Getting to grips with technicalities of home videoing can be more than tricky, especially if you’re trying it out for the first time. Your friend’s epic birthday party, your baby’s first babbling words… these occasions deserve to be captured in films that show off the beauty of the moment more than they show off your dodgy camera skills! Luckily it’s easy to fake it as a pro, if you just avoid a few common pitfalls. We already took you through a selection of the most frequent mistakes, but here are a few more to make sure that you really get the best out of your home camera!

Don’t Shake and Shoot

Keeping a steady hand is one of the surest ways to make sure that nothing detracts from the content of your video. Shaky shots often distract the viewer – and you don’t want to be held responsible for causing motion sickness when you finally share your video with family and friends. A little accidental wobble here and there can be excused, but many videographers find that once the power starts going to their heads they’re suddenly finding excuses to experiment with motion shots at every opportunity. It can be fun to move around while filming, but remember that stillness and balance can also be serious virtues when it comes to making home movies.

Avoid Accidentally Hitting That Record Button

Unwanted shots are exactly that – unwanted, and once they start cluttering up your video you’ll find yourself with more shots of Grandma’s feet than baby’s first steps. It’s all too easy to accidentally hit record, and it can be disappointing to find yourself with a lot of unintended footage. Luckily, this problem has a very easy fix: the camera’s viewfinder will always tell you if you’re currently recording, so keep an eye on it and make sure that you’re only filming what you really want. As an added bonus, you’ll find that less accidental recording makes for longer lasting batteries. Win!

Remember That Everyone Makes Mistakes

As much as this advice can help you take higher quality videos, there’s nothing worse than spending so much time worrying about getting the perfect footage that you end up missing the moment that you were trying to preserve. Mistakes are made by everyone – the best professionals with the greatest track records still find themselves messing up from time to time. As you practice filming and start to perfect your art, you’ll find that those mistakes get fewer and further between, and you’ll learn how to shrug it off when you do find yourself with that unwanted shot or little bit of shaky footage!

However polished your footage is, the most important thing is that once you’ve got it recorded you have it to keep forever. We specialise in transferring 8mm Cine Film to DVD, meaning that you can store your films in a format that is easy to watch, share and treasure. To find out more, contact us at 0800 592 433, or email info@cine2dvdtransfers.co.uk.

No doubt about it, shooting all those awesome moments can give anyone a real buzz. Whether it’s baby’s first steps, seeing your kid off to his school prom, or your daughter’s big day, any amateur filmmaker is going to be excited. But that way madness lies! Ok, not really madness – but certainly some errors which you may live to regret when it comes to watching and re-watching those moments on the small screen. So let’s take a look at a few common mistakes we’re all guilty of when shooting those precious moments, starting with…

Zoom-Zoom-Zoom

The zoom function on camcorders is pretty handy, allowing you privileged access to shots you might miss out on, getting up close and personal with your newly christened baby, say. But that doesn’t mean every shot requires a hard zoom. Or any zoom for that matter. It can totally distract from what’s actually happening – sometimes we need to just let the picture itself tell the story.

Auto-Mode is Auto-Pilot

Ok, we know we just had a pop at the ol’ zoom button, but really, that camcorder is a nifty little machine with some seriously cool bells and whistles. It may be easier to film with just auto-focus switched on, but when your kid’s walking down the aisle the last thing you want is for the screen to go blurry. Or watch the colour bleed out because you haven’t calibrated it properly. We definitely suggest checking out all you can about what your camcorder does, so you can capture those shots perfectly.

Eye-Level Lacks Creativity

With a video camera it’s sure easy to just point and shoot, right? After all, it’s in your hand, and you’re standing, what more do you need? Well, by just shooting at standard eye-level you may be capturing everything as you see it, but you’re also missing out on tons of really great shots. You can afford to be creative, especially if it means recording something that might otherwise be missed. Get down low, get up high, get as much range as you possibly can – not only will it make you feel like the next Spielberg, it’ll also let viewers see the whole scope of the event. And that’s more to make it memorable.

