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With Mother’s Day right around the corner, it can often be tough to decide what to get mom this year. Sure, you could go out and buy the annual staples like some flowers and a nice card, but what about giving mom something not only special and unique, but something that can last her an entire lifetime?

If you look around mom’s house, you’ll probably notice some older media laying around or in boxes. You know what I’m talking about — the old video tapes, photos, slides and film from the old days that nobody has even looked twice at in years. This is all stuff that she likely has no idea what to do with now that most of the technology needed to play that old media has been obsolete for decades.

However, just because the media is obsolete by today’s standards, doesn’t mean that it still can’t be enjoyed in a hassle-free way. By transferring those old family memories to DVD or hard drive, you can view, share and print your favorite memories with a simple click of the mouse or remote control! Never again sift through the attic looking for that special photo or cherished video tape.

Just imagine how special it would be to give your mom and grandmother a DVD of the family growing up in the early years. A small glimpse of the past can brighten anyone’s day! Don’t forget that we can add voice-overs to your project to give it an extra personal touch. Not only will it be very special for Mother’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.

Media transfer ideas for Mother’s Day:

–Scanning old photos is a great way to show off the good times. For example, just take one of Mom’s old vacation photo albums and create a custom slideshow DVD showing off all of the cool trips. Our talented editors are full of excellent ideas to make this the best Mother’s day gift ever!

-Transfer a few of the most cherished VHS tapes from decades past. Converting VHS tapes to DVD is a great way to effortlessly enjoy the old VHS format, share with additional family and friends, and to preserve the footage from further degradation!

-Convert and transfer Mom or Grandma’s old collection of family films. You can even edit the footage and create your own DVD masterpiece to hand out not only to mom, but the rest of the family!

Throughout the country and the world, there are still millions of pieces of analog media in storage, desperately needing to be converted into a digital format before time takes it’s toll. In 2005 the first comprehensive national survey of the condition and preservation needs of the nation’s collections reported that U.S. institutions hold more than 4.8 billion items. Libraries alone hold 3 billion items (63 percent of the whole).

In addition, there’s still a vast number of uncounted items held by individuals, families and communities which include books, photographs, art pieces, audio tapes, video tapes and film. These valuable, irreplaceable memories are becoming more and more obsolete as time drags on, and could even one day be deteriorated to the point of no return! We encourage instituation and families alike to take some time out of their day to start sorting through their important media and deciding what’s important enough to digitize and preserve for the future.

DVD Your Memories can help you with a wide variety of digitization services including:

Video tapes to DVD
Stop video tape degradation in it’s tracks! We can process and transfer a wide variety of formats including all consumer video tape formats including VHS, VHS-C, MiniDV, MiniDVD, MicroMV, Hi8, Video8, Digital8 and Betamax tapes, and many professional formats including Betacam and U-Matic tapes.

Film to DVD
Protect your family film for generations to come with our high quality film to DVD services. We can transfer your important 8mm, Super 8 and 16mm film to DVD, hard drive, or both!

Audio transfer to CD
Transfer and restore your old audio and listen to voices of the past! Many formats supported through our audio transfer and restoration services including audio cassettes, microcassettes, reel to reel audio, and vinyl records and LPs.

Photo, Slide & Negative Scanning
Protect and preserve your collection of images by scanning them to a DVD or your personal hard drive. We can scan your images at a crisp 4000DPI to provide you with true archival quality scans.

Preservation Week was created in 2010 because some 630 million items in collecting institutions require immediate attention and care. Eighty percent of these institutions have no paid staff assigned responsibility for collections care; 22 percent have no collections care personnel at all. Some 2.6 billion items are not protected by an emergency plan. As natural disasters of recent years have taught us, these resources are in jeopardy should a disaster strike. Personal, family, and community collections are equally at risk!

To access toolkits on preservation, news, or to find events near you and much more, we encourage you to visit the Preservation Week website.

Ahh, the fond memories of childhood plays, musicals and performances. These are all important memories that families can share for a lifetime. Who knows, this can be first footage of the next great American Idol or Oscar winner!

These types of tapes are often very enjoyable to re-watch decades later to show off how great (or not so great?) of a performer you or your child was. The problem is, finding the equipment to watch these older tapes can be often be an insurmountable task, then trying to figure out how to hook everything up to your TV… A nightmare situation for many of us!

Converting these childhood videos to DVD solves a lot of issues, such as the ease of watching and easily being able to be shared with close friends and family. Not to mention the fact that you can also upload your new digitized videos to sharing sites like Youtube and Vimeo.

