Don’t forget about your old VHS tapes! Many of us have tons of memories recorded on all kinds of different media such as 35mm slides, video tapes, loose photos, old 8mm film, etc. At DVD Your Memories we can preserve that video or image forever on one of our special archival DVDs with our VHS to DVD services that you can even hand out to family and friends!

Never worry about our discs not playing on your equipment, because we offer a complete compatibility guarantee on ALL of our services! In addition to this, all of our DVDs are labelled to your exact specifications, so organization of your new media is an absolute breeze.

Check out some of our services we provide in LA:

Cassette to CD Los Angeles
VHS to DVD Los Angeles
Film to DVD Los Angeles
Slide Scanning Los Angeles
Photo Scanning Los Angeles
Negative Scanning Los Angeles
Custom Slideshows Los Angeles

DVD Your Memories has opened it’s new office in Culver City and we’re now processing orders of all types including Los Angeles VHS to DVD, Photo Scanning, Slide Scanning, and Film to DVD projects! We’ve been working hard all week to ensure everything is in perfect working order. We dedicate ourselves to providing our customers with a one of a kind experience of transferring their cherished memories over to DVD and hard drive. Check out the images below for a quick view of the new office on moving day.

Come say hello and recommend us to your LA-area friends and family for local, on-site, friendly media transfer! We are proud to be your #1 choice for safe-handling, customization and easy-viewing of personal memories in Southern California.

DVD Your Memories has just opened our NEW store located in Culver City, California!

We are pleased to announce that your local, professional and specialized Family Media Transfer Technicians are now located at 3710 South Robertson Blvd Suite #205 Culver City, CA 90232.

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The new Los Angeles store has been all moved in and all orders can now be placed and processed! We will continue our mission to provide the highest quality media transfer services, such as video to DVD service in Los Angeles and film to DVD in Los Angeles. We’ve been hard at work the last couple weeks setting it up in order to transfer all of your precious memories onto our 100-year archival DVDs.

Don’t forget to stop in and say hello to our Los Angeles store team of Brian and Stephanie. Stephanie has been working hard at processing all kinds of image scanning orders, and would be the go-to person for any Los Angeles photo scanning needs such as scan photos in Los Angeles, Slide Scanning in Los Angeles, or Negative Scanning in Los Angeles. who will oversee the day-to-day operations of the store. We hope to see you soon!

When scanning older slides, it’s rare that you’ll find one that wouldn’t need even a little bit of restoration work. Fortunately, most of the higher end film-scanners have built in technology to counter the aging effect of old film and slides. This is called digital image correction and enhancement, or Digital ICE. Digital ICE technology automatically detects and removes surface defects such as dust and scratches.

Unlike software based restoration solutions, ICE technology works from within the actual scanner. The ICE technology uses a scanner with a pair of light sources, a normal RGB lamp and an IR lamp, and scans twice, once with each lamp. The IR lamp detects the dust locations with its unique detection method and then inpainting is applied based on this data afterwards. The general concept is to subtract the position of scratches and dust from the RGB image.

Check out a quick sample of what Digital ICE can do to a standard slide. (Click thumbnail to enlarge)


Digital ICE works great for large scale slide scanning San Diego, or negative scanning projects.

Over the years, DVD Your Memories has been through a couple design changes, but our mission remains the same. We care about your family memories and want you to preserve them and get the best transfers possible. which is to help and provide a resource for people preserve their memories that were captured on recordable media. We invite you to take a look at some of the logos that could have been DVD Your Memories. With a new store opening in Los Angeles, we’ll be able to process your orders even faster. Converting your video, audio, images and film to dvd in San Diego, Orange County, and LA is just so easy!

Why is Your Record Player Skipping?

Oh No! Your Record Skips! What Now?

Vinyl is great. It also happens to come with a lot of problems, such as record skipping. With the recent revival in popularity of vinyl record and record players, maybe you’ve brought your record collection out. Or, maybe you’ve purchased some new vinyl and want to play them on your old Rega player. Yet you find that there’s audible skipping and audio damage. Vinyl are certainly not the most durable form of media we’ve ever had, but they’re certainly one of the better-sounding ones. Ray Charles thought so, anyway. Luckily for you, you’ll almost certainly be able to solve your problem with skipping and audio distortion. If you ever decide to digitize your collection, you want the best capture quality possible.

Is it the Record or the Player?

The first thing to do is to figure out the cause. In the event that your record always skips at the same place, the record itself is damaged. If the time of the skips varies and it happens with all your records, you’ve got a faulty record player. Both issues are normally fixable, though, and you’ll more than likely get your audio back to the quality it should be.

If it’s the Record Skipping

Before you try to go and fix your record, you should first understand how they work. Basically, the sound waves themselves are imprinted on the vinyl, that’s why they’re an analog, not digital format. The magnetic needle is capable of translating the soundwave into an electrical signal. For a more technical explanation, this blog post is a good place to go. If you want to learn more about the process of actually making vinyl, we’ve written here about it. So, if you’re noticing skips happening in the same place, the records themselves are damaged or impaired. The needle can’t pass through the damaged area smoothly, and causes a loud pop and a skip. Look closely at the area on your record, ideally with a magnifying glass. Identify whether the groove itself is damaged, or there’s a foreign object impairing the needle.

Damaged Grooves

If the grooves are damaged, that’s probably the hardest thing to fix. We recommend trying to recreate the groove by lightly applying pressure to the needle while it passes over the damaged area. If you do it right, that will create a new groove almost like the old one, and restore the quality of the sound to most of where it was before the damage occurred. DJs often place small objects like coins, nuts, or bolts on the headshell of the needle in order to apply that little bit of extra pressure. That prevents skipping during play of heavily scratched areas of the vinyl, although it won’t carve a new groove nearly as well.

