Jay Booker is one of our favorite customers. And his story is one of the most entertaining.
In the early ’60s, Jay and his friend started a non-profit 8mm film club.

They would show classics like Adam’s Rib, Casablanca … When I say show, I don’t mean press a button, and the screen turns on.
This was the ’60s. Watch the video above and see how Jay Booker did it.

We don’t have a medal to give you, however, as a reward and salute to you for staying married that long, this Valentine Day month – February – we will transfer your wedding video VHS to DVD for free* when you bring any other item to convert to DVD.

Your marriage may last forever, but your VHS tape will not. Your VHS tape has a shelf life. Even if you have stored your precious wedding vhs tape in a cool, dry, dark safe, the magnetic media continues to degrade with time. If you play your wedding VHS tape today, it is not as sharp as when the video was first shot. Wait long enough, the images will white out, and your vows and beautiful church music will break into garbled sounds. Transferring your VHS tape to DVD will stop that degradation.

Still looking for a Valentine’s Day gift for your spouse? Give the gift of memories. It’s priceless, it’s thoughtful, it’s meaningful, it’s beautiful – especially if it’s your wedding video.

Don’t miss this opportunity to transfer your wedding video VHS to DVD on us*. In the age of 72-day marriages (Kim Kardashian), your love has grown, matured, strengthened like good wine, through all these years. Wouldn’t it be fun to watch that wedding video again? Easily on a DVD player.

*Through the month of February: transfer your wedding VHS tape to DVD for FREE when you bring any other item to transfer to DVD. Drop by our on-site video transfer lab in Newton, MA today and mention code: “Still Married”. (*Up to $25 value)

Here’s an excerpt of his article. You can find the full article here:
http://articles.boston.com/2011-11-27/news/30447866_1_film-footage-dvd-transfers

In “Super 8,’’ just out on DVD, some young teenagers become embroiled in an extraterrestrial mystery while filming their own low-budget zombie movie. The year is 1979.

It turned out to be a pivotal time for the format that gave the movie its name. Introduced in the 1960s as a user-friendly variation on the older 8mm film, Super 8 was quickly embraced by home-movie buffs. But its popularity was fleeting; by the early ’80s, it was already being pushed aside by the emergence of videocassettes. Yet Super 8 film, like movies about E.T.s and zombies, has retained a certain appeal. There are far fewer film labs working with old small-gauge film stock such as Super 8 than there were three decades ago. But those that remain still do considerable business with filmmakers, art students, and walk-ins from the general public who have uncovered troves of family footage. Click here for the full article.

Hi I came in today with a very special project to work on. One of my very closest friend from college – and I hate to admit it now but that goes back 40 years – unfortunately is struggling with cancer. She turns 65 in a middle of her chemo and her brother-in-law decided something that would really be nice to help lift her spirits and know how much everyone loves her would be to put together a photo-journalistic-kind of album of all the important people of her life wishing her well and sending her good energy.

I noticed that I don’t have a single photo in digital of her, of us. She and I. But I looked through my photo albums there was a photo from my wedding, less than 40 years ago and then a few photos over the years. So I came in, it was just wonderful, how helpful, how beautifully these old photos were scanned and how sensitive to the project they were.

And now I am going home with a beautiful bunch of photos that I can send of to her brother-in-law and its part of the recovery.

• you believe that your home video tapes last forever.  You take good care of them, you put them in a cool, dry place, you don’t let the kids bang them around.  After all these years, the VHS tapes, or Hi8, or miniDV, still look like fine. So you believe they last forever.
• or you believe these tapes are of times gone by, your VCR player is gone, there’s no way to play those tapes anymore, so you toss them out.

The bad news is that your video tapes do not last forever, and the good news is that yes, there those tapes can be digitized into today’s digital formats and you can watch them again today.

Video tapes – which includes VHS, VHS-C, Betamax, VHS, 8mm and mini-DV - degrade with time because the film tape is made of magnetic media. What you see ten, twenty years later is no where as sharp as when the tapes were first created. So, what is the shelf life of a magnetic tape ?

If you ask an audio/video professional that question, the answer you get can range anywhere between 5 to 10 years. This is because it depends a lot on how 1) you handle it, 2) how you store it and 3) how often you play it.   Have you been following these best practices:

How to Handle Your Video Tapes

• Never touch the tape itself. Hold it by the side of the cassette
• Rewind the cassette before storing it.
• Keep away from curious kids, avoid dropping or banging the tapes.
• Keep cassettes away from magnetic fields
• Don’t leave a cassette in the car where it will be exposed to heat and cold
• If using a new cassette and it’s still cold, let it warm up to room temperature first.
• Occasionally fast forward and rewind a tape that’s being stored a long time.

Where to Store Your Video Tapes

The conditions in which magnetic tape is stored and used can extend its shelf life. Observe these video storage tips:

• Store in conditions that are stable, cool and dry.
• Stay away from hot, humid and dusty.
• Store cassettes in the cassette case.
• Store your tapes vertically and not flat (see picture) to distribute the gravity pull equally and stably.

How often you play it?

If you haven’t played your tape since you shot the video, that’s 10-20 years of one section of the tape being stretched at the same spot.  Consider the video on that spot pretty much degraded.  If you’ve been playing it over and over and over again, you won’t encounter “blank fuzzy spots” but the entire tape has been stressed which also affects the shelf-life of your tape.  What’s a person to do?

One answer: Digitize your aging home video movies into today’s digital formats that do not degrade.  Digital formats are composed of 0 and 1 bits that do not inch to 1/2, or 3/4.  A “0″ bit, stays “0″.  A “1″ bit stays “1″.  That’s as technical as I want to get here.  The bottom line: A digital file today is identical towhat is is 100 years from today.  Now, the media itself, the DVD can get scratched, or broken, but the digital file itself does not change.

Not sure what’s on your tape, but you no longer have a VCR player?  Call us.  Come by our on-site video transfer lab in Newton, MA, and view your old tapes.

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.

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.”

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.