Family Videos

The most important thing is to get your family videos digital. Analog (tape) deteriorates much more quickly, and you lose quality and viewing capabilities as time goes on. Straight transfer takes some time and materials, but isn't too hard with the right set-up.
With all of my parents' family videos (well, up through about 2006 - it's a work in progress) I've gone a step farther. I go through and edit out the boring or repetitive stuff (think opening ALL the birthday presents on tape), add titles, dates, transitions, and music (sometimes) to make watching family videos fun for the whole family! This takes more time than straight transfer, but is so rewarding. If you have interest, I encourage you to get your own editing setup so you can do this for your family videos. It's easier and cheaper to do yourself, but I would love the opportunity to work with anyone that wanted it done. Even if it's just for some of the more important milestones (graduations, school programs, birthdays, vacations), it's worth it. It's almost worthless to have a bunch of family videos that no one ever watches because they're too long and boring, and the "good stuff" only comes up every 10 or 20 minutes...

Here are some examples of what I do with family videos for our families. I tried to pick some of the shortest clips (and of course the quality has been dialed WAY down to upload - I import and keep video at its current quality!):