(Days of work remaining until holiday time off: 5)
Saturday afternoon, we returned the first batch of tapes to the parents' and Daisy and her father found the rest of them. Daisy was right -- I did get most of them on the first go-around, as there are less than ten left.
Until you count the camcorder.
In the late 90s, Dad got a new camcorder, a Sony Handycam.
The Handycam takes Hi8 tapes -- 8MM tapes, unlike the more common VHS-C camcorder format. They're about double the thickness of an audio cassette and slightly smaller in overall size, and look very similar to a miniaturized VHS tape.
Well, there's no such thing as a VHS adapter for a Hi8 tape -- at least none that I could find anywhere online. Even the VHS-C adapter tapes are somewhat hard to come by and are expensive these days.
Dad had 7-8 tapes for the camcorder, all with various stuff on them. Unlike the tapes from the basement, on which I never knew exactly what I'd find, these tapes were all guaranteed to be home movies -- family footage from events and holidays and the like.
I just didn't know how to get them onto the computer, and from there onto the flash drives. Truth be told, I've never actually used a camcorder before. Of any sort, large or small -- they were sort of a novelty and very expensive when I was a kid, so very few people I knew had them, and as I got older and became a teenager and adult, I just...never cared, I guess? I grew up in the 80s and 90s in rural West Virginia -- a lot of people didn't even have fancy cameras, let alone video cameras. Part of this is why there's no family videos of me and very few pictures of me from my childhood. I didn't own a digital camera until 2005, didn't own a decent one until 2011, and didn't have a phone with a truly useable camera on it until somewhere around that point too. So, I was behind the times on a lot of tech and didn't really think about camcorders.
Because there's no adapter for the tapes, they must be transferred via the camcorder itself -- by plugging in the AV cables and hooking them up to the plug that runs into my USB port -- and then turning on playback mode. The problem is that the camcorder runs off rechargeable batteries and after 25 years, they've degraded to the point where they're almost unusable. I've had to keep the camcorder plugged in while I've gone through the set of those tapes.
What did I find? Well...
- Daisy's oldest sister's pre-prom video (2002)
- Our oldest niece's first birthday party (2007)
- That niece's preschool Christmas pageant (2009)
- Daisy's 14th birthday (2002)
- Family Christmas (2009)
- Daisy playing her cello in orchestra (2002)
- A high school theater awards ceremony, where Daisy's oldest sister and her now-husband both win multiple awards (2002)
- A full 90 minutes of Daisy's grandparents' (the Canadian ones) 50th Anniversary Party™ -- with everyone there, including people who are now sadly deceased (2002)
- and a video I called "Thirty Minutes of Rocks: Mom and Dad Explore the Utah Desert"
As an aside, that really is what it is -- it is thirty minutes of rocks. Oooh, look! Another rock!
Amongst other short snippets of "life as it happened," as Mom says.
The last tape I have yet to go through and digitize -- and as far as I know at this juncure, that's all of them -- is Daisy's performance in Fiddler on the Roof. At least that's what the tape is marked as. Who knows if that's what's actually on it.
So far I'm at 73.3 GB of video. The Hi8 camcorder tapes seem to be encoded differently, so it's not a continual stream of 1MB per second of video for the most part. It appears to depend on the tape manufacturer and recording speed, though.
This has all been an incredible undertaking of time and effort. I've spent hours at this computer every day for three weeks doing this work. I've sacrificed sleep to do it. I've sacrificed decompression and meal time to do it. I have (temporarily) filled my hard drive with a lot more data than I'm comfortable with losing were a catastrophic failure to occur.
Don't worry, I back up all of the videos to one of the flash drives at the end of every session. I won't lose those. But still.
Throughout all of this, there's still a lot going on in the background. Daisy has been busy at work as well as socially, and my job's not been that fun this week either. For the next three nights in a row, I am the Director in charge -- as my boss is OOO until the day I start my holiday vacation (Sunday/Monday, our other director is there). I'm not exactly happy about this as it was a nightmare the last time my boss was OOO, but I'm hoping that as we creep closer to the holidays, the idiocy will die down somewhat. I told my peers that this week is likely going to be the last real week of craziness before our workloads die down like crazy for the rest of the month -- as is the way it generally works.
I am still in the "Christmas spirit," though it feels like it's taking forever to get here this year. November went quickly -- so far, December has not. As you can see at the top of each one of these posts, I'm counting down the days.
My birthday is a week from tomorrow and we finally have some rough plans for it. Daisy confirmed with me that she is fully off work from the 20th through the 26th -- almost a full week -- so we do have some wiggle room if the plans fall through. We will:
1. Have breakfast at a small restaurant downtown that does vegan/GF options
2. Drive out to the waaaaay west side of Omaha to the putt-putt golf place and do that
3. Return to the parents' for my birthday dinner, where Mom is making me poutine
That's the rough plan, anyway. Whether we actually do it remains to be seen; weather/cold may be a factor, and I may just not feel like doing anything but the dinner (which is important to me). We may choose to do something else entirely. I'm not fully settled on everything yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment