By Marc Herbst, Panhandle House
Compared with taking photos on film or video on tape, digital photography or videography provides more opportunities for editing, storing and sharing your media with friends and family across the globe in an instant. However, taking advantage of these compatibilities typically requires pairing your digital video or still camera with a relatively new home computer and some basic software.
Most digital cameras available today capture photos or video onto a small internal hard drive or on a removable media card. A modern home computer, whether a Mac or a PC, if properly equipped, will provide all the tools necessary to get the most of this digital media.
The first challenge to overcome involves transferring video and still images from a camera’s internal hard drive or removable media cards onto the computer for editing. USB (Universal Serial Bus) has become the standard interface for most consumer digital cameras and all modern home computers. Many PCs also come equipped with a variety of media card readers installed. Macs typically do not include media card readers, but all-in-one media card readers which connect via the USB port are inexpensive and readily available. In either case, it is important confirm the compatibility between media card reader and the camera.
The right software can make the transfer process relatively painless and offer a range of editing and sharing options. Some cameras come with very basic editing software, but it is frequently only Windows compatible. For Mac users, software that comes preloaded such as iMovie or iPhoto, might be all that is needed. Those programs are designed to automatically detect a camera connected to the computer’s USB port and help streamline the process of copying the files onto the computer. They also provide basic video editing capabilities and photo enhancement tools like easy “red eye” reduction.
PC users might want to look to third party software for more powerful editing capabilities. Adobe’s Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements are scaled down versions of their professional video and photo editing applications and are surprisingly powerful and easy to use. Premiere Elements will easily transfer video from hard drive based cameras, removable media cards, DVDs or tape based digital video cameras. In addition to basic video editing one can incorporate still images, titles, music and narration. Once a video has been edited, it can be shared by burning it onto a DVD or exporting it to a compressed video file such as an .mp4 to be emailed to friends or uploaded to a social networking site like YouTube or Facebook.
At The Panhandle House, we frequently transfer older home movies, videos or photos shot on 8mm film, VHS or camcorder tapes and 35mm slides, as well as, audio recordings to digital files which the savvy home editor can incorporate into a video using their own editing software. For those who would prefer to leave the editing to the professionals, we can do that as well. We create simple videos for families and friends just as frequently as we produce slick corporate promotional materials.
