Hi everyone! Here's an interesting article from the latest Rootsweb Review on preserving family memories on film. I'm posting this to all three of my lists so my apologies if some of you see this twice. Rick B List Administrator ==================== WHEN TIME RUNS OUT By Maxwell Russell My ex-wife, mother of our three children, died on 13 April 13, 2005. She was diagnosed and operated on for a stage four malignant brain tumor at the end of 2004, and it took less than five months for the cancer to do its work. For many years, I wanted her and our children to review and narrate the home movies that we took of the kids as they were growing up, but we never got around to it. I wanted all of us to sit around and comment on these movies into a tape recorder and thereby be able to save the information, times and places, names and faces. We waited too long. We began taking movies of the kids in 1958, when our oldest daughter was just a toddler. In those days, the best equipment you could get was a standard 8mm movie camera that was only capable of silent pictures. As the years went by, we added many reels of film to our collection and had a pretty good documentation of all three children as they grew up. Many times, I wished that there was a way to add sound and narrate the movies that we had taken. At one time my son even bought the equipment to re-photograph the movies with his VHS video camera to sort of modernize them, but he just never got the time to do it. After his mother got sick, I instructed him to take all the films down to a nearby store (various photo shops and big box storesoffer this service) and have them sent away to be transferred to DVDs. Just so you know, it cost $430 and I ended up with three full-length DVDs, which were professionally recorded and had background music added to them. He then mailed them to his mother so that she could at least view the DVDs in her last months. Later, I took the DVDs and, with the help of my computer and several movie software programs, I was able to remove the background music, edit out the bad spots, move things around, cleanup dark or light scenes, narrate all the movies, and add my own background music. I really got creative with the music such as using the theme from "Jaws" to accompany the kids splashing around in the backyard swimming pool. I wasn't able to recognize all of the people or all the places that were in the movies, but I documented everything as well as possible. I used several movie programs and it took a many man-hours to accomplish this, but that's what our children and grandchildren got for their 2005 Christmas presents. I'm not sure how much of a big hit these made as Christmas gifts, but I know this the whole thing was a labor of love and my heirs now have a record of themselves and their parents growing up. I only wish that whole family had taken the time to do this a lot sooner so that all of the people could have been identified and all of the scenes could have been documented. We waited too long. Previously published in RootsWeb Review: 8 February 2006, Vol. 9, No. 6.