What the Tech: Gift idea family memories
These days, every family moment ends up on a smartphone. Birthdays, ball games, first steps, last steps, and everything in between get saved to the cloud without much thought. But it wasn’t always that simple. Before about 2010, the only way to capture those memories was with a camcorder. VHS, Hi8, and mini DV tapes were the standard, and most families still have a box or two of them tucked away somewhere.
If you’ve got those tapes sitting in a drawer, they’re probably holding some of your most treasured memories. The problem is, you can’t watch them anymore unless you still have a working VCR or camcorder, and even then the quality is fading fast. The good news is it’s easy to convert those recordings into digital files you can save, share, and enjoy again. And the gadgets you need make great Christmas gifts.
For old tapes like VHS, Hi8, and mini DV, the Pinnacle Dazzle converter is one of the simplest tools you can buy. It doesn’t play the tapes itself, but it does take whatever your VCR or camcorder outputs and turns it into a digital video file. Hook your player to the Dazzle, hook the Dazzle to your computer, open the included software, and press play. The program converts your video and even gives you tools to trim clips, add titles, or add music. From there you can upload your videos to YouTube, share them on Facebook, or save them to your computer for safekeeping. The Dazzle runs around sixty dollars and supports VHS, Hi8, and mini DV as long as you have a device to play the tapes.
If your home movie collection goes back a generation or two, you may have actual film reels instead of tapes. The Wolverine Film to Digital Converter is designed for exactly that. It looks like a small film projector with two reels. Load your 8mm or Super 8 film on one side, thread it through the gate, and as the film advances the device captures a digital image of every frame. It stitches those frames together and saves the finished movie onto an SD card. From there, it’s easy to move the movie to a computer and share it online. Wolverine includes clear instructions, and once you get the hang of loading the film, the process is surprisingly straightforward. The converter costs about two hundred forty dollars.
A quick warning. Old film is delicate, and VHS tapes don’t age well. Colors fade, audio drops out, and the magnetic tape itself can deteriorate. Converting them sooner rather than later is the best way to make sure those memories survive.
These gadgets make great holiday gifts in two ways. You can give them to the family historian who loves a good project, or you can use them yourself and surprise everyone with digital versions of the home movies no one has seen in decades. Either way, expect at least one person to get a little emotional when those first clips start playing.
Wolverine Film to Digital MovieMaker $249 at B&H Photo
Pinnacle Dazzle Converter at $39.99 at Walmart
