Honor your Dad this Father’s Day with a gift he won’t forget: A video collection filled with memories of your best moments together. Clients with young families typically record 150 videos per month! That’s a treasure trove of meaningful memories to share with family and friends by creating collections according to themes or events.
There are many reasons a video project makes a lasting impact. Sharing a legacy of love is priceless. Socrates wrote, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” In his article, “Why We Make Home Videos,” David Pogue describes finding old home videos of his family. They had “completely forgotten” what they used to look like and enjoyed reflecting on how life evolved as each new child was added to the family. As we go through our daily lives, sometimes we forget about the special moments we’ve shared with our loved ones. Videos help us remember. We can show you how to get the most out of your video memories!
Using Media Files
Do you have movie reels from a film camera or tapes from video cameras? What about more recent video files from smartphones? Some companies convert multiple types of media so you can display or share it online for other family and friends to access. Picture This Organized explains why you need to preserve old film reels and tapes and offers tips on how to do it in an article about home movies. Once the video is protected, you can include it in video collages.
If you are like most people, you have many videos stored at home in boxes or digital devices. Trying to organize and protect them can be a daunting task. We recommend gathering your collections by family members and separating them by media type. Digital copies can be more easily identified by creating filenames that include dates and events in the name.
For example: 2020-04-02-Easter Bunny_IMG 4259.MOV
If you find long videos or extended footage you don’t need, it’s easy to edit the converted files to create smaller clips. If you use Apple products, you can learn how to take and edit and videos on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch and organize all your files in iCloud.
Popular video applications like Apple iMovie software and Windows Movie Maker allow you to import files and edit your content. Every video editing software on the market has different features and capabilities to upload, cut, crop, and rotate your images or video. You can add text, transitions, effects, sounds, and more. Once your video project is finished, you can share it in many ways. Compare some of the best video editing software to find one that works for you.
Sharing Files
Depending on the size of your project, you may be able to share your video files directly from your phone. It’s fast and easy. For larger files and any converted collections from those old family videos, you can preserve and share them on video platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. Choose the best one for your preferences. Since YouTube is a social media platform, everything you share is public. There are settings to keep them private or unlisted and share links with your family and friends, but searches using specific names or keywords can accidentally make them available to others. Vimeo is a media platform to store your videos and offers several privacy and security options, plus private video sharing restricted to the people you choose. Both video streaming sites are free to use but offer paid service upgrades.
Vimeo gives you more control over your content, but the platform isn’t as popular as YouTube. However, YouTube must compress users’ videos to accommodate the speed of so many users. The video quality may not be as sharp as videos posted to Vimeo. Keep in mind each platform will offer distinct advantages and disadvantages.
YouTube pros:
- Free and easy to use
- Popular for sharing stories or information
- Search Engine Optimization is used to drive traffic to the videos you publish
- Video can’t be edited after it’s been posted
YouTube cons:
- Material isn’t protected by copyright
- Rules determine what you can do with your channel and how it looks
- Accounts can be disabled for no reason
- Advertisers can place ads on your site
- Ability to edit videos after posting
Vimeo pros:
- Quality video
- Better encoding
- Greater freedom over your creativity and privacy
Vimeo cons:
- Less popular than YouTube
- Limited storage (requires upgrades)
- Causes upload failures on some web browsers
Maintaining Files
To help our young families manage their vast video collections, Picture This Organized helps set up a Vimeo account. Whether you set up a YouTube account on your own or ask us for help with a Vimeo account, your videos will be centrally located for sharing. But you’ll need to organize them in folders labeled by names, dates, or events to be easily located. You can also edit the thumbnail image and snippet of the file content. If your videos are in an iCloud library, you can create Smart Albums by media type.
Share your video website link with your family and friends so they can keep track of all your videos. You can set the privacy settings so that videos imported always use this setting and you don't need to edit each one. We recommend as a default making your videos private. You can always change individual videos to be public and shareable. On Vimeo, you can also create a password for an extra level of security. Check out Vimeo and YouTube privacy settings to learn more.
Make sure to review your videos and select only the favorites to upload. Think about archiving older videos on local storage. As your collection grows, you’ll have room to add new ones.
Preserving, organizing, and archiving videos is a great way to keep your family memories alive forever. Honor Dad on Father’s Day and entertain the entire family for years to come. Contact us to learn more about how to collect, organize and share your videos!