Tue Dec-27-2005
Isn't it great to know that you can rely on the new technologies to help you relive your past? Remember the old home movies? If you were born in the 1940's, chances are your parents had an 8mm movie camera and were considering whether your antics were worth paying extra for color film. Yes, it was a time when kids could be seen and not heard.
The technology of the Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) now makes it possible to bring out all those old gems of your personal and tribal history and lay them down in a two-hour or more archive on each disc. Barring fire or flood, they'll probably last another 75 years, which should be far longer than the format itself.
If you have your old 8mm or Super-8 films lying around, and do not have (access to) a working projector, your best bet may be a film transfer service. A few years back, I went through three 8mm⁄Super 8 projectors and one rear-projection device (used by salespeople to pitch their products before the laptop was invented). After transferring the family memories of a friend, three generations of history condensed to the flickering images of about twenty 15-minute reels, or 4 VHS cassettes. Or, in the latest media, 2.5 DVDs. Because they couldn't fix it, Kodak even sent me a free replacement projector for the family's machine when it broke under the strain. The "new" one lasted to the end of the project.
If you were born in the late 70's to a wealthy family, you may have been immortalized in Beta II or III format, or VHS. This would leave you with a much simpler problem: to find a way of transferring your old self images to the DVD medium without having to be screened first.
My Beta VTR woke up after a 15 year sleep and dined on the front end of the first tape I loaded. I got another Beta through Freecycle, but when I plugged it in, it would neither play nor rewind. Finally, I found one on eBay. It was in relatively good shape, but is sluggish in fast forwarding and rewinding (which you need to do to tension the tape evenly before dubbing). Nonetheless, I have produced about two dozen DVDs by hooking it up to the combo machine as an auxiliary input device. Only one DVD was spoiled, as a result of letting it burn to the end, rather than stopping it a minute or so short of its completion (to allow for finalizing it, so it could be played on a different machine).
So for those of you who have VHS tapes gathering dust, the convenient solution today is a combination VHS and DVD player-recorder. Sure, you can do the same thing with your new computer, if you bought a video capture card for it, and it has a DVD burner. You can download Movie Maker 2, for the ambitious. But these approaches involve a rather steep learning curve, not to mention the loss of desk space.
Currently, there are two main competing formats for DVD storage: DVD-R and DVD+R (as well as the corresponding rewriteable formats for each). Most of us who want to preserve our past glories aren't too concerned with editing. So the process is simple: put a DVD in the machine, put the VHS in the other side, and press the red button. For some reason, DVD-R seems to work best in this application, possibly because it has higher reflectivity than DVD+R, meaning that the latter can be read by older equipment.
However, with the increasing market presence of High Definition Television (HDTV), a much larger storage capacity is needed, and a new DVD format, Blu-Ray (named after the color of the laser), is in production. The demise of VHS will be followed by the end of the standard DVD.
Today's kid, of course, will press a button to transmit all the sound and fury of his lifestyle wirelessly to the nearest computer, which will burn it to a DVD in high resolution and Dolby 5.1 surround sound. And tomorrow's kid will look it up in Google.