Missed out on CES 2012? Check out some of the cool highlights below. Some of the coolest gadgets from the most innovative companies in the world have shown up to show everyone their latest technologies and patents. Unfortunately, no one from our staff was able to make it this year, but we look forward to making it next year! In the meantime, we’ll be busy upgrading our own technology for transferring video to DVD!
Looking for a place to scan your collection of old family photos? Our office in Denver is equipped with high quality flatbed scanners and photo scanning equipment to convert your photographs into digital images that you can keep and share for a lifetime.
If you’re planning on getting your collection of photos scanned, the whole process is actually easier than you’d think. The hardest part of the project is usually the initial organization stage. If you have a mountain of photos, you may not want to get ALL of them scanned, or perhaps you’d like to scan batches at a time. Once the organization is complete, however, the hard work is done, and they are ready to be scanned. Check the map below for easy directions to our office.
First, you’ll simply drop on by our store with your photos by either appointment or walk-in. One of our technicians (usually the one who will be working on your order) will ask a few basic questions to help guide you through the order taking process and come up with an initial estimate. Once the specifications have been decided, the technician will give you a completion date, and your copy of the estimate.
Here are some of the advantages of choosing DVD Your Memories for your photo scanning in Denver:
All your images are scanned and transferred to our 100-year archival DVDs. If you choose to place your images on one of our DVDs, we’ll place everything on our Taiyo-Yuden DVDs rated to last up to 100 years.
We don’t use document scanners to scan your photos. We only use high quality flat-bed scanners to digitize your photos.
All scans are performed in-house. We never outsource any of your media. All of your photos will be scanned here at our local office. In addition to photos, all of your media will be transferred at the location that you dropped your images off at.
We’ll make sure that each and every one of your images are cropped and rotated correctly. We even have a second technician check over your order prior to finalizing to make sure it is 100% accurate, start to finish.
Free custom folder and file naming, meaning that we will organize and name your photos to your specifications. For more details, check out our photo scanning page.
If you opt to place your photo scanning order onto one of our DVDs, you can title the disc however you’d like!
Many Rare formats supported such as photo albums and large format photos. In addition, we also support many rare and obsolete formats for slide scanning and negative scanning.
Contact sheets allow you to view your collection of images quickly in an indexed format. All of your images will be nicely indexed and placed into a custom binder with your images.
Slideshow creation services are available for Denver photo scanning orders that need a little more flair or touch. You can even sit down with our in-house editor to create something truly fantastic. The options are limitless!
1. Someone’s wedding is one of the most important days of their entire lives. What better way to show your husband or wife that you care than by transferring your wedding tape to DVD! Transferring the video to DVD will help prevent further deterioration and degradation, so that you’ll be able to keep a copy of this special event forever. Show your special someone you truly care by converting your precious memories to a DVD! 2. Tribute video creation is another great way to show family or friends a meaningful message. Gather up some photos and create a themed slideshow detailing the years events or the life of one of your own. Custom slideshows are great for parties, family gatherings and events! 
3. Does someone close to you have tons and tons of old photos or photo albums? I’m sure they would just love to get all of their precious photos scanned and digitized at some point, but are probably having trouble of where to start. Spend a day with them organizing the photos, or even picking out the most important ones that can be used to scan into the computer later, so that you’ll always have a digital copy, even if something were to happen to the original image. Even mentioning to the person you love to get their photo albums scanned can be a huge motivator! 
4. Turning old images from photos, slides or negatives into personalized photo items and gifts has been popular for years. Nearly any kind of item can be created from a photo. We’ve seen quite a variety of items to choose from and the most popular include coffee mugs, t-shirts, charms and mousepads! This is a great way to show someone you care and to keep them thinking of you! 5. Framed picture enlargements are great for Mom and Dad, especially after a family photo shoot. These are wonderful gifts that can be hung or displayed in just about every room of the house. If someone’s walls are little lacking in the artwork department, try gifting them an enlarged photo. 
6. Similar to a framed picture enlargements are the canvas prints. You can convert slides, negatives or photos to a canvas printed image! These are awesome decorating pieces that are gaining a lot of popularity. It will essentially allow you to turn any image into an exeptional work of art. These are also great gifts for your child’s prized drawing creations. 
7. Got an entertainer or a music lover in the family? Try recording a family music video and sharing it with friends! You can film all sorts of sequences and blend them to the music using video editing software. Once finished, it’s easy to upload to Youtube, or other file sharing site to watch with family or friends. You can set the video as private, or public for the whole world to see. 8. Creating a digital scrapbook out of photo albums is a great way to share all of your cool photos, without having to lug around severl photo albums. If you scan photo albums to CD or DVD, you can take the digital images, and insert them into a slideshow or scrapbook creation software to make the perfect piece to show off to all of your friends. 
9. Create a custom calendar from your photos. Calendar creation is a great gift, especially towards the end, or beginning of the year. Many people use traditional calendars to track their day to day activities, despite the prevelance of web and smartphone calendar apps. This is especially true if you craft a cusom calendar with your own images. You can even print special messages on certain days to remind your loved ones of important events. 
10. Start up accounts on a family sharing site is a great way to keep up with your family’s activity and media. It’s like a central hub that contains all of your family history and media– where everyone can upload funny pictures, videos and short messages to each other. If the whole family uses a site like this, it can get even better, since multiple people are providing content and uploading the site on a consistant basis.
