Tag: Media Digitization

DFW Metroplex, Photo Organization, Photo Organization Coach, Photography

Accessing & Preserving Your Video History

Jane Sadek

MEMORY KEEPING 101 – OFF THE SHELF AND INTO YOUR LIFE

Reclaim Your Video Memories

From old reel-to-reel home videos to moments recorded on phones, video memories have been a part of our media landscape for a long time. My family never went down the movie path, so my personal experience with them is limited. However, I have a lot of customers whose memories are more video than photograph. Forever can handle that, too.

What I usually hear first from video clients is they have a stack of tapes/reels somewhere and they don’t even have the equipment to watch them. I have both good and bad news to deliver at this point. The good news is, Forever CAN convert those tapes/reels to digital. The bad news is, there is no watching service to give you a report on what the video contains before the conversion. It is during conversion the subject matter becomes knowable.

So, whether your tapes/reels have riveting moments of well-shot action or hours and hours of poorly shot videography (which would cure insomnia), you get the good with the bad. The good news is this. Once the footage is digital, there are lots of great apps and software out there with which you can turn the yawners into jewels with just a little editing. So, while we all wish our parents, grandparents and spouses were better videographers, at least we can save the good parts for future generations.

What Does It Cost?

I’m not going to lie. Pricing digital conversions is tricky. A small Forever box is regularly priced at $60 (but there’s always some kind of deal going on, so it will never be that much). That price includes the conversion of two “items” in Forever-speak. An item can be a VCR tape or a 50 ft reel (or 25 photo/slides for that matter, but we’re talking video today). If you put two VCR tapes or two 50 ft reels or one VCR tape and one 50 ft reel in the box, digitizing them will be covered. However, the boxes will hold more than two videos, and Forever encourages you to fill them in order to save shipping, but that’s where it gets confusing.

I go over this with everyone who ships in media to be converted, but often they are so excited about the project they don’t hear me. Then we have sticker shock and I hate that. While you can fill the box to the brim, whatever you put in there beyond the first two items cost extra at the regular price of $30 per item.

So, at regular price, if you had 5 tapes/reels. You’d pay $60 for the box, $90 for the extras and then shipping and taxes would be added to that. That’s $150 to reclaim your memories (at regular price) and that’s a pretty good deal – a lot better deal than storing tapes/reels you can’t watch.

Now, the more tapes/reels you have the larger that number gets. If you’re currently storing boxes and boxes of these things, then we need to get together an discuss strategies. We can watch together for the best specials on conversion. Perhaps you have family members who would share the cost with you. You could join Forever as an Ambassador for a year and enjoy that discount on your conversions. And there’s always The Forever Club to help you budget your memory keeping expenses.

Special Considerations

Certain types of media come with certain restrictions. For instance, let’s say you sent in what you thought was your wedding tape and it was all I Love Lucy reruns. It’s always best if you have some idea what’s on your media and if you don’t, please understand our technicians need to be paid for the time they spend on your material, even if it’s not what you thought it would be.

There is nothing Forever can do about the missing wedding footage and they are not allowed to reproduce copies of copyrighted material, so you’d have a conversion mess. At least if it were blank, you could get back 50% of your money, but to pay for finding out you didn’t have the wedding tape you thought you did, that would be a really bad day. Thankfully, we don’t run into many bad days.

While it might be obvious I Love Lucy or Batman Returns are copyrighted, there are other things that might not be as obvious. Take wedding videos by a professional videographer or game clips from your child’s team or video you bought at a dance competition or swim meet. Because you paid for these tapes, you might think that you own the rights to them, but in most cases you do not. Technically, you are supposed to return to the videographer who created the original.

While this is technically true, in many cases, it could be virtually impossible to find the videographer and honor the copyright. So, if you are only digitizing the copyrighted media for your personal use, then you can sign a waiver releasing Forever from any responsibility, should you be sued for improperly use of the footage. I’m warning you though, don’t turn around and use it in a “for profit” project or you could end up in the middle of a very serious law suit.

Just, in case you are wondering, if you have documents like birth, death and wedding certificates, or census and deed records or any publicly available documents, those are not copyrighted. Digitize away!

What If There’s Something Wrong with the Video?

Forever will do the very best it can to digitize whatever video you turn over to them – even if it is broken or damaged. I’ve heard many heartwarming stories about people who doubted Forever would even be able to digitize a single frame of a tape. They thought if they could get back anything they’d be lucky. To their amazement they got back a digitized copy and they couldn’t even tell there had been any damage on the original. Forever cannot guarantee you’ll get back something that looks better than the original, but that could actually be the case in many situations.

So, How Exactly Does it Work?

Well, first choose the box you think will best fit the media items you want digitized, then let’s talk so I can be sure you’ve taken advantage of all the discounts available. You pay for your box, shipping and the covered items up front. You can also choose to get thumb drives or DVD’s if you like, but we should talk about Forever storage and streaming. Soon your box will be delivered.

Materials for packing your box, packing instructions, a worksheet and your shipping label will be inside. Follow the instructions and fill up your box. I’ll be happy to help you with this step. The worksheet will show you what’s included with the purchase of the box and give you an estimate of the amount you will need to pay for extra items. Put the paperwork in with your media and put the shipping label on the outside. The let Fed Ex know there is a pick-up or just drop it off at a box or office. You can keep an eye on the Forever Box Center to know what’s going on.

