Ok so you are knee deep in nappies but the world expects you to be a master of digital manipulation and distribution.

I am a new parent and I probably take for granted the amount of tech skills required, so here are some tech tips.

Pictures

Tip: Take lots of pictures, this is digital. If you are trying to capture a moment take as many snaps as you need to to get it. You don’t have to keep all of them. But I find quantity leads to quality.

Tip: Megapixels: Most modern Digital Camera’s are 4+ megapixel’s. The larger the megapixel the larger the image files will be. They will also contain more detail the higher the settings. If in doubt put it on the highest setting.

Tip: Camera Memory (SD, MMC, XD) Basically this type of memory has never been cheaper. Get a card with minimum of 1GB of storage.

Tip: Photography tips are really outside the scope of this post however my one tip is Lighting is everything. Before taking pictures consider the best use of available light.

How having captured your wonderful digital memories lets move on.

Tip: Transferring the images to your computer. There are two ways. One is to connect the Camera to a PC, the second is to take the memory card out of the camera and put it in a memory card reader.  Some modern PC’s have these on the front panel.

The software that comes with most Digital camera’s is usually rubbish.

Tip: For Managing and Manipulating Images stored on your PC Google’s free Picasa is fantastic and free. On your PC you will want to Catalogue, carry out simple fixes like red eye and experiment with the tuning and effects.

Above is a screen shot of Picasa

Take 10 minuets out of your life to see what Picasa can do, it will save you so much time in the long run

Tip: Etiquette, you may think everyone you know wants 20 x 6mb images of your new baby. You should consider the recipients and filling up their mailboxes. My advice is resize a few of the good ones into a much more file size friendly way (you can do this in picasa).

Example: My mother has a 15″ TFT Monitor so I never e-mail her pictures larger than 1024×768 pixels as she simply would not be able to view them.

Link: Picasa

Video

Now video is all the rage on the Internet these days. You will also find video has become convergent and your Digital Camera has Video recording capabilities. But lets assume its a  DV camcorder.

Most camcorders have either a USB or FireWire connection to the PC. In this example I am going to talk about FireWire.

Tip: The simplest way to to get DV on your PC is to use Windows Movie Maker (this came with Windows XP). Movie Maker will talk directly to the DV tape and copy the DV video file locally. The file will be stored in .avi Format.

Above is a screen shot of Windows Movie Maker.

Tip: In Windows Movie Maker you can cut and past the best bits of the video into a new clip.

Tip: The original DV video file (the .avi) on your PC is likely to be massive in file size. Example  6gb for 30 mins. So unless you have lots of storage and a way to backup that storage you now have a file management problem on your hands. My advice would be keep your original DV tape but edit from the .avi like a best of video clip and store that on your PC. This way you can revisit this in the future when storage is less of an issue.

Distribution

OK so now we have some digital content to share with family around the globe.

The simplest way to distribute is by e-mail. You need to keep an eye on the file sizes but this is the quickest way to get to people.

Tip: Google’s Gmail (their free e-mail service) has a really neat way of previewing images as thumbnails with a view all option that is super easy for non tech people like elderly parents.

You could consider an online image hosting service, but choose one where you can setup a secure login for people so you retain some privacy control.

One easy option is to use Picasa (again) it has a feature called web albums which you can choose to store pictures and video online in either a public or private album.

It doesn’t use a user name and password but Picasa web albums create a private link that you can e-mail to people for access.

Video is a bit more tricky and you may consider going down route of burning of CD/DVD’s of video content. This way you can keep the quality high and can reach people without a computer. Most consumer DVD players can playback this type of content.

Finally: Backup, Backup, Backup. You only get one shot with digital storage. You should just assume your going to lose it all.

Time to get paranoid. Keep your digital content on your local PC, keep backup on an external hard disk like an Iomega USB host powered one in the picture above. This is my recommended buy.

Next get your content backed up online. There are services like http://www.carbonite.com/ for example.

So I hope some of this helps. If you have any other tips you want to share or make a plea for help. Use the comments.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 9:56 am and is filed under Blog Entries, Recommended Buys, Tech Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.