Media Formats

We are often asked to digitize customer’s photos, film and video tape directly to their hard drives.  This can be done on request.  However, is converting your media to digital files really protecting them on a Hard Drive?  We continue to read what  professionals recommend and we keep coming up with “the DVD”.  If you make a DVD of your film and memories, then you can easily convert or copy those files on to your hard drive to work with, or upload them to cloud services.The DVD can be used for copies and will be able to be converted to whatever the new media is.

Media changes very quickly, it comes and goes.  Blue Ray was the newest and greatest disc over the past 5 years but who really uses it?  Not many in the digitizing profession.  Uncompressed footage files are enormous and therefore a great deal of memory and computer space is required to work with these type of files.  What we need to keep our eye on is when the equipment becomes difficult to play our media on. Records are still in excellent condition, they didn’t fade, we just can’t easily play them anymore.  Hard drives have a lot of memory but they are computers so they too will eventually crash or freeze if they are not run.  So keep a copy of your DVD’s handy and gather around the TV instead of the computer to enjoy those old home movies and family photos.