When Forever gets the box, they audit the worksheet and the items you have packed, to make sure they are correct. Then they’ll start digitizing. It’s all done right here in the good old US of A and lovingly handled by gloved humans, rather than machines. The difference is noticeable take a look at the “A step above the rest” section, on the lower part of this page to see why Forever is better: https://www.forever.com/ambassador/jane-sadek/digital-conversion

When you items are digitized, Forever will notify you that your videos are in your box center. The images will stay in your Box Center for 60 days, giving you time to add them to your Forever account, download them to your computer or whatever. They’ll also ship your stuff back, along with any DVD’s or thumb drives you’ve ordered.

And that’s it. I, of course, would love to discuss the benefits of storing these precious memories on your own Forever account. DVD’s and thumb drives are not permanent storage devices. Someday folks will look at them the way you would look at a 78 rpm vinyl record – if you do have a device to play it on, chances are it won’t sound the way you though it would.

One of the best reasons to choose Forever as your online storage provider is their video streaming service. We’ll talk about that next Thursday.

Photo Organization, Photo Organization Coach, Photography

Digitize Your Memories

Jane Sadek

MEMORY KEEPING 101 – PUT ALL YOUR MEMORIES ONLINE WITH FOREVER

Forever Boxes Make Digital Easy

Unless you’re quite young, you’ve watched the world go from analog to digital. One set of grandparents used a Brownie Hawkeye camera to take photographs, while another set grandparents opted for slides. An uncle wandered around all of your family gatherings filming reels and reels of movies. Then maybe your dad showed up with a huge camera on his shoulder to take VHS tapes and you may remember when he changed over to the Hi8 format. Then you went digital, but you’ve got photos on your computer, more on dvds, others on a hard drive, perhaps some on the cloud, but a whole lot on your phone, for sure!

A lot of that media you can’t even look at, because you no longer have the equipment it needs and if a photo you want to find is on your phone, then you might have to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll to find it. Last week I told you how wonderful Forever’s storage is and obviously moving all your digital images from wherever they are to your own digital storage space will be easy. But what about the photos, the slides, the movies and all the rest. Well, Forever can convert it all to digital – including the piles of photographs.

Well, that’s easy, too. You put it all in a box and send it to Forever. Not just any box, a Forever box and I’ll be happy to help you.

Your Forever Box

Here’s how it works. We decide which box(es) is/are going to hold all your stuff and order what you need from Forever. Forever sends you an empty box to fill up with all the items you would like to be converted to digital. When the box comes, you fill it up and send it back to Forever. Forever digitizes it and puts it online. Then they’ll send your stuff back to you, but if you don’t want it, you can just dump it in the trash, because all your stuff is online.

When Forever digitizes your material, it goes into a temporary storage account for 60 days, so you can decide what you want to do with it. They’ll also be happy to produce a dvd or thumb drive. But the very best thing you can do, in my opinion, is get your own permanent storage from Forever and put your memories there. Those memories will be there to be enjoyed by generations to come and you can rest easy.

Organizing Your Online Memories

Once you’ve gone to the trouble and expense of getting your memories online, you’re going to want to share them and Forever makes that easy, but somewhere along the way, you really need to do some organizing – or get me to do it for you.

Many Forever customers want to do the organizing before they send their memories off to Forever or they get me to do it for them. This is the most economical way, because you won’t be digitizing things you’re not interested in keeping. Your empty boxes will come from Forever with plastic bags and labels to keep your memories in order. If your memories have already been organized, at that point we can put notes on your bags and Forever will use those notes to name your online images. Your organized memories will be ready to share.

However, some of my clients say, “Jane, I don’t even know what’s on these videos!” Or they say, “It will be easier for me to sort through them once they are online.” Some even say, “Once they’re online, my family is going to help me sort them.” In this case, we can get your stuff all packaged up, as is, and send it off to Forever. Then you’ll have 60 days in your temporary account to decide what will go on Forever, what you’ll download and what you’ll just delete.

Curation for the Generations

Anything is better than nothing. If all you manage to do is send your stuff off in your Forever Box and move it over to your own online storage account once it’s digitized, then you’ve already done more than most people manage to get done. Too often, the next generation, faced with a cache of slides, reel to reel tapes, VHS videos and a pile of analog photos, will just toss them into the trash. And why wouldn’t they? If you haven’t organized your memories and taken the time to identify who is in them, then exactly how are those who come after you supposed to know what it’s all about?

Now, imagine notifying your family and friends they can peruse their memories online, at their leisure, with the click of a link. That will be great news for them, even if the images are helter skelter, but imagine how much more excited they will be if the memories are organized by date and event and tagged for cross-referencing by name. With a few clicks, your Uncle Joe can see all the photos you have of him in one place. You get to decide which of your photos you want to share, whether you want your family and friends to download from your cache and even if you want someone to be able to upload new photos or add notes.

I’m There for Whatever You Need

If you like, you can do all of this yourself. It’s easy and I am happy to show you how. Or, if you’d just like to turn it all over to someone and wake up one day with a totally organized online storage account, I’ll be happy to take over for you.

How much does it cost? Well, that depends on a lot of things. How much do you have, what does it consist of, is it organized or do you need me to sort it? Here’s the link to the digital conversion page, which has the cost of the various boxes https://www.forever.com/digital-conversion/, but first timers can find it very confusing. You’ll need to understand what an item is and how overages work, to begin with. So, give me a call at 972-971-5263, and we’ll get you started.

When it comes to pricing with Forever, there can be a little sticker shock along the way, but there are also a lot of different ways to save, save, save. During November’s Black Friday Sales, you could get $1000’s worth of storage for less than $400, but you needed to know all the money saving tools available from me and from Forever. So, while I encourage you to browse the Forever site and learn all the exciting things you can do with Forever, don’t let sticker shock scare you away. I’ve got offers you’ll be excited about.

In fact, why don’t we talk about those money-saving plans next week. You’ll love all the ways there are to save with Forever.