Archives for October 2011

We received a phone call today from one upset woman. She explained her husband had died in May after a sudden illness.

With the holidays approaching, she wanted to do put some of the photos her husband had taken into a music video montage for her kids. “It’s a beautiful way to celebrate his life, the places he was, the vacations he took with them…“, she added

Here’s the problem: there were 31 carousels of slides that were completely unlabeled. Each slide carousel had 100 to 140 slides, so we’re talking thousands of slides here. Even after I offered her to view her slides at our store – we have viewing stations for these old memory media – going through thousands of slides still seemed very daunting to her. So we decided a different approach. She’ll randomly pick a carousel to go through, view the slides, and pick out the ones that touched her. Then she’ll do another carousel. The minute she finds 50 slides she can use for the video montage, she will stop.

The slides she picks will be from different periods of their family lives, may not even be contiguous periods, but it’ll still be a beautiful video slideshow.

So ladies and gentleman, label your memory media. These days, you’re not recording in 8mm film reels, VHS tapes, Hi8 tapes, it’s all digital. Label your digital file folders. If you backup family photos in hard drives, label the hard drives. Maybe fifty years from now, someone is trying to piece your life together, make it easy for them.

Today, I learned from a customer that “Play it again, Sam.” is one of the top film misquote. Meaning, never in the film Casablanca, did anyone utter the phrase, “Play it Again, Sam.” “No way”, you say. That was my reaction too. But read it for yourself in the Top 15 Film Misquote.

The phrase is often believed to have been said by Bogart in the movie, Casablanca. In fact, Bogart never said it quite like that. The closest he came to the phrase was: “You played it for her, you can play it for me…If she can stand it, I can. Play it!” How about Ingrid Bergman’s character? What she actually said was “Play it, Sam.” Doesn’t it make you want to watch Casablanca all over again, just to prove this yourself?

We are Play it Again Video. But we answer to Play it Again, Sam too. After all, at least once a week, someone calls and asks, ‘Is this Play it Again Sam? I need to transfer my old home movies to DVD.”

This guy, Mark, came in with old Super 8mm home movies from his mom’s attic.  He didn’t know what was on it, so he brought the film in to view them on our projector to decide whether he wanted to spend the money to convert the Super 8mm film to DVD or not.  He kept shaking his head when he watched them.  I was puzzled why little happy kids running around on the old home movie should be so objectionable.

I understood when Mark commented, “Wow, I  have been going to therapy for the last 10 years trying to undo my childhood.  What do you know, turns out my childhood is not so bad after all.  Here’s the evidence.”  That is precisely why I take a lot of home videos.  So if my children end up in therapy accusing me of total parental neglect, I can whip out these videos and say, “Here’s the evidence, I took you to the zoo, I took you camping, etc.”

Capture your good times, and remember to publicize them, especially to the kids, over and over and over again.  Because according to Kodak, every kid has a happy childhood.

If you can’t remember what your childhood is like, go dig out those old 8mm film reels, or 16mm film reels from the attic and convert those old home movies to DVD so you can watch them again.  It may change what you remember about your childhood.  For the better, I hope.

Rush job today.  Needed it by 4 pm. For a court trial the next morning.

It was a surveillance tape (VHS) that needed to be transferred to DVD ASAP. A company had been missing valuable art pieces from their walls.  Over the years, the business owner had treated himself to expensive work of art to grace the walls of the office he spent so much of his life in.  Mysteriously, pieces of art work were disappearing.  Stolen.  He didn’t have any surveillance camera in his office. After all, he had built a close-knit team that worked so long and so close together, they were like family. Setting up a surveillance camera to monitor their every move was the last thing on his mind.

He consulted the building’s security team to see if he had any ideas. The security officer had an idea.  Though there were no surveillance cameras in his office, there was a surveillance camera in the lobby.  Since the company’s office was on the 23rd floor, most probably, the thief would take the elevator.  Based on the date of the disappearance of the last art piece, the security officer pinpointed the surveillance VHS tape to inspect.

You may wonder, a VHS tape can only store up to 120 minutes, how does it capture a day’s worth of lobby comings and goings.  I learned that surveillance camera records in a funny way.  Something about multiple number of frames per seconds so that when you watch a VHS surveillance tape, the video timecode on the tape goes multiple times faster than real time (the number of seconds that lapse on your watch).  That’s how a whole day’s worth of recordings can fit on a VHS tape.

Enough of technical trivia, I’m sure you want to get to the bottom of the story.

Once the VHS tape was transferred to a DVD, it was much easier to go through the video on the computer and spot the ‘thief’.  How was the thief identified?  He walked out of the elevator with a mysterious bulge around the waist.  Sadly, the business owner identified the thief as one of his regular clients.  When the owner compared records and dates of the client’s visits, they coincided with dates art pieces disappeared off the wall.

Most of our customer stories are heart-warming touching.  This one is not so heart-warming, I’m sorry to say.

At Play it Again Video, a VHS to DVD transfer lab in Boston, we are not just performing a technical process of turning old VHS/VCR tapes to digital formats. We are protecting precious memories; there is a story behind every film/video transfer job. Other more heart-warming Customer Stories:

• She used to be so little
• I am looking for my father