Saving Your Photo Memories Digitally on DVD

The disasters of Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami's in southeast Asia, and even the brush fires and earthquakes we may have here in California drive home the point that any of us may have to evacuate our homes at a moment's notice.

With only minutes to pack up and leave, what do take? Do you forsake those photo albums and videotapes of your trip to Washington DC, DISNEYWORLD or even Paris for pictures of the kids? How can you make a choice to leave memories behind that may be destroyed in a catastrophe?

Well, thankfully, we live in the digital age. And with that, comes the ability to scan and encode photographs, slides, and home movies and digitze them onto DVDs and place them in arms reach. That way, if you have to get out of your house fast, all you would need to do is grab a DVD case filled with your digital memories and you're out of there.

Then, in the aftermath, if you've lost everything, all you need to do is head on down to the local photo hut and have those lost photographs reprinted from the digital kiosk. Or, reprint them yourself on the PC that you'll have replaced thanks to your home owners insurance.

Have a plan.

Digitizing a lifetime of memories may seem like a daunting task. The average shutterbug may have thousands of photographs. And as such, it can take days, maybe weeks or total time to commit to this digital project. But once you have it done, it's done forever. And better to make a downpayment of time now, than to lose those photo and movie memories forever. Concentrate on doing one album at a time.

Pick up a good scanner. These days, scanners with attachments to scan slides and negatives aren't very expensive. When you scan, scan the photo with a piece of black construction paper behind the photograph. This will help limit the light leakage from the scan and really make your image "pop" in the scan. Scan the image with a high DPI setting - like 600 dpi or more (you'll be burning these onto DVD, so there's no trouble with room).

While scanning, you can also take advantage of the time and perhaps do some photo image adjustments using such programs as ADOBE PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS or even PICASA 2 - free from Google. You can remove red-eye, sharpen up the image, or even clean up the contrast. Some scanners have special software that will even remove "hairs" or scratches in older photographs. Clean them up, unless you like that old look.

Save the images in a common photo format like .jpg. in folders that have the same titles as your Albums. That will make for easy organization. When ready, use a program like NERO (for Windows) or TOAST (for MAC) to burn a DATA DVD of your photo scan folders. Then place them in your typical DVD/CD storage cases. At this point, it would also be a good idea to make copies of the DVDs and place them in a safe deposit box or give to another member of the family for safe keeping.

Home movies on tape can also be digitized extremely easily. If you just want to get the raw footage into digital format with no muss or fuss, LiteON makes the LVW-5005 DVD recorder. It's essentially a VCR that records to DVD. It will burn to any format - +R, -R, etc. And it also has a special menuing program onboard which will create an easy menu for you of chapters. Plug your tape player into it and hit play, record on the DVDRecorder and you're making DVDs. It couldn't be easier. And the quality is really good.

To digitize your home movies on Super8 film, one could invest in a special mirror adapter, but he quality is just as good by playing the movies on a plain white wall and setting up your camcorder on a tripod to record the image. Make sure you check your white balance before you actually roll film. Take your time to frame the image and hit record. If your camcorder comes with a remote, so much the better.

Once you have your super 8 movies are on tape - it's a simple matter of hooking up your camcorder to your computer (most have firewire in/out these days) and using a program like Adobe Premiere, iMovie, or even Microsoft MovieMaker to capture the footage and encode it to AVI or Quicktime movie files. Then burn it onto DVD and place it in that memories storage case.

Then, if the call ever comes to evacuate, you don't have to undergo the stress of trying to decide what memories you can and can't live without. You can simply take em all and replace them later.