For Neglected Video, A Hollywood Touch

If a tree falls in a forest and someone records it but never views the video, did the tree really fall?

As home video accumulates, many prolific tapers are pondering a close-to-home variation of the old Zen brainteaser. They have acquired a trove of family scenes, but are daunted by the tedium and time involved in playing it all back.

After all, searching for the good parts means sitting through the boring ones, too. Other sections may be marred by camera shake, exposure problems or wind gusts thundering into the microphone. But just letting the tapes pile up won't do either; home movies that are neither viewed nor inventoried can be said not to exist at all.

"The problem people have with their home movies is mostly one of retrieval," said Mark Smith, a co-owner of Pergamon, a video editing business in Portland, Ore. "They have all that raw material, but no clue where the good bits are. In which case, there's little practical use they'll ever get out of having it in the first place."

To address the quandary, a growing cottage industry has sprung into action. Companies like Pergamon take customers' raw video and turn it into short movies containing highlights. They convert analog tapes to digital data, weed out the boring bits and stitch the remainder together, often to a music soundtrack.

Most companies will include a selection of customers' slides and photos, Ken Burns-style, if asked. The finished product is usually presented to the customer on a DVD, complete with menus, chapters and instant scene access. Typically the cost runs from $400 for a five-minute movie to $2,000 and up for a half-hour one.

Carolyn Alexander got into the business three years ago, when she bought Family Memories Video based on the growth potential she saw. The enterprise, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., seemed more solid to her than the Silicon Valley high-fliers that had begun crashing all around her.

"I took a good look and saw that the demographics were on my side," Ms. Alexander said. "The boomers are almost 50, or older, and their parents are dying. They're getting sentimental about being the holder of the family knowledge, about the huge quantities of photos and footage they possess, and they realize they should do something with all that material."

The importance people attach to home movies is increasing, others agree. Marco Greenberg, founder of Reel Biography, a Manhattan-based firm that produces broadcast-quality personal biographies, finds that more of his clients want to incorporate old family video. He speculates that recent documentaries like "Capturing the Friedmans" and "My Architect" - both heavy on decades-old scenes recorded with imperfect consumer cameras - may have opened people's eyes to the possibilities.

"Old home movies are proving to be an authentic, well-received touch" in his company's work, Mr. Greenberg said.

Although Ms. Alexander's company, too, produces original video biographies, the bulk of her business comes from clients who want her staff to edit existing video. The advent of easy-to-use home editing programs like Apple's iMovie and Pinnacle's Studio has not seemed to affect her revenues, which have doubled over the last two years, she said.

"Boomers are in the habit of hiring someone to do their chores," Ms. Alexander said. "They don't mow their own lawns, they don't change their own oil and they don't clean their own homes. Why would they edit their own video?"

Other business owners also report an uptick in business. Ted Craft and Jaclyn Jeffrey of Weston, Conn., started Little Dream Pictures with a niche in mind: editing home videos of foreign adoptions (the couple have two adopted daughters from China). They have indeed received a steady stream of orders from adoptive parents, but "Seventy percent of our business is other stuff," said Ms. Jeffrey, who handles the finances and marketing.

"A lot of the films we do are gifts for a special occasion - Father's Day, Mother's Day, wedding anniversaries, that kind of thing. When we started, that market hadn't even occurred to me."

Nonetheless, Mr. Craft, who is in charge of the creative side of the business, confessed to having a special fondness for editing adoption videos. "Those kids often have nothing tangible from their pre-adoption past," he said. According to Ms. Jeffrey, "It helps them articulate their own identities."

Patience is a necessary virtue in his work, Mr. Craft said. "The original videos get difficult to listen to after a while because of all the screaming," he said good-naturedly, referring to babies suddenly being cuddled and kissed by a couple of as-yet perfect strangers. "You can't fast-forward through it, because then you miss the sound and you might skip past an important moment. But yeah, I've sometimes pounded on the table for the tape to be over."

