As mentioned in earlier blogs, a while back I spent the time to convert whatever VHS I could to DVD. Granted, I could have done this with my computer. I had the equipment to do so. And I could have made nice fancy DVD menus in the process. But that would have taken forever. Besides, not every tape deserves special treatment. So at the time I just bought a DVD-R/VCR combo unit for dubbing. Load in a disc, load in a tape, press the dubbing button, and wait. This is what allowed me to dub literally about 90 discs of video.
So now, I'm on to another mission. The old 8mm and Hi-8 cassettes.
(This photo was intentionally blurred for privacy reasons, of course. I don't need to let the world know all of my private details like relative names, my places of residence, school names, etc.)
As I understand it, Hi-8 is just a higher quality version of the 8mm tapes. Sort of like those "Super VHS" tapes that not too many people ever used, outside of professional video people. They still fit and they still play in my old camcorder. So I'm just going to refer to both as 8mm cassettes.
It took a little while for me to figure out how to get the combo unit to recognize the signal from my camcorder, but I got it. Right now as I type this, the remaining 1/2 hour of a tape from 1988 is playing, featuring my brother's chorus concert from that year, Xmas that year, and some little league game.
Something tells me that I should have more tapes lying around somewhere. Then again, I know these tapes weren't cheap, so it was common for us to dub the tapes on to VHS, then rerecord over the 8mm tapes. So maybe this box of 25-30 really is all I have.
Looking over some of these, I have a LOT of related reflections (read: rants) I could potentially write about:
- Why do parents capture so much of this stuff?
- Is little league more of an activity for the parents than the kids?
- What was I like at the age of [insert number here]?
- What happened to me between the ages of [insert number here] and [insert previous number, plus 1 or 2]?
- Why do parents include kids who really don't want to be there?
- Why are parents in general so technically inept with these devices?
- Can I watch these films and pick up little things that tell us what their relationship with each other was like at the time?
- Or their relationship with us?
- What stuff should I dub for other family members?
- What, if anything, would I feel worthy of uploading to YouTube? Keeping in mind that I don't want some born-again Christian schmuck who doesn't even know me to try to do some kind of bad psychoanalysis on me at age 11.
- And DAMN I had a thick Boston accent as a kid.
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