My friend John just gave me a bunch of his father's 16-mm and Super-8 film reels to digitize. His summer project is to edit the video into a DVD for a family reunion. I made a comment about how his siblings must appreciate the work and love that go into a project like this and he laughed. "We've gone on a cruise together, vacationed in Africa, Europe, and I've made some beautiful DVDs for all of us but no one watches them except my wife and I".

His comment reminded me of my own similar experience in the past. My parents are abroad and I made beautiful videos of the children to send them. After many cross-atlantic calls to get them to watch it, they finally did and my dad fell asleep in the middle of it. How insulting. Don't they love their grandchildren enough to watch to the end of the video?

Why don't friends and family watch your videos? I have a few ideas, and it's got nothing to do with whether they love you or not.

1. Home videos are usually long and boring. To the parents, 10 minutes video footage of watching baby eat his peas is darling, to others it's like watching grass grow, death by boredom. Suggestion: Make your videos short and sweet, 3 minutes maximum. Even your 7-day European tour, check out my post on keeping your finished movies 3 minutes or less.

2. Got no humor. Have you noticed that the successful TV commercials are the ones with humor? Same thing with YouTube videos that get millions of views, they are very funny. Like this video on How To Hug a Baby (a Guide for Ambitious Dogs). Suggestion: Turn on your funny bone. Got not funny bone? Find humor videos on the web, watch how they do it.

3. No documentaries please. We play reporter with the video camera, capturing every blow, every turn our marathoner makes, every step up Heartbreak Hill (Boston Marathon), all the way until he disappears into the shower stall. Is this video for the archives or for entertainment? Suggestion: If it's to share with friends and families, I suggest it's more entertaining to capture more details about a specific incident than a long stretch of the event. That's why the Charlie Bit Me video got virally passed around to millions of viewers. Long generalities makes a good historical archive, detailed video clip of an emotion, an incident, an experience makes a good story.

4. It's not on their errand path. How many harried families take a breather, sit down and pop in their old home movies to reminisce? The DVD is much easier to pop into a player but it still takes tearing away from your normal routine to sit down for a home movie. It's not the natural errand path of busy families. Suggestion: Send it by email. I don't mean the actual large video file (or you'll lose even more friends and family), I mean the link to the video that you post on the web. That's just one option, there are many ways to share your video today, be versatile if you want your families and friends to watch your video.

Happy video editing. Remember, keep it short, keep it funny, keep it tight, make it easy for them to watch, and you'll have friends and families raving and asking for more. To do all that, you will need to know how to do simple video editing. If you've been intimidated with that in the past, don't. Today's software, such as Windows Movie Maker (free), and camcorders such as the Flip Video, for example, make the process a lot simpler and quicker. Also many video tutorials out there to guide you every step of the way.

Related Posts:
Flip Video Camcorder- Super Simple
How to Make a Home Movie

When families think of making home movies, they think of one style of movie chronichling an event from start to finish. I like to think there are 3 types of home movies:

• Video stories
• Video vignettes
• Photoshows

What’s a Video Story?

A video story is a 3 to 5-minute video that covers a significant event in your family life, the "major event" of the year. Examples are graduations, family trip to Hawaii, a retirement party and big holiday events. A video story is a well-choreographed sequence with a beginning, middle and end. I like to include more details, close-up interviews, more contemplative scenes, etc. Aim to do 1 video story a year.

What’s a Video Vignette?

A video vignette is about 1-3 minutes long. Vignettes are not stories with beginning, middle, and end. They capture small moments of our lives. It’s the little everyday things that usually just pass by and are remembered no more yet they are the little things that make your lives rich and precious. Examples are a child’s first attempt at riding a bike, house renovation, junior’s first haircut, a swim meet, Grandma teaching your daughter how to knit, etc. Aim to do 2 video vignettes a year.

And a photoshow, what’s that?

