Basics: The Record of Your Life as a Digital Archive By ERIC A. TAUB

The New York Times
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August 16, 2007
Basics
The Record of Your Life as a Digital Archive
By ERIC A. TAUB

WHEN Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Karen Duncan was ordered to leave her uptown neighborhood.

Among the possessions that Ms. Duncan, a lawyer, and her family took on their evacuation to Mississippi and later to Baton Rouge were two large trunks, filled not with clothes, but with the stacks of paper that recorded their life: photographs, birth certificates and their dog’s immunization records.

“This is not going to happen again,” Ms. Duncan said. “The next time, I’m carrying a digital flash drive — not trunks — loaded with my pictures.”

Ms. Duncan, like millions of other Americans, has her feet firmly straddled across two technologies: embracing the new digital era but still hanging on to the paper records of the fast-disappearing analog age.

There are many reasons to digitize one’s precious records and store them on a PC: to preserve them from aging, to make multiple copies that can be kept in separate places, and to create multimedia slide shows, perhaps to show future generations.

Digitizing records, whether documents, old photographs, or favorite LPs, “preserves history and lets people tell their stories,” said Mark Cook, marketing director for Kodak Gallery, a Web site that stores consumer photographs.

“People want to use their content with today’s tools, like iPhoto and YouTube,” to create new forms of entertainment, Mr. Cook said.

Today, virtually any traditional document, movie or musical recording can be inexpensively and rapidly digitized and stored on a hard drive. And for those who do not want to spend the time, low-cost commercial services will do the job for you.

DOCUMENTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS So-called all-in-one printers have become the norm, with machines that print, scan and handle faxes available for under $100.

Optical character recognition software, included with such devices, will recognize printed text and convert it into a form that can be edited by a word processing program.

Photographs can be scanned and saved in the JPEG format at resolutions of at least 1,200 dots per inch. Once in a PC, software like Adobe Photoshop Elements ($80 for the Mac version; $100 for the PC version) can enhance faded colors, remove scratches and crop the image, just as with pictures shot with a digital camera.

Hewlett-Packard’s all-in-one printers can scan in one pass as many photographs as will fit on the scanning tray, then save them as separate images.

Epson’s Perfection 4490 ($350) includes a 30-page document feeder and scans up to three black-and-white pages a minute; it also scans 35 millimeter slides, negatives and photographs.

H.P.’s Scanjet G4050 ($200) scans up to 16 slides or 30 negatives simultaneously, and saves them as separate files. It does not, however, include an automatic sheet feeder for documents.

A number of services will do the conversions for you, either at storefronts or by mail, like Scanmyphotos.com. For those who are concerned about letting their precious memories out of sight, Kodak offers batch digitizing of photographs and other documents through its ScanVan, a vehicle that is currently on tour in the Eastern United States.

HOME MOVIES The simplest way to digitize those shoeboxes full of Super 8 movies is to use the technique perfected by movie pirates: project the image on a white wall, set up a digital camcorder on a tripod, and then shoot the film.

This is one case where you won’t get the best results if you make it a do-it-yourself project. The different frame rates of movie film and a camcorder could cause annoying flickering of the final image. Send your movies to a commercial transfer service like Audio Video Memories (audiovideomemories.com), Digital Transfer Systems (digitaltransfersystems.net), and Just8mm.com that uses a telecine machine, a much more sophisticated version of the same home technique.

Movies arrive back on DVDs, ready to be imported into the PC for editing with a program like Apple’s iMovie ($79, part of iLife ’08) for Macs, or for PCs, Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 ($100).

VHS TAPES To transfer VHS footage, which is analog, into a computer, the PC needs to receive the data digitally. One way to check if your PC is so equipped to do that is to look at the computer’s ports. If it has the familiar RCA inputs — the yellow, white, and red connectors — then it most likely is analog ready.

If not, analog images must first be converted to the digital format. To do so, combination VHS/DVD player/recorders are one of the simplest ways to get your home movies off your aging video tapes and onto more permanent DVDs. Available from Panasonic, Sony and others, prices start at under $200.

Alternatively, connect a stand-alone VHS player to a DVD recorder to make a digital copy.

VHS tapes can also be recorded onto a computer’s hard drive by plugging the VCR’s output cable into a digital camcorder that offers a “pass through” mode (most do). The signal is digitized within the camcorder, and then passed on to the PC’s hard drive.

Sony’s $229 VRD-MC5 is specifically made to record DVD copies of VHS tapes, or recordings from any camcorder or digital video recorder, without using a PC. VCRs and camcorders are plugged into the device, which resembles a portable DVD deck.

If you do not own a camcorder or DVD recorder, but you have loads of valuable tapes, consider an intermediary conversion product, such as the DAC-200 ($184; synchrotech.com); Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge ($300; omegamultimedia.com), and VHS to DVD 3.0 ($80; honestech.com). Each product includes hardware and software that converts analog signals to digital,.

LPS, EIGHT-TRACKS, AND CASSETTES Getting your old Country Joe and the Fish albums into your PC is one of the easiest conversions to do, according to Tom Merritt, executive editor of CNetTV.com.

Assuming you still have a phonograph turntable (or eight-track or cassette deck) and it is not the console type from the 1950s or earlier, plug the audio output from the turntable’s amplifier/receiver into the minimike port found on virtually all home computers.

While commercial audio editing software is available, Mr. Merritt recommends installing Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net), a free program available for Macs, PCs and Linux/Unix machines that will manage the files, convert them into a specific format (for example, WAV or MP3), and remove clicks and crackles.

For those who value their time more than the fun of connecting cables and reading manuals, there are plenty of commercial companies happy to do the converting for you. Cassettes2CDs.com will convert audio and video tapes, LPs and 45s to digital format, storing the data on a CD, DVD or MP3 format for iPod use. The company does not handle 78 r.p.m. records, reel-to-reel or eight-track tapes.

If the thought of gathering up boxes full of photographs or phonograph records to digitize is daunting, here is one other compelling thought: your treasured memories will be in a digital format that can still be easily converted to the next video and audio formats that will invariably show up in the coming years.