Newcomer - an archive of family films

[StephenMarris]

I have for many years been an intermittent poster on the Adobe forum, and have received valuable advice there from Chuck, Steve and Ron. But I find this forum more congenial, so I am switching over. Briefly, a retired 78 year old Englishman living in Paris who has been using computers since 1984, originally at work, now as a hobby. I have used various versions of Premiere for 10 years.

My current project involves converting, capturing, editing and authoring about 50 hours of family films (standard and super 8) and videos (minDV), covering 46 years (I had the film conversion done commercially - over two miles of film). Bitter experience has taught me that home made DVDs are never fully reliable, so I have decided that the best way to keep this archive and transmit it to my children is to put the results onto the now remarkably cheap and small external drives available on the market. Those who have a modern LCD TV can show them directly on their TV set without the need for unreliable physical DVDs. After several months work, all the footage is now on my computer and I have divided it up into 44 “DVD length” (65-75 minutes) projects, which I am now slowly working my way through. It frightens me to think how many hours of work are involved if one goes back to the original shooting, the editing of film with scissors and glue, the converting, the capturing, the editing and the authoring. At a minimum I would say it comes to at least five hours for each hour of final product. But my wife and I like the results very much — although the odd thing about this kind of effort (including creating slideshows of one’s photos) is that once one has watched them the images are so clearly embedded in one’s visual memory that one does not feel the need to watch them again very often.

[VernonRobinson]

Stephen,
Welcome. It is very nice that you have that kind of film history to work with. Most people, including myself, do not have that kind of library. There are a lot of friendly and knowledgeable people here in case you need some help. Good luck on your project.

Regards,
-Vernon

[Steve Grisetti]

"a retired 78 year old Englishman living in Paris who has been using computers since 1984"

Now, THERE'S a man with a story to tell!

Welcome aboard, Stephen. I'm sure looking forward to seeing some of your work in our Gallery.