Personal Media Collections

DVD has a relatively vast storage capacity when it comes to storing photographs, home movies and videos. For example, a double-sided, two-disc set can hold 12 or more hours of high quality film or video—or tens of thousands of high quality still pictures...or HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of moderate quality pictures!

When families are considering archiving their films, videos and still photographs, DVD is a great choice for giving everyone a copy that will last for generations. The interactive features within the DVD specification allow such collections to be organized by pretty much any hierarchy you’d like. For example: by the year, by decades or other time periods, by the people in the pictures or movies, by the holidays or events—just about any type of sorting you’d like to have...we can program the disc for.

Collections of still photographs can be set up as a slide show where each image is held for a set period of time before auto advancing to the next...or, a still show, where the viewer advances each image. The latter choice is considerably more expensive to do because each image has to be programmed individually. Also, with the slide show version, music, narration and transition effects can be added; they can’t be with a still show.

Photographers can use DVD’s to archive high quality digital files of their images for safe keeping as back-ups before disaster strikes and they lose their original films or computer files. This is not the same as the slide shows or still shows described above, where the images are essentially a stream of video that can be displayed on a TV or computer. A photographer’s archive is basically a collection of high quality computer files from which prints or duplicate films can be made. Even though they are for entirely different purposes, the photographer’s archive and the slide/still show archives can be put on the same disc or collection.