Before film is viewed, or ready to transfer to DVD, it must first be properly cleaned and inspected for breaks in the film. If no film cleaning is done, the film will appear dark, grainy, and often times much harder to watch. To properly clean and lubricate your film, you’re going to want to get some manual 8mm film rewinders. These can be mounted to ply wood, or other wood base to help with your project. In addition to the hand cranks, you’ll also need to obtain a spare reel, or tak-eup reel. The photo below shows a typical pair of film rewinders. If you’re a hardcore DIYer, you could probably fashion something similar out of parts you find around the house.
The materials you’ll need to clean the film are some silicon cleaning cloth, and some film cleaning solution, which can be purchased from our friends at urbanskifilm.
Once all the pieces are gathered, and assembled, it’s time to begin inspecting and cleaning your film. Make sure you’re hand cranks are mounted properly.
1. Use the right winder as the take-up reel Load the film into the reels so that the emulsion or dull side is facing up and the sprocket holes should face you.
2. Use a small amount of cleaning solution on the silicon cleaning cloth.
3. Fold the cloth over the film and pinch it between your fingers.
4. Slowly load the film onto the take-up making sure some gentle pressure is applied to the cleaning cloth and the film. Change cloth frequently as it will gather lots of dirt.
5. Repeat the process and load the film back onto the original reel.
6. Repeat if film isn’t cleaned entirely.
During this film cleaning process, it’s common for splices to break which puts a halt into your efforts. When a break happens, you’ll need to splice them back to gether. If at all possible, you want to avoid using tape to splice the film back together. For best results you’ll want to use a splicing kit, and some film cement. Use the picture below to see what the splicer looks like. The splicing process isn’t complicated, but needs to be pretty precise.
1. Place the film on the splicer, spocket holes facing you and line them up in the pins.
2. Raise the lower and upper left arm and upper right arm. Place film on the right of the registration pins, dull side up, and clamp it in place with the upper right arm.
3. Press the left arm down, which cuts the film. Then raise the upper and lower right arm.
4. Place the film to be spliced on the registration pins on the lower left arm, dull side up, and clamp it down with the left arm. Then cut the film using the right arm.
5. Now dip one end of a small cloth into some water, and moisten the film protruding beyond the left arm. Scrape all of the emulsion from this portion using a scraping tool. Wipe away all emulsion with a cloth. Make sure surface is dry, and apply small amount of film cement.
6. Bring right arm down over the cemented portion and wait at least one minute for the cement to dry. Lift all arms and remove film and inspect to make sure splice is complete.a
This is obviously a lot of work and setup involved, but film cleaning is an absolute must for the ideal film conversion. For small amounts of film, we recommend simply taking it in for a 8mm to DVD transfer or hard drive conversion. Prior to each film to DVD transfer, we clean every inch of your film and make sure it is spliced together neatly.
A neat little toy has been found for the 8mm film enthusiast. The camcorder is called the Fuuvi Bee Camera, and it’s actually capable of shooting over 100 minutes of footage on a single charge. What makes it even more interesting, is that because of the low specs on the camera, the resulting footage has the look and feel of a vintage 8mm film. They even took the care to design the camera as a 8mm look-a-like!
The specs on the camera are far below what you’d find on it’s competitors. The video is recorded at 640×480 at 30fps and the camera is a 1.3MP also capable of taking still shots. The camera is pretty tiny, and you don’t have to worry about changing out reels of film every few minutes. When you’re finished shooting, the camera plugs right into your computer with a USB plug housed on the camera itself.
Here’s a short sample of the quality it can provide.
Maybe once finished transferring all of the 8mm film to DVD, you can start recording even more 8mm movies with everyone grown up, and combine them with your film transfer DVD for a comedic effect!
Have you ever wanted to watch videos from your computer or tablet on your home TV? Well believe it or not, there are several products on the market which will allow you to do just that! These little media boxes will enable you to watch all of your movies, media, and music, plus other high def streaming video sources on your TV just by connecting a hard drive. There are actually several different brands, the most common being the Apple TV, WD TV Live, and Roku.
Apple TV is most beneficial to those of you who own Apple products such as iMacs, Macbooks, and iPads. Apple TV plays all of your media wirelessly on your widescreen TV. No managing storage. No syncing to your iTunes library. HD movies and TV shows from iTunes and Netflix play over the Internet on your HDTV, and music and photos stream from your computer. All you have to do is click and watch. Apple TV also integrates itself with iCloud, which will allow you to play all of your media stored in the cloud.
WD TV Live is another option, similar to Apple TV. The newest version comes bundled with it’s own wifi adapter, so you can connect to the internet from anywhere in the house. The WD TV will provide high def streaming of media, and also play media directly from a hard drive, if plugged in via USB.
Roku is one of the first streaming media boxes, and one with a lot of support from users and the company. Roku is popular due to it’s design, and capabilities such as being able to play streaming HBO channels and movies straight from wifi. Roku also comes preloaded with apps and channels including Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Crackle and Pandora.
All in all, these are wonderful new devices that everyone should use for their own media. They’re especially great for streaming family movies and audio from the cloud after a video to DVD transfer, or a 8mm to DVD transfer!
We all know the Betamax format was technically superior to the VHS tape if we simply compared specs on the tapes themselves. However, you also need to consider the “whole product”.
“The whole product” model also provided a convincing explanation of why VHS had thrashed Betamax. VHS offered a bigger choice of hardware at lower cost, the tapes were cheaper and more easily available, there were a lot more movies to rent, and so on. Indeed, the main thing that didn’t fit was the idea was that Betamax was “technically superior”. Standing in a shop at the time, there was absolutely no visible difference in picture quality, and some reviews had found that VHS’s quality was superior.
When transferring betamax to DVD and VHS to DVD in San Diego, it’s often hard to tell which one is of better quality due to the age of the tapes, you be the judge!
