3. Take your tunes to go. Portable CD players have long been making way for fast, tough MP3 players with a variety of storage capacities, including the Dell DJ, Samsung Napster and Rio iRiver. Apple’s iPod (apple.com) has become invincible in the personal digital music player market. Available on both the Windows and Macintosh platforms, the iPod stores up to 10,000 songs on a 20- or 40-gigabyte hard drive. Coupled with a number of third party accessories, the iPod has tremendous capabilities:
• It can organize music files into custom albums and playlists. Hook up to a sound system and broadcast your own concert, or play exactly what you want at your wedding without hiring a DJ. Search songs by any number of options, including artist, title, genre and keyword.
• The iPod is not just for music: Download audio books, take notes, record lectures. Organize your contact information, and keep appointments with an alarm clock. Download photos directly from your digital camera with the appropriate adapter.
Digital video footage:
1. Pull footage directly from your camcorder or camera into your computer. Organize clips in a film-editing application such as iMovie or Final Cut Pro (both available at apple.com). Set up folders for each movie with files for clips, stills and so on.
2. Purchase an external hard drive with as much storage space as you can afford for the enormous files you’ll be processing.
3. Save completed movies in a size and format suitable to their intended use and that will work on specific output devices.
Slides & home movies:
1. Store slides and Super 8 and 16 mm movies in an area protected from light, humidity and heat, all of which will cause the gelatin in the film to eventually degrade. Take a cue from the pros, who are moving away from the original metal canisters and opting instead for acid-free cardboard boxes.
2. Digitize your home movies and slides to protect them from time and the elements. Even better, once these assets are digital, you’ll be able to combine them with digital photographs, and add music and titles. Edit the whole thing into a home movie, then burn DVDs to send to all the relatives.
Extra Tips:
Select categories that work for you. You might prefer to categorize your music or movies by its mood or emotional impact (such as “uplifting” or “calming”) rather than by genre.
Back up digital files regularly to CD or DVD and store them outside the home for fire safety—with a trusted friend or in a safe-deposit box.
Who Knew?
Firewire (Apple), iLink (Sony), SB1394 (Sound Blaster) and Lynx (Texas Instruments) are all trademark names for the IEEE-1394, a standard multimedia connection that allows instant transfer between computers, digital cameras, VCRs, camcorders and TVs.
MP3 is a music compression format that allows files to be reduced to a size that’s small enough to load onto portable music players. The process of compression, however, does involve a loss of quality from the digitally perfect original. iPod owners can enjoy the new Apple Lossless encoder for sound quality that’s virtually indistinguishable from the original CD file at about half the size.
In order to prevent illegal use of licensed music, online music stores embed rights-management coding directly into their songs. This allows them to be played only on specific devices, and to be burned to a limited number of CDs before listening rights are terminated.
Some new DVD players can record analog VHS footage onto DVDs. Pioneer’s DTR-500 makes the transition from analog to digital a snap—and even cranks out VHS copies for your low-tech friends.
The simplest (and cheapest) way to convert those old Super 8 and 16 mm movies is to set up your digital camcorder on a tripod and film the movie as it plays on the screen. Presto! Digital movies. The better the camera, slide screen, light and sound, the better the end result. Digitizing slides is slow and expensive as they have to be scanned one at a time..
Weigh the time needed to input, edit and transform any media into the format you need against the very hefty cost of hiring a professional transfer service.
Warning
If any of your 16 mm or Super 8 movies has a vinegar-like smell to it, immediately isolate that can from the others. “Vinegar syndrome” is contagious and causes film to degrade.
