chapter markers and interactive menu screens for your kid’s birthday parties instead of sifting through 2 hours of raw footage.

9. Production and Editing
With advancements in technology propelling us to the ‘digital era’, producing quality media from the comfort of your own home or office is now a reality. Once your media is digitized, nearly anything is possible from putting together a new scrapbook, creating a graduation slideshow for your children, or even a new commercial for your business. People no longer have to pay outrageous production fees in order to create a viable video for them.

8. Celebrating a Special Event
Do you have a special event planned in the near future? Would you like to create a San Diego custom slideshow or video montage to incorporate into an event? For the next party or get-together, instead of dusting off the old slide projector, you can show off your fully-edited custom slideshow movie for everyone to enjoy. This is a great way to show off you latest product or idea, while getting everyone in attendance involved.

7. Portability
The newer they are, the smaller they get. This can apply to most media throughout history. Just think about how much easier it would be to do a little bit of 35mm slide scanning, and condense your 35 carousels of slides into a single disc. With video, for instance, VHS tapes were the standard for several years until laser discs and DVDs hit the market. As many people know, the more VHS tapes you owned, the more storage space you needed to allocate to them. When digitized however, you can save a remarkable amount of space. Instead of holding onto hundreds of old VHS tapes, you transfer them to some easy to maintain DVDs or even to hard drive to save more space.

6. Entertainment
Reflecting on past events can be entertaining as well! It’s always a treat to catch a glimpse of your vacation from years ago, and re-live the time you spent there. This is also great for family get-togethers or parties especially if multiple people attending are featured on the video! If you decide to go with a video transfer to hard drive, you can do some simple or advanced editing to create a new video for everyone to enjoy.

5. Reconnecting With Lost Friends
15 Years ago, you and your friend may have taken a video camera on that awesome trip to Europe. As time goes on, people change locations, and connections are missed or often lost. Without watching that video today, you may never ask yourself, what happened to this person? Where can I find them? Not only is it much easier these days to transfer your media, it’s also become much easier to find and locate people! Sometimes a little reminder is all you need.

4. Family Time
Everyone has busy schedules with school, work, football practice, church, etc. and often, time spent with your own family is overlooked. Once your media is digitized, it provides a great opportunity to spend and share time with family or close friends. People can relate to what they’re watching and can spark up some interesting discussions of the past, and connect with new friends.

3. Technology Changing
Technology is constantly evolving into “smaller” and better things. A closet full of old videos can now be placed onto a plastic drive the size of your thumb and your desk drawer full of photos can now be replaced with archival-grade DVDs. Now that most of the older formats are obsolete and often difficult to see or watch, it’s best to get them digitized sooner than later. As time drags on, it will only start to get more difficult to obtain the equipment needed to perform the video transfer, or image scanning that is right for you.

2. Degradation and Deterioration
During the 80′s and 90′s, most of us were under the assumption that our precious memories stored onto magnetic tape would be safe forever. Recently, however, more and more people are realizing that this is simply not the case. Magnetic tape is great for short term play back of our fondest memories, or to relive a historic event. Video tapes deteriorate every year even if you don’t view them. Your precious memories painstakingly caught on tape WILL someday be unplayable. Most VHS tapes, with proper care, can last up to 20 years with only minor degradation issues. However, since VHS tapes have been obsolete for nearly 10 years now, the timeline is running thin! If you want these images to last, it’s best to get the VHS transfer to DVD done now, before it’s too late. DVDs can last you hundreds of years with absolutely no degradation, as the laser never makes direct contact with the disc itself. I’ve seen where people have, unfortunately, waited a bit too long to get their tapes transferred, and as a result they’re left with a fraction of what they once had.

1. Archiving/Preservation
Archiving your family’s media should always be in the back of your mind. Older media types, such as slides and video tapes, were never designed or meant to last forever. It has now become much easier to archive your tapes and images by simply capturing them to a hard drive or DVD. While most consumer DVDs typically last anywhere from 5-10 years, there are a few high-grade brands that will last you 100 or more years with proper care. Virtually all recordings from the last 40 years are in jeopardy, whether it be unique mastered audio recordings or news broadcasts. No tape is safe from the multiple threats that range from physical loss due to disaster, accidental erasure, or the increasing disappearance of equipment needed to play them back. Realistically, most of the inventory of tapes are duplicates of other materials, but many others are originals, masters, or unique content that cannot be easily duplicated. The amount of tapes needed to be restored is so huge, that it would take decades, even if facilities, techniques, and funding were readily available.

If you have any questions regarding the media transfer service, give us an email: info@dvdyourmemories.com

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Buzz it up
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post
• Tell a friend
• Print for later

Technorati Tags: audio, film to dvd, Film Transfer, Photo Scanning, scanning, Slide Scanning, vhs to dvd, video, video editing, video transfer