TAPE TRANSFERS: A VIDEO SCRAPBOOK OF MEMORIES

There are few situations more frustrating than trying to decide what to do with old home movies, slides or pictures. You have to keep them, since they’re the only proof you have that your gray hair was once shiny brow

And what about those memorable trips to Disneyland with the kids? Or the time you rode cross-country on a motorcycle? If you look at the pictures now, they’re likely to be a bit more faded than the last time you looked at them. Kind of sad, isn’t it?

Consider having those movies and pictures preserved by transferring them to vid?ocassette tapes (you can also add titles and mood music). The process is called “video transfer,” and although it’s not a new process, it has become increasingly popular with the advent of vid?ocassette recorders.

You can find the service at a couple of area photo stores. Vicky Buchanan at PDQ One Hour Photo at Forest and Abrams says that she’s getting more requests for video transfers. “People go home and clean out their closets and bring back old slides and movies,” she says. “These things are a record of their whole life

Buchanan says she can transfer black-and-white or color 8mm movies, Super 8mm movies, 16mm movies, 35mm slides and negatives and prints of any size to VHS or Beta cassettes. She has a large collection of music to lend the right atmosphere to the video, or a customer can supply his own. The most popular music is what she calls “semiclassical.”

PDQ charges 10 cents per foot for movies (that’s about $5 for a 50-foot reel) and 25 cents for each slide or print transferred. If you add music, it’s $10 per hour of music. The whole process takes about two weeks.

One of the most unusual tapes Buchanan has made is a birthday tribute to Clint Murchison Jr. She says that more and more people are bringing in their parents’ home movies to be transferred and then giving the vidéocassettes back to their parents as gifts.

PDQ manager Bruce Penman says, “The video transfer system preserves the family history in a simple form. I think you should get movies and slides transferred even if you don’t have a video recorder, just so they’ll be better preserved.”