A photoshow is a lot of fun and easy, easy to make with the right software. A photoshow is a bunch of photos strung together into a movie-like video with music, captions, transitions and special effects. They take minutes to do and bring back the memory to life just as powerfully. If you have not created a photo show before, there is a link at the end of this article to a video tutorial on how to create photo shows in minutes. The software is even free if you are a Comcast Internet subscribier.

There are several reasons why you want your collection to have a variety of video stories, vignettes and photoshows: vignettes and photoshows are a lot quicker to do if you are time-pressed, a variety of short and longer videos keep the audience excited, and finally, the variety stimulates your creativity instead of getting stuck on one style.

Another piece of advice I also always give to families wanting to start video editing: Keep Finished Movies Short & Sweet

Useful related articles:

How to Share your Videos on the Web

To keep my finished movie fast-moving and exciting, the first thing I do is to trim out the slow, boring parts from the raw footage during the [tag-tec]video editing[/tag-tec] process. But I save the nuggets of interviews I often shoot as part of the event even though these ‘interviews’ are not what you would call fast-paced. The [tag-tec]video interviews[/tag-tec] could be a kid telling the camera what she is looking forward to at the beach, or it could be someone sharing all the warm wishes he has for a new graduate, or it could be my grandmother explaining how her grandfather escaped with his art collection from China.

Ten years from now, when you watch the finished movie, the interviews are like little jewels of flashback into a time, a sentiment that has long been forgotten.

A professional TV interviewer has very sophisticated gear set up such as lighting, lavaliere microphone (that little cockroach you see perched on collars or lapels), and headsets. Myself? If you put a pause on a magic moment to set all that up, my little guy may have run away, or the graduation party may [Read more...]

‘Tis the time of reckoning. As doting parents not willing to let one memory slip by uncaptured, we have been videotaping every event from the first hospital oohs and aahs to the first baby steps to their first recital to their school graduations.

And now we have stacks of videotapes stuffed in the safety of our cool, dark closets. Safety? Not. Video tapes have a shelf life.

When Barbara Streisand sang: "Misty, water-colored memories, of the way we were." she might as well have been referring to the thousands of videotapes of old home movies that are stuck in people's closets, slowly fading as they wait for someone to pull them out and copy them to digital media.

Don’t wait any longer. When you transfer those water-colored memories into digital media, you get these benefits:

1. Stop the degradation. Magnetic media starts degrading as early as 3 years.
2. Digital files can be edited with video-editing software and turned into movies with nifty transitions, special effects, soundtrack, and captions.
3. Digital files can be shared with friends and family via DVD, the internet, iPod, email, etc.

So is it easy to transfer video tapes to a digital form?

Today, it is. To learn about the different options available, click here.

Whatever you do, don't do nothing. Otherwise, everyday you wait, your tapes degrade. One day, they will completely fade away, which was almost what happened to the video below. Degraded "Misty, water-colored memories" where it gets difficult even to make out the faces – is not always what you want.

It's time to dust off your video tapes and turn them into professional-looking movies. Here are 4 good reasons why:

Reason #1 – Unedited, raw video footage is painful to watch. It's choppy, jumpy, most scenes stretch out too long, and you end up pressing the Fast Forward button every two seconds.

Reason #2 – Cheaper and easier. Everything – hardware, software, accessories – are all cheaper and much easier to use.

Reason #3 – Easier to Share an edited video.
Raw video footage is long, often over an hour long. That's hard to hard a video that long over email, the internet, on your smartphone or other mobile devices. when you edit your videos, you can cull out the highlights and create a 30-second highlights video, or a video around one simple scene. Shorter, succinct videos are easier to share and more fun to watch (see below video example).

Reason #4 – Video tapes/cassettes degrade with time. Have you watched your parents' video tapes lately? They are blurry? Don't blame your parents' video shooting skills. Blame Time. The longer you wait to digitize your tapes, the more they degrade. Click here on tips to slow down the degradation process.