The boxes of photos are piling up from grandparents, parents, and your own family. So are the videotapes. And regardless of whether they're neatly pasted into photo albums or piled into boxes in the garage, photos probably are going to waste. Putting those photos into the computer may not help your storage problems, but it will help you make sense of a jumble of images and, in the process, produce some spectacular family albums. The skills you use for a home photo project can be applied at work as well, letting you create some dynamic presentations that potential clients can access from CD-ROM, video tape, or your company's World Wide Web site.
How complex you make this project is up to you. Inexpensive equipment and software let you produce some very respectable- and very artistic- results, while higher-end, feature-laden versions can yield results that look professional, complete with higher resolutions, more complex special effects. Regardless of your goal, however, the first hurdle is simply selecting the photos and getting them into your PC.
Video Capture. Of Course, you may want to digitize video clips or still images culled from video in addition to still photos. There are two basic ways to do this: Install a video capture card or add a frame grabber. Installing a video capture card requires opening the computer and physically inserting the card, but the card can offer onboard video compression, the ability to capture video at VCR quality, and other features depending upon your choice of card.
A video grabber can display video clips with audio in a resizeable window at 30 frames per second--standard video quality--on a VGA monitor under Windows. It also can capture still images from a camcorder, VCR, or television. It includes image display and capture software and JPEG compression software.
Video frame grabbers offer poorer resolutions--which are typically about 15 fames per second--but are external devices and tend to be less expensive. Video grabbers offer an easy way to grab video images for the PC by connecting to a PC's printer port and offering a standard video jack to allow connections to a VCR, television, camcorder, or virtually any other video source. If you want to transfer images from old 8 mm home movies, however, you must have them professionally converted on videotape.
Digital Cameras. If you're less concerned about archiving existing data than about getting current work into your PC, a digital camera could be for you. Users say digital images are easier to use and more flexible than film-based images, letting you screen shots as you take them, delete poor shots on the spot, and easily input the images into your PC.
These cameras use computer chips rather than traditional film and come in black-and-white-only or color-only models. They store their photos either in the camera itself or on removable PC Cards--either the cards formerly know as PCMCIA cards or the new, matchbook sized CompactFlash cards that fit into PCMCIA adaptor cards. (PC Cards are credit-card-sized devices that plug into portable computers to extend capabilities.) The number of photos that can be stored depends upon their resolution--typically you can store 16 to 20 images at 640x480 resolution and 24-bit color and 32 images at 320x240 resolution with cameras or cards with 2MB of storage. Adding either RAM or storage space (using CompactFlash or PC Cards) significantly boosts storage capacity. Some models include a small monitor, either built in separately, to let you see the actual image before deciding to keep or erase it.
-PC Novice, Issue P35 961107