Give Mom Precious Memories with a Professional, DVD Scrapbook for Mother's Day

Imagine a mother, relaxing on the sofa with tea and cookies, watching television. A smile breaks across her face, then another, and a tear forms at her eye. What is she watching? Nothing from Hollywood, nothing on cable - she's watching the video scrapbook her family made for her. Here's how to make one for your own mom, using things found around many houses these days.

The ingredients are simple, but they do require some computer literacy. You need the ability to burn DVDs, which is common in most computers these days. You need good DVD burning software, which may have come with your computer or you can buy one such as Nero. If you don't have these, don't fret - you can probably find a service bureau or photographer who can do that part, or most of the other parts of this process for you, for a fee. Or there's always your uncle Charlie (whatever his or her name in your extended family), who always has the latest computer equipment and would love to help.

As you gather the pieces for this project, make sure to keep it simple enough that you can finish it on time. You can always do more later, volume two, three, however many. You might want to just do a scrapbook for the past year, and it's definitely a good idea to plan ahead for the future and take more digital pictures and video this coming year.

The first step is to gather your material for the scrapbook. You can have old pictures and film scanned into digital files, or photograph old objects with your digital camera. By now, you probably have lots of digital pictures and even video on your hard drive, time to sort through them! Your video may come from your video camera, or from that little digital still camera that you have, if someone's discovered the "movie mode."

Again, keep it simple. At this point, you can make a decision - make a slide show with music, or dive into editing. Your schedule will help you choose. For editing, you can choose between the software that comes with your computer (such as iMovie for the Mac, or Windows Movie Maker for Windows PCs), or one that comes with software such as Nero, or other commercial or free programs. Feel free to combine still pictures with video, and keep clips long enough for some emotion to develop, but not enough to be monotonous. Of course, video of something like baby's first steps can never be long enough, so don't worry.

Cut the video into segments about ten or twenty minutes long, and add music or narration to the still pictures or silent film sections. Add titles as reminders if you want, especially for posterity. Your DVD burning software should allow you to combine them in "chapters" on the DVD, and you can customize the menus just like on your favorite movie DVDs.

Burn a copy of your new DVD, and check it out. Don't be afraid to go back and change things, or get more creative once you know it works. Also don't worry if it's not fancy, you know how mothers are, she'll love it and play it over and over any way you make it.

If you start small, you can make your DVD scrapbook grow over the years, expanding to include as much material as you like. Don't forget to make backup copies in case of scratches or other damage, and one great way to make "offsite backups" just like major corporations is to send copies to relatives!
"Nero", http://www.nero.com/enu/index.html
"iMovie", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMovie
"Windows Movie Maker", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_movie_maker