If you are one of the lucky few that has old 8mm movie film of your grandparents or family, it is time to get this old film digitized. The technology is not readily available to digitize this movie film and at some point the film becomes too brittle to run through the digital convertors. How sad it would be to lose a whole generation or more of ancestral videos.
Many families have VHS (or other format) home movies of their family activities. As the machines that can play these tapes are no longer being manufactured, your home movies will no longer be viewable and your own family history will be lost. Time to get these tapes digitized!
Our local Idaho Falls Idaho FamilySearch Center has four VHS machines and the software to convert the VHS home movies to a digital format. They also have 3 movie film digitizers to convert your movie film to a digital movie file. Many other FamilySearch Centers have this equipment as well. Contact our library if you need help. If you are interested in help with basic video editing skills to remove parts you may not want in the film, or to create shorter video clips, they can also help with this.
Do You Have Any of These?
Video Capture Device
If you still have a working VHS player then it's time to consider getting those home VHS movies digitized before you no longer have access to a working VHS player. All you need is a computer, and what is called an Analog to Digital Convertor, which can be purchased online for about $50. They usually come with the video capture applications.
.png){kind=spacer}
Video Editing Software
There are several free open-source video editors available and I have tried most all of them. By far, the easiest one to use is "OpenShot". Your one to two hour tape will likely include multiple "events" like a birthday, vacation, family reunion, Thanksgiving activity, Christmas time, and so on.
The process of taking your digitized mp4 movie and splitting it to smaller segments is quite easy to do. You can also remove any unwanted segments of your movie file. Creating smaller event segments makes it easier to find and watch just the segments you want to see. Smaller clips also make it easier to share with others. Realize that a full two hour movie can easily be 1-2 gb in size.
Use some of the organizational ideas on this site to label your movie segments. By far the easiest way is to just start with the year, month, and the event name.
As an example, 1979(03)-Girl's Birthday Party.
LABEL Each Person in Your Videos?
You can upload a PDF version to FamilySearch, effectively uploading the video clip for others to view. The green "HERE" link on the page is a hyperlink that points to the video clip that is stored on YouTube. By tagging every person in the video to this file, the PDF file will be displayed on each of those person's "Memories" pages.
One VERY nice aspect about preserving movie clips in the way described below, is that you are also preserving who is in the movie clip. Screenshots of the people in the clip pasted into the word processing program allow you to name them. I have old movie film from the 1930s and had no idea who many of the folks were. My mother and we were able to travel together on an ocean cruise and during some of that time, I went through the old digitized movie films that were taken while she was growing up. We went through and identified each of the people in there, so that I could label them. Without her help, these old movie clips are simply old movie clips with nameless faces. I was able to extract a photo of my great grandfather from a couple of movie clips, photos that I did not have of him.
While you can't technically label people in the videos, as you might with photos, you can create a photo page that contains screenshots of those people in the video clip and then put an actual label with their name(s) just under the screenshot. In this way, anyone can watch the video and refer to the photo page(s) of screenshots and labels and identify each person. The easiest way to create these photo pages is with any word processor like Word, LibreOffice, and such.
Do NOT let those old movies sit and become useless because no one knows who they are of. Spend time asking your grandparents who these individuals are, and then create a way to ensure that those individuals in the movie live on for years to come.
Click Below For an Example
When on FamilySearch, click on the green HERE link in the displayed PDF and the video clip will open in YouTube. You can also download the PDF file by clicking on the "Actions" menu.
You may have had some of your old video tapes commercially converted and stored on DVDs. DVD's are no longer a good storage media, as they also degrade over time, get scratched, and can become unplayable. DVD's are already an outdated technology, and in fact, no longer come installed on newer computers. It is a good idea to "rip" or copy the video file off the disk and store as a "mp4" video file. There is free software like VLC, Handbrake, and others that can accomplish this task. These files can be stored "in the cloud", on backup hard drives, and such. They can also be easily shared with other family members as well. The mp4 video file is a common standard archive type and is easily played by many different computers or media devices.
You may find old video clips of ancestors telling stories, playing the piano, singing a song, or such. Did you know that you can extract the audio from the video clip and then save the audio as a "mp3" audio file. Audio files are easily uploaded to FamilySearch and can also be easily shared with family members. Your mp4 video file remains intact.
Many folks have recorded interviews of a parent(s) using their video recorder but would love to upload that interview to FamilySearch. Unfortunately, digital movie files can't be uploaded directly to FamilySearch, but the audio portion can be uploaded. It is a simple process of just importing the .mp4 video file into Audacity, an app used for editing audio files. Once imported you can then export the digital audio portion to an .mp3 file which no longer has the video portion attached to it. You do have to have a "helper file" called FFmpeg installed in Audacity to do this, but it can be downloaded for free from HERE.
Movie film quality degrades over time, becoming brittle, shrinking, having color changes, and so forth. It needs to be preserved. Generally it is best to have a Media Facility convert these for you. Many of the FamilySearch Centers now have 8mm/Super 8mm film digitzers available for you to use for free. The Centers do not digitize the media for you, but they can show you how to run the digitizers. There are often local places that will also digitize your film for about $25 per 7" reel. Be leery of sending off your films to places across the USA, as there is potential for these items to become lost in the mail system. (It has happened).
Don't Fear the "Cloud"!
Many folks tell me thay they would NEVER use Cloud Drives like Google, Microsoft OneDrive, iCloud, and such because they were not safe. Over the years I have realized that many folks have horrible online safety practices, like having easy to guess passwords that they often use across many websites. There is no Two Factor Authentication in place to further protect their accounts. No wonder they hear the stories from their peers about being hacked.
With strong password protection and using the Two Factor Authentication, there is almost no chance of ever having your cloud drive information hacked. #1: They would have to know your very strong password and #2: hackers would have to have physical control of your phone or device to have access to your cloud files. If you don't practice strong password practices, then you could be hacked. If you are interested in seeing if your information has been hacked (usernames & passwords, emails, etc), go to the site Have I Been Pawned and enter the information to see how many times your email or password and been associated with corporate breechs and is out there in the dark web to be utilized. You will be amazed.
There are good basic security procedures to keep your web files safe. Learn more about them. Also realize that Cloud Drives like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple are going to be the most secure of the many options that are out there. Also, YouTube will host your videos for free, and as long as you set the permissions correctly, no one will even know they are there unless you share a link to those movies with family. However, I would not use YouTube as a backup option.
One Cloud Storage Option For Your Videos
Fun Projects to Create With Video Editing
Years ago I interviewed my parents about some of their early life memories. Both of my parents were in the video frame, but my mother was the principal one talking about all the camping that their family did in her early years. I was able to crop the video to just show her talking. The movie clip to the right is an example of part of longer 1 hour video.
I kept a small movie image of her in the corner of the frame while showing different movie clips that my grandfather had recorded on 8mm movie film of what she was talking about. It made for a nice movie clip to share with family. Instead of just mixing or blending different movie clips, you could also mix video with photographs. Test your creative talents, or…enlist the help of your younger generation family members who find this sort of thing easy to do.