Since a lot of tapes contain a lot of uninteresting footage, another cool thing you can do is to digitize your children’s tapes or performances into digital files placed on a hard drive, and edit them together to create a visual masterpiece of their best bits throughout their childhood. The best part is that you don’t even need to have a knack for directing because our in-house editors are skilled with all things editing and can help create the perfect video for your next gift idea or event.

Instead of letting your old childhood video tapes sit in the attic and slowly fade away, why not transfer these valuable tapes to DVD? If anything, they are great for embarrassment ammo once your child turns into their teens!

If you have a vast collection of photos on your computer, hard drive or DVDs somewhere, it can often be a near insurmountable task to find any one particular photo, especially if they are disorganized, and crawling with duplicate photos. After a large photo scanning job, people often next, what next?

The first step is to decide what your goals are. Do you want to organize them by date, by person, or by event? Or maybe a combination like “Christmas 1993”, or “Road Trip 2001”. You should also decide how accessible you want your photo collection to be. Do you want them able to be viewed online? Viewable on your television?

The first step towards ultimate organization and indexing of digital photos is to make sure you have them all in a centralized location. For this step, it’s best to use a clean hard drive or even a new/separate computer to store all of your photos. Make sure you take them off all of the SD cards, hard drives, DVDs, computers, social networking accounts and digital cameras you might have laying around. Once they’re all on one machine or hard drive, it greatly simplifies the task of finding that one pesky photo.

Once they are all located in one place, you can begin the initial sorting and indexing process.

To begin indexing your collection of images, we highly recommend a respected photo organizer like Google’s Picasa or Apple’s iPhoto. These programs can help you better to manage your collection by offering grouping and folder creation utilities to help you sort through them much easier than if they were all housed in one or a couple of folders. They also offer great auto-sorting abilities. For example, Picasa offers the ability to sort by facial recognition, with extreme accuracy, which is great for finding photos of a particular person with just a few keystrokes. These sorting features work great for scanned photos, or other photos with little to no data.

As far as sorting goes, simply sorting by facial features is enough for some people, but if you want them completely organized, you’ll have to spend some extra time creating folders and placing the photos where they need to go.

Picasa also includes the feature to “Show Duplicates” which allows you to see which images you have multiples of and delete them because more than likely you’re going to be pulling in some dupes, especially if you’re pulling photos from more than one source.

Granted, depending on how granular you want your images sorted, it will still take some serious dedication to get through all of them and put them where they need to go, but with the nifty auto-sorting features, you can spend much less time searching through endless photos to find the ones you need.

Gotta Groove Records – “Groove With Us” from Nick Cavalier on Vimeo.

Despite the waning popularity of traditional analog media such as 8-track and audio cassettes, vinyl records are still being steadily produced and collected, even today. Digital downloads from services like iTunes have essentially taken the place of the CD nowadays, leaving little reason to go out and purchase an audio CD. However, many people still prefer to have a physical copy of their music, and a surprising majority of people prefer the warmer sounding vinyl records over digital audio, which has led to a resurgence of vinyl records over the last few years.

Even new vinyl producing companies are sprouting up, check out the video above to see how Gotta Groove Records makes vinyls from raw materials.

Depending on when you were born, you are probably familiar with the old gramophone, or vinyl record. A record is an analog-based sound storage and playback mechanism consisting of a flat disc with inscribed spiral grooves running along the inside of the record. The groove starts at the outer edge of the disc, which is also the beginning of the first track or song, and then spirals inward as the record turns on the turntable.

Thomas Edison is credited with the invention of the phonograph, and was actually one of the first devices to both record and play back sounds way way back in 1877. In the old days, it recorded sound as indentations on a sheet of tin foil wrapped around a grooved cylinder. This could then be played back by rotating the cylinder with a needle gently gliding along the grooves which in turn vibrated a mechanical diaphragm to reproduce the sound. It actually wasn’t until the early 20th century that the cylinder was replaced by the flat disc we know and love today. Originally, these records had to be played on a turntable that required a hand-crank, and the sound fidelity wasn’t the greatest. Soon enough, the 78 speed record was released, which was seen as a great technological accomplishment over the traditional hand-cranked versions.

This quality increased even further with the release of the standard 33 RPM records which were released in the 1950’s. These discs were capable of holding up to 25 minutes per side which was a huge step up from the 3-4 minutes of the 78 RPM records. Typically, audio was recorded onto tape first, which could easily be edited and its sound optimized in post production. The audio on the tape would then be dubbed onto a master disc, or a lacquer or acetate disc. Unlike mass produced vinyl records which are molded, the master disc is physically cut, its grooves gouged out on by a record-cutting machine’s needle whose mechanical motion is guided by an audio input. The grooves are checked for quality, and then sent off to the production company who would then create a metal cast of the lacquer master disc. This metal cast is then taken and used to stamp the actual vinyl records available to consumers.