Here at Cine 2 DVD Transfers we love helping you relive those awesomely special memories. That’s why we specialise in converting cine to DVD, so you can re-watch those moments time and again. For more information about our services, please don’t hesitate to contact us on 0800 592 433 or email info@cine2dvdtransfers.co.uk and our team will be glad to assist with all of your enquiries.

Have you ever watched a movie in silence? And we’re not talking about the old Hollywood films of the 1920’s with the dialogue cards and the over-acting. We mean modern movies which have been muted, say. Or maybe you’ve put together your own indie flick, and watched it through before laying down the soundtrack.

If you’ve done any of this, you’ll have probably noticed just how evocative music in the movies can be. Sometimes you won’t even notice just how much the music or score contributes to, say, the suspense or romance of a certain scene – until you take it away. It’s a case of you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone, right?

So important is music to movies that some songs are hard to separate from the films they appeared in. Reservoir Dogs owns ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ by Stealers Wheel. Thousands of people will evacuate the waters if anyone even dares hum the first bars of John Williams’ score for Jaws. And every man in a tuxedo will mentally sing the James Bond theme to themselves – fact!

Many of the old-school cine cameras that came out didn’t have microphones attached. That means when we convert your old films to digital, the scenes play out in sheer silence. For some that’s fine and dandy, but others prefer to enhance their films with some background music – just like in those Hollywood movies we all know and love, it can help add character or emotion to what’s unfolding on the screen.

Here at Cine 2 DVD Transfers we offer the option of adding music to your film – so if you’d like easy listening music or even classical, we’re happy to oblige. After all, they’re your memories, and we know how much they mean to you. Whether you’re looking to transfer Super8 to DVD or all types of cine film to USB, we’ve got you covered. For more information on our services, please do contact us on 0800 592433 and we’ll be more than to assist with your enquiries.

You may have heard in the news yesterday that two people have been arrested in the UK for pirating the Stallone-Statham-Schwarzenegger actioner The Expendables 3. Turns out that what wasn’t expendable was the $10m revenue the film apparently lost out on thanks to online pirates – at least, that’s the view of the movie’s producer.

With the issue of copyright rearing its head in the headlines again, it’s worth bearing a few things in mind. You may not realise it, but Great Britain actually has an entire police department, the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), dedicated to hunting down those who flout anti-piracy laws.

Here at Cine 2 DVD Transfers, we specialise in converting your old films and videos onto the DVD disc format. But that sort of service is reserved for those products for which you actually own the copyright. So how do you know if you own the copyright on your intellectual property?

Here in the UK, copyright is granted if you’ve created the work – be that a recording of your sister’s wedding, or an original poem you wrote for your mum’s birthday. That blog you run on the side, you own the IP for that. And you don’t have to do anything in order to copyright anything you’ve created, it automatically comes into effect the moment you’ve made it. Generally speaking, copyrights last life plus 50 years too. That’s why you’ll sometimes see movies and books in the public domain – the copyright expired and no-one renewed it.

But pretty obviously we don’t own the copyright to The Expendables 3 – even if we have the DVD at home. In fact, these days, in the age of digital ownership, you rarely even own items you’ve purchased, at least not in the legal sense. So you don’t own that song you bought on iTunes – you’ve bought a licence to play it; a licence which can be withdrawn at any notice. Same with film and game downloads.

If you’re looking to transfer your old home movies, whether it’s birthdays, christenings, weddings, Christmas get-togethers or that old film you made back in school – because you own the copyright to them – we can help. Here at Cine 2 DVD Transfers we’re always on-call to convert your cine films to DVD for you to watch and share once more. For more information about our services, please contact us on 0800 592 433 or email us at info@cine2dvdtransfers.co.uk and we’ll be glad to assist.