how to EDIT your Home movies

There are many advantages to digitizing your home movies to hard drive, but one of the biggest perks is having the ability to edit your old films. Once your films are recorded as digital files, you'll be able to add titles, music, narration, and still photos. You'll also be able to rearrange scenes, isolate portions to share with particular family members, and do additional color correction.

If you're a novice to video-editing, or if you're just tech-phobic, there's nothing to fear. The external hard drives that we provide plug directly into your computer's USB port, and there's nothing to download or install to set up the drive. The files are formatted as Master H.264 .mov, a high quality format that is one of the most widely compatible options out there. Most clients will be able to double-click their files and start watching their films immediately. If, for some reason your files don't play right away, you can download VLC for free. (VLC is a no-cost, ad-free, open-sourced video player that is designed by video engineers).

While the files themselves will look professional-quality, playing them will not slow your computer's performance down. The Master H.264 files will be instantly compatible with the vast majority of editing programs, and if not, a quick download of VLC will provide the software with the driver needed for the program to read the files.

As far as editing software goes, there are many programs that are inexpensive and user-friendly, and most give you all the features you'll need to turn your footage into a polished, customized movie experience for your friends and family to enjoy. If you're a Mac user, you will have iMovie pre-loaded onto your computer. Some PCs come with editing software pre-loaded as well, but if you don't have a PC program, there are many great, inexpensive options out there. We recommend Corel Video Studio Pro.

Once you have your files edited, you'll be able to export your project to a variety of different formats to make sharing your masterpiece super easy. You can record to a DVD or Blu-ray (if your computer has a DVD or Blu-ray burner) or you can format it to a file share it via cloud service (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc) or upload it to YouTube or Vimeo.

Before you begin, make sure you back up your project before doing anything. That's extremely important. We also recommend doing a quick check of your editing program's settings to ensure that you're getting the highest quality video. Sometimes programs will default to a lower quality video setting in order to conserve hardware resources, but this can dramatically alter your video. Many problems with image quality can be traced back to an error in the initial settings, so please check carefully.

A note about editing from DVDs: Hard drives allow for exact frame by frame editing on your computer. DVDs, on the other hand, use MPEG-2 recording, which makes frame by frame editing difficult or impossible depending on your software. MPEG-2 editing loses quality with each editing generation, whereas file transfer between hard drives is lossless. Also, DVDs have a maximum data rate of 10Mb/s, compared with much higher data rates for files on hard drives.