The Past: Tied up in Video8

If part your past was played out before the proliferation of digital media then collecting those analogue bits and pieces can be a chore. Currently I am in the process of digitizing my old Video8 camcorder cassettes. It just so happened that I was fortunate enough to have acquired (meaning my parents bought me) a Sony camcorder, the TRV-55E (Video8, the analogue predecessor of Hi8) in 1990, well before the era of the digital hub had arised. Compared with other cams of the time it was quite compact. I believe it was probably the most compact video camera of the time. Remember this was a time before it was commonplace to have a videorecorder and camcorders were very novel indeed. A couple of months ago I tested my camcorder to see if it was working; it had been laying around for many years and I had just assumed that it would be in working order. Some of the LEDs flickered on, but it wouldn't eject (good thing there was no cassette inside). The outer black surface had deteriorated leaving a very sticky gloss on the outside. Although the camera itself is apparently dead, the memories have been preserved in the cassettes in Video8 format.

This task has been nagging me for quite some time now. In fact I justified my decision to completely switch to the Mac OS environment because I believed that most media should be put into digital form. As of this writing I have now finished digitizing the first batch, about 9 tapes in all. It's a pretty time consuming task. The main question is how to get the distill the video information wrapped up in the magnetic film. The problem starts with trying to find out exactly what is on the cassettes. I did a half-hearted job of documenting what was on the tapes which themselves usually on carry names such as "Home Videos 2", "California Tour III" and "91-". So essentially I am left to guessing. I have about twenty cassettes in all.

First using iMovie, you have to play the tapes through a digital-analogue converter (in my case the Miglia Director's Cut Take II) to the computer and this takes place in real-time. And those DV files are huge, a 60-minute tape takes almost 12 Gigs of hard-disk space. And then, in order to preserve the DV-files I transfer these to DVDs as data files, which also takes a while. And in between you also have to sift through the material adding dates and cuts to the files since the Video8 format does not provide this information.

The new iMovie app has been harangued in the press and personal blogs after its appearance about two months ago in iLife '08. Missing time-line, missing audio-manipulation. But something what it really is great for is as a sort of visual database for all the video material you produce. It's comparable to iPhoto in that respect.