VHS Home Videos for Today
One of my favorite pastimes with my family is watching old VHS home videos. I want to generate that same experience for my kids, but today's media doesn't really seem to have the same sensation.
These videos of my childhood all have a sort of specific feel to them. Long form movies, these typically took up the entirety of a VHS tape, about 80 minutes or so if I recall. Scenes might run for several minutes of us just doing household things. Maybe it was a birthday party, or it could be the one time my cousin tried to make a documentary about trees. In any case, it was a live action glimpse into that period of time.
I still need to digitize those videos. We have tons of them somewhere or another, and I know that tape media will most definitely degrade over time. If I can convert those to mp4 now and properly store them, they’ll be preserved for years into the future. I might just burn them to DVD and watch that instead of the original VHS. Who has a VCR nowadays anyway?
Fast forward to today, I probably have significantly more videos of my kids by time. The difference is that most of these are very short clips. If I’m recording from my phone especially, most individual videos are probably 30 seconds to a minute. And instead of sitting down as a family to watch them for an extended time, I’ll just show one or two clips to individuals here and there. It’s a very different scenario.
The closest thing to those old VHS tapes is video that I take on my GoPro. I’ll sometimes do short clips, but other times I’ll hit record and sit the camera on a bookshelf or something. Especially around Christmas, this gives a longer individual shot, and it feels much more like those home videos of yesteryear. Sometimes I’ll capture a specific event, but other times I just want to document my life for that short time.
These videos were especially touching when I recently watched through some footage from Christmas last year. My grandfather passed away several months ago, and seeing him alive and moving again was very special. Part of me wants to edit together some of those clips into a longer single movie, and show my family when we all gather this year.
I want my kids to be able to sit down in 10 or 20 years and watch bits of their childhood, not in individual clips from some folder I happened across, but in an extended movie. I want to remember what life was like through video. There’s something of a ritual about dusting off an old tape and configuring the VCR to play it properly. What do we have like that today? What will we have in the next decades?
These videos of my childhood all have a sort of specific feel to them. Long form movies, these typically took up the entirety of a VHS tape, about 80 minutes or so if I recall. Scenes might run for several minutes of us just doing household things. Maybe it was a birthday party, or it could be the one time my cousin tried to make a documentary about trees. In any case, it was a live action glimpse into that period of time.
I still need to digitize those videos. We have tons of them somewhere or another, and I know that tape media will most definitely degrade over time. If I can convert those to mp4 now and properly store them, they’ll be preserved for years into the future. I might just burn them to DVD and watch that instead of the original VHS. Who has a VCR nowadays anyway?
Fast forward to today, I probably have significantly more videos of my kids by time. The difference is that most of these are very short clips. If I’m recording from my phone especially, most individual videos are probably 30 seconds to a minute. And instead of sitting down as a family to watch them for an extended time, I’ll just show one or two clips to individuals here and there. It’s a very different scenario.
The closest thing to those old VHS tapes is video that I take on my GoPro. I’ll sometimes do short clips, but other times I’ll hit record and sit the camera on a bookshelf or something. Especially around Christmas, this gives a longer individual shot, and it feels much more like those home videos of yesteryear. Sometimes I’ll capture a specific event, but other times I just want to document my life for that short time.
These videos were especially touching when I recently watched through some footage from Christmas last year. My grandfather passed away several months ago, and seeing him alive and moving again was very special. Part of me wants to edit together some of those clips into a longer single movie, and show my family when we all gather this year.
I want my kids to be able to sit down in 10 or 20 years and watch bits of their childhood, not in individual clips from some folder I happened across, but in an extended movie. I want to remember what life was like through video. There’s something of a ritual about dusting off an old tape and configuring the VCR to play it properly. What do we have like that today? What will we have in the next decades?
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