Video Scrapbooks Make a Wonderfully Unique Gift

There are many times in life where a gift is customary or expected. However, it sometimes gets difficult to choose just the right gift or to find something that is not a duplicate. Everyone has that certain someone that is very difficult to buy for, that person who seems to literally, have everything. They have the matching bathmats, the engraved photo frames, and even the foam finger from their favorite ball team. When all ideas seem trivial or already done, consider a video scrapbook of life if you will.

I have had the opportunity to witness the making and giving of this wonderful gift. Set to music this wonderful gift is a photo collage of a person's life and friends set to the person's favorite taste in music. This gift, customized to tell the story, and show the life progression of a person, can be sentimental or funny make you sad or make you think.

The three photo gifts that I have had the extreme pleasure of being a part of were for a young woman graduating from college with her bachelor's degree; it played in the background for her graduation party. A birthday gift from a loving wife for a truck-driving father of five, and a father of five's gift to his firstborn son as he heads off to serve in Iraq. These gifts were well though out and highly received by those who had the privilege of watching them.

While I did not do any direct work on the young woman's DVD, I did do some legwork and consultation on the other two projects. We began by collecting photographs from the family that they wanted people to see, photos with special memories and sentimental value. We then looked for an array of songs that meant something to the family or person that was in the video. For the truck driver the songs were more toward truck driving and providing for a family, for the soldier going off to war it was more toward patriotism and those waiting for the time when he will be home again, safe with them.

We began the main portion of the project by scanning the photos into files on the computer. The photo's had been roughly separated into piles by categories (i.e. family, friends, prom, graduation, early life together etc.) The music was then loaded onto the computer so that it could be applied to the appropriate photo file. Using a program called My DVD Studio by Sonic the pictures and music were arranged together to create a wonder display of life set to music. With a few changes in picture arrangement, the pictures were made to display during certain points in the song, or during certain words that created just the right effect. With this program, the songs can be switched around to create different effects as well, and to make the video flow. This portion of the process does take the most time to fit music to picture so the desired effect is achieved. Once the display is believed to be finished we suggest watching it all the way thru, to make sure that the songs and pictures faded in and out at appropriate times and that it flowed smoothly from one area of the video to the next. Finally, it is time to burn copies and present as the wonderfully thoughtful gift that it is.