Ever converted your old home movies to DVD? Have you actually watched the entire length of the DVD? And, last question, did you watch it at normal playback speed?
Your Dad captured your first trip to the ocean on video. All two hours of your trip is on that DVD. Someplace in the middle, you’re not sure where, is a hilarious scene of your first attempt on a surfboard.
So you suffer through the whole DVD. It’s boring, so you watch your precious memories in high-speed. Take your pick, 2x or 4x speed, your memories go whizzing by.
Why bother? Wouldn’t it make more sense to edit it them down to a manageable length before watching them with family?
You want them to re-live the memories, not be bored by them.
Especially if it was a transfer from 16 mm film reels rather than VHS. Those reels most likely didn’t have any sound. If you were lucky, your transfer service included some beautiful royalty-free music, if not, you received two hours of video with no sound at all.
The music might sound like elevator music, and perhaps didn’t exactly go with the mood of the video, but it was better than nothing. You only fell asleep after the first 15 minutes.
What you really want to do is edit these home movies down to a watchable length, add some titles and captions, perhaps add some photos. Then you can share it with family at normal speed.
If your video is transferred to DVD, you can edit it directly from the DVD format (MPEG-2 files). However, it will be of very poor quality. You’ll need this software to get the files into a format which can be edited.
Your best bet when getting video converted is to have it transferred to an external hard drive. You can then either edit it down yourself or have it professionally edited.
Once you have a hard drive edition of your film, you can begin the editing process! Remember to keep the overall movie length under 30 minutes. The yawning begins at about that point.
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