Even when the children are at their most angelic, Mr. Craft's job is not always easy. "You try sitting through two hours of footage of a baby sleeping in her crib," he said with a chuckle.

While hiring a professional video editor results in a slick-looking, customized product, most people choose a more budget-friendly approach. They send the tapes to be digitized in their entirety, then preserved on DVD's. As a primary advantage, the discs are generally expected to last "many times as long as videotapes," said Bob Wilson, the vice president for sales and marketing at YesVideo in Santa Clara, Calif. (yesvideo .com), whose own 13-year-old VHS wedding video, to his dismay, has gradually shed all its color.

But many customers require more than a simple analog-to-digital transfer for preservation. They want an easy way to find and view all the different scenes in their digitized video. To that end, YesVideo has developed patented software that automatically identifies natural scene breaks.

"When you turn the camera off and on, our computers flag that as a chapter point" on the DVD, Mr. Wilson explained. "When the light in the scene changes, maybe because you walk from one room into another, that's another chapter point."

For $25, customers receive a disc that contains up to two hours of video with 54 chapters and a pictorial index. The company says that in a few months, licensees will introduce special DVD recorders for the home that will incorporate the automated YesVideo technology.

While YesVideo is for people "who have flashing zeros on their VCR's," said Mr. Wilson, some large competitors aim at consumers who possess a bit of technical prowess. HomeMovie.com (now StashSpace), based in Twisp, Wash., digitizes clients' videos, then allows their owners to edit video online.

"It's a great way to share video without having to make individual copies," said John Larsen, the company's chief executive. "We recently had one of a wedding that took place here in the U.S., and some family members living in Israel couldn't attend. But they spent hours watching the footage from halfway around the world."

The company will store up to 20 hours of video for $10 a month, although customers are welcome to decline the offer and walk away with a $15 DVD of their final edit instead (there's also a fee of $5 per digitized tape). Mr. Larsen, of course, encourages clients to store videos on his computers indefinitely. "Not only have you now stopped the march of time on your deteriorating tapes," he said, "but you have a backup video copy if your house burns down."

Last October, exactly that calamity befell Barbara Nyegaard, a co-founder of a San Diego data collection company. Ms. Nyegaard's home, along with more than 400 others, was destroyed by a wildfire. Six months earlier, she had had her home video transferred to DVD by HomeMovie.com, but it didn't do her any good when the fire struck; the brand new discs were lost to the flames along with the original tapes.

Because HomeMovie.com did not offer the remote video storage option at the time, the company had promptly erased Ms. Nyegaard's video files - and a good deal of her tangible past. "It was a very strange feeling, as if I suddenly didn't have a history," she recalled recently. "My whole life before the fire had dissipated."

Whether driven by the fear of data loss or the desire to retrieve favorite scenes in no time, consumers have been lining up for digital video duplication services. YesVideo says it has created more than a million unique DVD's since its inception in 1999. HomeMovie.com boasts that it has "ten of thousands of hours" of video storage on its servers.

At the smaller video editing outfits, personal touches may further fuel the customer's satisfaction. Mr. Craft of Little Dream Pictures, an amateur musician, has been known to write and record original music, customized to the client's video, at no additional charge.

As for the final products, "they're all very different in feel and pacing," he said. "Some turn out very joyous and lighthearted. Others are slower and almost mystical in character. I could do the cookie-cutter thing, work from a template, but that wouldn't be any fun." He and Ms. Jeffrey ship the finished DVD back to clients with a beribboned bag of popcorn, to enhance the movie-viewing experience.

Meanwhile, Ms. Alexander, of Family Memories Video, has lately seen a new, younger breed of customer coming through her door. "We're now not only doing video résumés, but audition tapes that people send to the producers of shows like 'Survivor' and 'The Apprentice,' she said, clearly amused. "I don't think any of the candidates have been picked yet."

But there's always hope - and always more, better video to share.

StashSpace Press

StashSpace in the News

News from StashSpace

>>> Back to StashSpace News