Home Movies

If you are like me, you probably have a ton of home movies around from the camcorder you won at a company Christmas party that not only did you organize, but also picked out the very prize you ended up winning. And if not, chances are if you have kids, you probably have a video recorder of some form or another.

My particular camcorder is a JVC Digital Video Camera that takes MiniDV tapes to record the video onto. These are fairly high quality tapes, but are magnetic tapes none-the-less, and will degrade much quicker than a digital disc, such as a CD or DVD, which are considered archival quality.

Okay, so, I’ll have to admit, we got the most use out of it the first year we had it. I think that eighty percent of the video tapes we have are from 2006. Of course, a lot of stuff happened that year: We got married; our friend’s Rob & Sarah got married; got a dog; camped out to watch the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant’s cooling tower implode; had a family reunion; went to California & Disneyland. There were quite a few other things scattered here and there, like holidays and camping, but the listed ones were the biggies, and are all captured on digital video tape.

The term “digital video tape” seems odd, but I can explain it rather simply. It records the video as a digital signal onto a high quality magnetic tape, giving you DVD quality playback, and when connected to your computer, transfers the information back to its original digital format. This makes it rather easy to burn onto a DVD for archiving, however, the only videos we’ve archived are our wedding, our friends’s wedding and the Trojan implosion. I know, you’d think that the family reunion would be more important, but hey, it was pretty frakking cool to watch!

Now, this isn’t to say that these are the only video tapes of home movies we have, as it isn’t. The old-school VHS tapes were huge in the 80s and 90s, and most of our home movies from our childhoods are in those formats. And then there are a couple Hi8 tapes from borrowing a friend’s video camera that we have never transferred over and are sitting in our movie closet. And yes, we have an entire closet full of movies. My partner spent a lot of this last Christmas break transferring some of his old home movies from VHS to DVD. We used to have a VCR connected to the computer, but when we had to replace the motherboard, which had a built-in video editing port, we didn’t get one with that capability. Fortunately, we purchased a DVR a few years ago, and were able to connect the VCR to it and transfer the video to a digital format and burn a DVD directly from the DVR, both for archiving, and editing at a later date.

Not everybody has this capability, but if you want to preserve those memories for the longest amount of time possible, you should look into archiving them in some way or another. A digital file stored on a digital disc has an archival life of about one-hundred years, compared to the ten or so from a tape. Services are available for digital archiving, or you can ask a friend who has the equipment if you can use it. I know that I have a few tapes of my own that I really need to archive, if for no other reason, then to edit together short films I did in high school where I was only the producer and camera man, not director, so my footage is all raw. Who knows… maybe after I get it transferred and edited together, it’ll end up somewhere on the internets, go viral, and I’ll become a famous writer, producer, actor and director all in one!