inside costco
Restoring fading m e m or ı es
Costco brings old home
movies into the digital era
1-Hour Photo Center and fill
out an order form. You’ll be
asked to choose a theme for
your new DVD, such as “baby”
One other feature: The new DVD has
clever, brief music videos, showing short
clips set to music. It’s a fun way to see the
video without watching the entire thing.
o r om e
t
pd
title. The theme applies to the
D
FRANCE FREEMAN
The DVD organizes your
video in handy chapters for easy
navigation—no more scrolling
through the entire tape to find a
scene. And for movie film, the quality
is improved during the conversion
process, with colors brightened and
film flicker reduced or eliminated.
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o —n
ee
m im h t
m v ng h
p o w o ed d
film flicker reduced or eliminated.
e a
e r b id s s t
clips set to music. It’s a fun way to see the
vi it g h t
By Tim Talevich
I HAVE A LARGE BOX in my closet that holds
not only a lifetime of precious memories, but
generations of movie-taking technology.
First are some old movie reels, shot by my
dad from the 1950s to the ’70s with his Super
8 mm camera as my siblings and I grew up.
Next are several VHS tapes whose brown and
faded labels list years of important events
from the 1980s, when VHS tape was the day’s
popular format.
Then comes a stack of cassette-style tapes
from my first camcorder, which used the 8
mm video format. Captured on them are all
the key moments from my own children’s
lives—shaky first steps, the first birthdays,
family camping trips and early baseball games.
Filling out the box are a half-dozen small tapes
in the MiniDV format, taken in recent years.
Here, the kids are young men, graduating
from high school, jumping into a river and
mugging for the camera at Christmas.
How the process works
Costco offers slides- and home-movies-to-DVD conversion through the
1-Hour Photo Centers in the
warehouses. The process is
easy: Just bring in
the original movies or slides and fill
out an order form.
A time-saving move
is to go to Costco.
com before you bring
the film to the warehouse. Click on “Photo”
to access the online
b the film to the ware-
o
e
Connecting You can get details about Costco’s home-movies-to- DVD service at the 1-Hour Photo Centers in the ware- houses and online at Costco.com. Costco members receive 90 days
of free service on MemorySafe. You
can also get slides saved to DVD
through the service.
Making more of your video
Many people will be satisfied with having
the new DVDs to view at home. But what
about storing, editing and sharing this
footage? Costco’s service offers two options: • Each DVD comes with Digital Scrap-
book, a film-editing program. You can select
scenes, cut out unneeded footage, add a title
and music, and click a button to email the
video to others or post it on a social network. • You can sign up for Memory-Safe™, a
for-pay service that stores your video online
in “the cloud.”
MemorySafe offers advantages that are
worth considering. It’s a safe storage place
for all your digitized home movies, and it
offers the same video-editing capabilities
you get with your DVD. Also, you can invite
others, such as relatives across the country,
to view the online videos, and they can order
additional copies. It’s easy to post your vid-
eos to Facebook and Twitter, and you can
view them on an iPhone or an iPad through
the MemorySafe app.
But for me, the biggest advantage with
MemorySafe is having an entire video library
in one place, easily accessible. For example,
say I’d like to make a soccer video of one child,
from first kicks to the last high school game. I
can quickly grab scenes from throughout the
collection and put them together.
Going through all these old videos has
been an ambitious project, and the results are
very rewarding, especially considering that
all those images—from various years and
technologies—used to be trapped in a box in
my closet. C
MAY 2011 ;e Costco Connection 87
