Hi, I’m Myrtha. I’d like to share with you how I got started making home movies.

When my son was born, a more experienced parent advised me, "Don’t blink". I didn’t listen. I blinked, and in that one blink of an eye, my son is 11 years old today. Time flies, and what I don’t capture is lost forever.

That’s why one of the first thing I bought as a new parent was a video camcorder. It didn’t take long before I had shoe boxes of video tapes of precious moments I didn’t want to lose.

Unfortunately, I found that watching unedited, raw video footage is down-right boring and I find myself pressing the Fast Forward button every few seconds. I knew the thing to do was to take all that raw video footage and create beautiful, touching home movies out of them. 

I have to tell you, getting started was not easy. I had to integrate a multitude of hardware and software and I had lots of questions. Does my PC have enough RAM? Which movie editing software to choose? How to hook up my video camera to the PC? The manual is too technical and long-winded. How to add music to my video? Why does the application hang? The worst part, when I try to get help, the computer manufacturer blamed the software, the software folks blamed the camcorder, the camcorder folks blamed the … you know what I mean.

I stuck with it and kept going. You know why? It’s this: my parents live half a world across and only see my kids once every two years when our family visits the old country. Can you imagine seeing your grandkids at age 0, age 2, age 4, age 6, age 8? I was very motivated to create home movies and share my kids’ going-ons with their grandparents much more frequently than that!

I also learned that video tapes/cassettes degrade with time. Everyday I waited, everyday it degrades. Don’t let your video tapes end up like my parent’s. We recently dug out some old video tapes my parents shot when we were kids. We were shocked at what Time did to the video quality: Click Play below.

I wrote this blog for busy parents, families and hobbyists like me. See, the catch-22 for busy, time-pressed folks like us is that we are so busy living our lives, we have no time to capture the precious moments of our lives and our children’s.

Do we spend time capturing the moment, or do we put the time living in the moment?

Hence, Rule #1 about making home movies: It has to be easy, hassle-free or it is not sustainable.  If you’re ready to make home movies, check out the How-To Central on the right panel.  You will find click-by-click video tutorials on how you too can start making home videos..  Good luck. 

After you’ve mastered the basics, don’t stop there. Visit the blog section for tips, shortcuts, new gear reviews and connect with the community.

Better still, sign up for our monthly enewsletter so you will be alerted of new posts on the blog. Don’t worry we don’t share, sell, slip-out, let anyone else take a peek at your email address. We like to keep you all to ourselves.

Sincerely,

Myrtha Chang
www.SimpleVideoEditing.com

Email: simplevideoediting at gmail.com
(substitute ” at ” for “@”, I’m trying to prevent robot spam)