Foreign Objects

In the event that there’s a foreign object lodged in the groove, you need to get rid of it for the record to play properly. Try using a cotton swab to gently lodge it free. In the event that doesn’t work, move on to something more rigid, but nothing with a sharp edge. If your vinyl just has granules of dirt or motes of dust lodged in it, you should be able to clean it just using compressed air.

If It’s the Record Player Skipping

This is likely only a problem for you if you’ve got an old record player. That’s because it usually has to do with a lack of pressure on the headshell of the needle. If your record player is old, the trick used to be to place a penny on top of the needle. That would apply that tiny extra bit of pressure to get the needle in the groove properly. Modern record players come with an adjustable knob that accomplishes the same thing without adding a coin on top.

Not all records are in the same shape, but these techniques are usually helpful. You’ll almost certainly get better sound quality after you’ve applied them. They’re especially useful for digitizing vinyl records, especially for rare releases that you can no longer find. If you want to digitize them yourself, here’s our guide. If you want a professional to digitize for you, DVD Your Memories has been the best in Southern California for 15 Years. Here’s why you should choose us, and here are our four locations.

The goal of VHS restoration is to create a product that looks or sounds better than the source. This can be accomplished through a variety of ways, and commonly uses a combination of factors to achieve the desired results. Results will often vary, depending on the condition of the video, and what combination of techniques or equipment you’re using.

As with audio restoration, there is no one true method for eliminating all video errors. It can often be a tedious, time-consuming process of trial and error until you achieve the desired results. Experience and skill plays a large factor in video restoration, as with experience, you begin to notice how to diminish certain effects using various hardware and software tools.

Hardware

The first phase of the video restoration process is running the tape through high-end equipment in order to get the clearest video signal you possibly can. The VCR you use to transfer the video is actually the most important piece of equipment for VHS restoration. Video restoration is directly proportional to the quality of the source signal, which makes this step crucial to the VHS restoration process.

Finding a VCR capable of providing you with great results can be tough to find. I would suggest searching ebay, or local classifieds such as Craigslist, or the daily newspaper. Consumer VCRs you’d find at the local department stores will not get the job done, and can often leave your videos looking worse than before. For this step, expect to spend $300-400 for a VCR that can provide you with any sort of positive results. A VCR with a built-in time-based corrector would be the best bet for restoring old VHS tapes back to their original glory.

You’ll also need to obtain a high-quality video capture card for your computer. Do some research and make sure you invest in one that can deliver quality results. It’s best to steer clear of the USB type of video capture, and stick to an actual video capture card, or an advanced firewire unit such as a Canopus.

If quality is your main concern, I also suggest purchasing a standalone TBC, which will remove the damaged timing from the VHS tape, and replace it with a solid timing. This will help to remove flickering and other motion errors associated with older VHS tapes. This is also pretty expensive, but is a must-have for any serious video enthusiast.

Software

Most video editing programs have some restoration tools available. It usually just depends on what program you feel comfortable working in. Check out virtualdub for a great free program that can produce amazing results when combined with the right settings and plugins. When capturing video, it’s recommended to capture to uncompressed AVI format, and then apply the filters when encoding to MPEG.

Think about the oldest photos you have. The odds are that it is probably pretty important to you. What kind of condition is it in now? 30-40 year old photos tend to have more problems that not, often suffering from torn edges, faded colors, creases, and so on. It could probably benefit from some photo retouching work. Before the digital age, photo retouching was all done by hand on either the photo itself, the negative, or a combination of both.

Photo retouching has provided people with the ability to manipulate their images in a favorable way, either by removing blemishes, or adding effects to enhance the quality of the photo. There are some steps to take which will make the whole process go a little smoother. With the right amount of time and ability, you can restore old photos such as this.

To make retouching your own photos a little easier, try to follow these steps. Remember that photo restoration techniques come with first hand experience and knowledge, and the best jobs are often result of trial and error. Try different approaches and techniques to find the style that fits you.

1. Always save the original image. This is a key point that sometimes people will look over. Always saving your original image will prevent you from accidentally deleting or altering it. You will never get that data back unless you re-digitize the image. When performing photo retouching work, you should ALWAYS be working from a copy!

2. Make sure to align the image properly. After scanning, images can sometimes be tilted or shifted left or right or slightly rotated. Try to align the image as straight as possible using the image rotation tools of your photo editing software.

3. Once the image has been straightened out, you should now make your initial crop. This is just a basic crop which will remove any unwanted areas such as scanner glass or black borders that are sometimes present after scanning.

4. Try your best and assess the damage of the photo. Find out exactly what you’d like restored, and what kind of damage it is. Find out the causes of the problem, and what you can use to fix it up.

5. Adjust the tone of the image, so that the colors appear natural. Photos that are extensively faded may need the tone adjusted before you assess the damage, as the damage could be harder to detect and assess before the tone fixes have been applied.

6. Now it’s time to do the cleanup work for the restoration. Use your knowledge, the various filters and plugins at your disposal to your advantage.

7. Once the bulk of the restoration work is completed, you may need to alter the color levels of your image. Sometimes you may need to add color to black & white image or change color levels.

8. Add any enhancements to the photo through various tools and plugins. This step is all about applying the finishing touches to your retouched image.

9. Once all the work has been completed it’s time for a final crop. This will determine the final size and output of your image so make sure you crop it correctly!

10. Save the results. If you followed these each 10 steps you should now have a clean, retouched image that will last you a lifetime! You should ideally use this 10 step process for any photo scanning and restoration project for best results.