It?s a safe bet that somewhere in every house is a box of home movies?several even. Maybe those movies are on VHS,? Betamax, or even film reels; the one near-constant is that they?re all on old-fashioned media and need to be digitized. Enter Pixorial, a service that takes all that old media and modernizes it. Not only does the company digitize and preserve your media, but it gives you some neat Web-based tools that let you edit and share the results. The process can be nerve-racking when it involves your family?s memories, but Pixorial works well and quickly, and if you can handle the price it?s one of the best ways available to bring your memories into the 21st century.
Converting Your Media
A quick note on pricing before we dive in. Pixorial?s individual prices aren?t high, but there are a number of different costs, and they can add up quickly. The most obvious is for converting your stuff: You?ll pay $14.99 per tape or cassette, and 20 cents per roll of film. (Pixorial will convert VHS, VHS-C, Digital8, Hi8, MiniDV, 8mm, and 16mm for now, but the company says more formats are coming soon.) That?s the only cost you have to pay other than the shipping kit and shipping itself. But to really take advantage of Pixorial, you?ll want to use its Web app, which is free for 1GB of storage, or $5 per month or $49 per year for 25GB. You?ll be shocked how quickly you'll fill 1GB, so plan to pay the $49 if you want to use the Web features.
Setting up with Pixorial couldn?t be easier?the company makes the whole process surprisingly simple. When you first sign up on the site, the first thing you?ll do is order a shipping kit. There are two sizes depending on how much stuff you?re dealing with, but all come with boxes and envelopes for your various media, and are designed to make both yours, and Pixorial?s life easier, dealing with your stuff. You can ship things yourself and save the $4.99-$14.99 cost of the kits, but I?d recommend using them.
Once you ship things off, the company handles the rest, keeping you up to date on the process: I really appreciated the emails updates when my stuff was received, when it was processed, and when it was shipped back to me. Peace of mind is a big deal when you?re shipping fragile and important film across the country, and Pixorial seems to understand that. A couple of weeks later (my order took just over two weeks to finish a hefty amount of video) all of your original media, plus the digitized copies, show up on your doorstep.
As you?d expect (or at least hope), all my media looked good. The DVD quality was high, and there didn?t seem to be any loss between the old videos and the new ones. The one thing I didn?t like was that it was hard to figure out where everything was?I sent in a number of video tapes, and though Pixorial bundles tapes with their returned DVDs there?s still a lot of fast forwarding and rewinding to find a particular scene or tape. The only way to alleviate this, really, is to do it yourself, but having to re-catalog where everything was became a bit frustrating.?
The Web App?
This is where Pixorial really gets interesting. Instead of just turning your VHS tapes into DVDs, which countless other services and devices will do, Pixorial turns them into Web videos that you can do almost anything with, using its online tools. You can watch your videos online, or share them on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Being able to share my family?s old videos on Facebook with one click never stopped being fun. There?s also a basic video editor on the site, which lets you trim the video to cut out the inevitable camera-pointing-down shots, or the moments before the good stuff happens. You can add music to your videos, split them up, and quickly download them or burn them to a DVD. (It?s worth noting you can upload your own videos to your Pixorial account and use the tools that way as well.)
If you?re really feeling enterprising, though, you?ll want to take a look at the Producer tool. Producer allows you to do more advanced video-editing tasks, but in a user-friendly way: You can splice videos together to create a supercut of your favorite scenes, or a longer video made of multiple home movies. (It?s a great way to put together your kid?s pee wee football highlight reel, for example.) It?s nowhere near as powerful as a tool like Apple iMovie, but it gets the job done fine if you just want to add a few fancy transitions, write a note or a caption over top of the film, and share it with the family. Some of these features are only available in Pro mode, though.
All of the editing takes place in your Web browser?there?s a mobile Web app too, and the company says an iPhone app is in the works as well. There are upsides and downsides to using the browser, with the most prominent downside being that the site has a tendency to be very slow. I occasionally waited several minutes for a video to load before I could edit it, and saving any action took a lot longer than it would with a desktop tool. Pixorial smartly has you edit in a low-res version of the video even though the final product is much higher-resolution, but it doesn?t completely fix the problem. Of course, the upside is that you can see your videos from anywhere, and it?s a much more convenient way to create and access videos on the fly.
What Pixorial does is smart: It takes old media and makes it new again, not only by digitizing it but by making it available online, in a place where it can be easily seen and shared. There are certainly less-expensive conversion options out there including plenty of devices for converting home media like the Hauppauge?USB-Live 2, and it?s frustrating that Pixorial can?t handle more types of media, but I?ve not found any other services that offer so many tools. Instead of just converting it to a newer format that won?t age as quickly, Pixorial actually makes your videos available and useful, and at least for me, provided the best way to watch home videos that I?ve had in a long time.
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