Compose a holiday newsletter on CD
Share special news with friends and family
By Laura Pratt
Ruth Baxter delivered her first family newsletter just months after delivering her first child. “It finally seemed like I had some real news to share,” the former Texas schoolteacher says.
Baxter’s first effort at newsletter creation was a wild success and, several Christmases and children later, it has become a standing tradition. Early every December, she puts together her latest dispatch and slips it inside a greeting card and envelope.
This year, put a new spin on your annual paper missive by placing all of your festive greetings on a CD (or DVD). Sending and receiving a seasonal disc jammed with news and photographs of family members’ experiences over the past year can be more fun than sending or receiving a two-dimensional card. CD newsletters can sing (quite literally) with all manner of multimedia: voice, graphics and video clips.
“The sky’s the limit in terms of the kinds of things you can do,” raves Dr. Mary Ellen Beatty, founder of Time Capsule Multimedia, a digital biography company based in Mississauga, Ont. “It’s the power of the story and then the emotion that’s evoked when you bring media together — particularly if you have the spoken voice along with video and audio.”
Here are a few tips about the technicalities of producing a CD newsletter to get you started.
Get equipped
- You will need a CD or DVD burner. New computers generally come with one, but you can buy external or internal ones to hook up to your computer.
- Stock up on blank recordable discs.
- You can use a basic word-processing program to create a text newsletter. A scanner, microphone, video-editing software and photo-editing tools are also good tools to have when adding multimedia.
Decide on the format
There are two ways you can compile your CD newsletter. The first is to save your text document, photos and video clips as separate files and then to burn them all onto a CD at once. This approach might include a Word document full of news with instructions directing the user to find specific files on the CD such as a sound clip of a child singing in the choir or a photo slide show of the family’s summer vacation.
The second, more advanced way is to embed photographs, sound clips and video files within the Word document. This process can be a little harder, but it allows you to have everything in one place.
Select memorable pictures
Family photos taken over the year, your children’s artwork and collages or slide shows of pictures can enhance your newsletter.
If you have a digital camera, you may have been organizing and cataloguing your images all year. Now is the time to choose the highlights. If you do not have a digital camera, scan your photos onto the computer or have a photo-processing store put your film-based images onto a CD, which can then be copied onto your computer.
Editing pictures is s snap with programs such as Windows Photo Gallery, in which you can delete red-eye or crop photos, and then save them as GIF or JPEG files. Don’t worry about having too many images. A CD has 600 to 700 MB, and a DVD has 4.7 or 8.5 gigabytes of data depending on the format. There’s more than enough space for a good selection of pictures.
Record audio clips
“As far as audio goes, there’s nothing better than sending Grandma your little one’s voice saying ‘Hi Grandma, I love you,’” says Dave Chalk, a computer television host with Chalk Media in Vancouver.
Use Windows Sound Recorder (Start > All Programs > Accessories > Sound Recorder) and a microphone to record everything from your newborn’s first wails to the barking greeting of your furriest family member.
Press the “record” button with your mouse, record the sound, and save it to your computer’s hard drive as a .wav file. If you are trying to save space, convert the sound file to an MP3. Right-click the sound file and go to Convert Media format.
Save each sound file onto your hard drive by name, in a “sounds” folder. If you want a Christmas carol playing in the background, download it off the Internet from a pay-per-tune web site and drop the carol into your folder.
Add home movie clips
Create a video presentation with snippets from holiday parties or your child’s Christmas pageant for the loved ones who couldn’t attend. Connect your video camera to the computer with a FireWire card or USB connection. Then use a video-editing program such as Windows Movie Maker to edit the footage into usable clips, adding titles, music, dates and transitions from different scenes. Save the file to your hard drive as a smaller file (but remember — the more compressed it is, the worse the quality). Movie Maker is included with Windows Photo Gallery; just click the Make a Movie tab.
Movie Maker also allows you to make a slide show of your favourite family moments. The easy-to-follow instructions guide you through the process of adding photos, sound clips and effects.
Inserting sound, photos and music into your Word document
You can enhance your text newsletter by inserting different multimedia elements into the Word document. To add sound and video files, go to Insert > Object. A pop-up menu will allow you to choose which element to add. For instance, choose a Wave Sound to insert your recorded sound or Windows Media Player to showcase a snippet of music that will be embedded in the document.
Copy to CD and send
When you’re done, you can copy the digitally enhanced newsletter and accompanying files to multiple discs. Print yourself some nifty labels and CD mailing sleeves, and drop off the whole lot with the folks at Canada Post.
