 |
We've received many phone calls in the last year asking "How can I get video I've taken of my family on holiday into my computer so I can edit it?" This question seems to be especially perplexing for Mac owners, whose computers require very narrowly defined video file types. (Read all about this at the iMovie site.) VideOccasions has the answer! Bring us your video -- VHS, 8mm, Hi8 and Digital 8 or miniDV tapes, as well as DVDs -- and we'll convert them to a format you can play on your computer and edit. If your camera has a hard drive, bring in the camera, the cables and power supply that came with it, any accompanying software and the instruction book. If it uses memory cards, bring us the cards, card reader and its power supply and accompanying software. |
There are three ways we can convert files for you:
Situation One: Most commonly, VideOccasions has transferred your family films to video tape, which creates an AVI file. The folks at the Apple store tell you that iMovie needs files in the MOV or MP4 format. What to do?
Situation Two: You received a DVD from your mother and, although it has lots of great material on it, you'd like to delete the shots of you as a baby in the tub. You have WindowsXP Movie Maker on your computer, but you're not sure how to get the VOB files on the DVD onto your hard drive, and what to do with them after they're there. What to do?
Situation Three: You have several short videos that you have created and would like to put onto your company or home web site. Your service provider tells you he wants these files reduced in size encoded as either AVI, MOV or WMV files. What to do?
Situation Four: You would like to have several video tapes transferred to your external hard drive or PC laptop. What to do?
And if editing at home sounds too daunting, talk with us about having Jack or Judy work with you to produce exactly what you've imagined, whether adding music to old films you've had transferred to digital tape, creating a photo montage or getting those priceless family video tapes into a format that everyone can now enjoy, a DVD.
*A data DVD will not play on your DVD player. It will only play in your computer. And it can only hold about 19 minutes of video, unlike a regular DVD that can hold up to two hours.
** Your hard drive should be formatted as NTFS rather than FAT 32 as the latter has a 4gb file size limit. Video files that are larger than 4gb -- about 15-18 minutes -- will be broken into 4gb units by a FAT 32 system. If in doubt, go to "My Computer," hi light the directory name, right click and then left click on "Properties" at the bottom of the drop-down menu.
*** Owing to the large size of video files -- about 13.5gb per hour of material -- flash drives are only useful when a very small amount of video is to be downloaded.
Last modified 2/14/10