Each stamper, which is attached to an autonomous 100-ton hydraulic press, works essentially like a big, heavy waffle iron and can churn out thousands of records before needing replacement. A sheet of preheated vinyl roughly half the area but 3 times the thickness of a finished disc, called the biscuit, is slipped between the jaws of the press, 300 degree F steam is applied to further soften the material before the jaws close, and squeeze the hot vinyl into its final shape while imprinting the audio. The disc is then cooled and hardened in a water bath and labelled—all of which is done automatically, the only human input is the loading of the two disc labels sandwiched around the biscuit.

We are excited to announce that we just lowered our pricing on ALL media transfer services, and this pricing is here to stay! DVD Your Memories pricing is now simpler, more uniform and competitive for all of our awesome services.

Thank you to all of our customers for your support and and your interest in our digital media transfer services over the years. We are delighted to continue to provide the BEST service in Southern California and Denver when it comes to converting your precious media. We hope these new lower prices will ensure that your media lasts a lifetime!

Check out the new pricing for any of our professional services:

• Video tape transfer
• Film Transfer
• Audio Transfer
• Photo Scanning
• Slide Scanning
• Negative Scanning

Feel free to contact us at any time at 1-877-388-6093

Also, don’t forget to check us out and LIKE us on Facebook for great upcoming promotions and deals on all of our services ranging from hundreds of dollars in Gift Cards to free video tape transfers, the sky is the limit!

How would you feel if every home movie and photograph of your kids, parents, and friends were gone in an instant? How would you ever replace those invaluable memories?

When preparing for the thought of a natural disaster such as a flood, fire, tornado, or hurricane many of us think about those precious belongings we would take with us in the event of an evacuation. And, most of us probably know EXACTLY which boxes of photos, home movies, and other keepsakes we would grab. But, we’ve all witnessed the devastation that these events can cause, either in our communities or on the news. Even those that make painstaking plans to protect their families and their prized possessions are often left with little time to gather ANY belongings, much less their important family media.

Learn how to protect your precious memories now – FREE Project Consultation

Most of us were enraptured with the Hurricane Sandy coverage we saw, this past October; nearly 150 individuals lost their lives and millions were affected. The devastation was unprecedented and the financial losses surpassed $70 Billion. But, not included in that financial figure are the priceless items that were also lost – precious memories of times past, family histories, invaluable video of a child’s first steps or a collection of wedding or anniversary pictures. And, unfortunately, these are often those things that you can’t take with you when these tragic events occur.

And while there is little you can do to prevent the next hurricane or tornado, there are many things you can do to protect your precious family memories.

The best way to preserve and prevent your old media from the effects of a natural disaster is to digitize and archive them, electronically. Video tapes, photographs, slides, negatives, film and audio can all be converted to a variety of digital formats that can be stored on modern devices such as smartphones, thumb-drives, hard-drives, CD/DVDs or as digital files that you can store as data online or “in the cloud”. Instead of trying to catalog and salvage your hundreds or thousands of photographs and home movies, you can keep your entire photo and video collection safeguarded on something as small as a USB thumb-drive or a DVD. Converting your media is a simple, cost-effective way to ensure that in the event the original copies are destroyed or lost, your family can continue to cherish these for generations to come.

How many of those invaluable moments in time were lost? We’ve prepared a free infographic, or graphical representation of how significant this overlooked piece of emotional impact may have been.

RIGHT NOW is always an appropriate time to ask your family and yourself, “Are our memories safe from natural disasters?”

Use This Hurricane Sandy Infographic for FREE on Your Site!

You may use the infographic above on your website, however, the license we grant to you requires that you properly and correctly attribute the work to us with a link back to our website by using the following embed code:

<a href=”https://dvdyourmemories.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/free-hurricane-sandy-infographic.jpg” />
<img src=”https://dvdyourmemories.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/free-hurricane-sandy-infographic-thumb.jpg”alt=”Hurricane Sandy Infographic” /></a><br/> <p>Infographic authored by DVD Your Memories, a <a href=”https://dvdyourmemories.com”>Family Media Transfer</a> Company. To view the original post, see the original<a href=”https://dvdyourmemories.com/blog/memories-safe-free-infographic-hurricane-sandy/”>Hurricane Sandy infographic</a>.</p>