Don’t Make This Mistake When Preserving Your Old Home Movies and Photos

Have a bunch of old home movies and photos collecting dust on the shelf? You have no way to watch or organize them? What to do? Hmmm, get them transferred to DVD. Stop! Don’t you want to tell a story with those home movies and photos? Let’s look at why transferring your old home movies, photos, and slides to hard drive makes organizing that media into a story much simpler.

This was something I spent quite a bit of time covering in my workshop on storytelling with your media. Let’s look at the best method for preserving and organizing video and photos.

Video preservation

If you have hours of home movies on 8mm tape, but no longer own an 8mm camera, you would think you’d want to watch it right on a DVD, right? Wrong.

Chances are, those old tapes also contain several minutes of footage of lens cap, floor, sidewalk, general boring stuff. Guess what? That’s just as boring on a DVD as it was on the tape.

Remember, we want to tell a compelling story with our photos and home movies. Watching two hours of opening presents on Christmas Day 1988 isn’t exactly a thrilling story. But, cut it down to a two to five minute montage interspersed with meaningful photos from the day; now we’re talking.

But if you had that video transferred direct to DVD, how are you going to tell a story with it? Yes, it’s possible to get the raw footage back off of the DVD, but it’s heavily compressed and won’t look good when edited together with your photos.

One DVD can actually hold approximately 4 GB of movie footage. If your tape was 2 hours long, as most 8mm tapes were, that’s actually about 26 GB of movie data. That’s an awful lot of compression.

Even if you get the software to get the footage back off of the DVD, learn how to use it, and import it into an editing program, you’re not going to wind up with a beautiful final movie.

That’s why you want to transfer old film and video to hard drive. You can still have DVDs made for easy viewing, but the transfer to hard drive ensures that you can edit the footage into a story.

Photo preservation

If you have unlabelled shoe boxes of photos, it can seem a daunting task to try to organize that into a story. It’s much easier to organize them into a story once they are digital.

If you have more than about 1000 photos or slides to scanned, you might want to consider having them transferred to a flash drive rather than DVD. You can then have them all in one location rather than miscellaneous DVDs. When we scanned 21,000 slides for a client last year, he quickly figured out that one hard drive would be a whole lot easier for him to organize that a bunch of DVDs, which can’t be reorganized into other folders.

Hard Drive Maintenance

There are a couple of things you should remember when getting your media transferred to hard drive. First of all, hard drives need some routine maintenance. You want to connect them to your computer at least once per year and boot them up to perform their own defrags and other geek terms. I am a geek, so I’m allowed to say that.

Don’t use the hard drive containing your precious media as the backup drive for your computer. Automatic backups are generally set to continue backing up until they run out of hard drive space, and then they begin to overwrite files.

Whatever you do, don’t reformat, partition, setup or initialize the drive!!!! That is geek speak for erasing everything on it.

Alright, so you have your home movies and photos on a hard drive, rather than simply on a DVD. Next week we’ll take a look at how to actually organize them into a story using that storyboard we talked about two weeks ago.