Getting Geeky with the Archive

Loch Ossian on Rannoch Moor

One of the secrets which the dismantling of our old attic space revealed was an on old video camera, complete with leads, tapes and some amusing footage of our three kids when they were small. The kids really enjoyed looking at themselves as babies/toddlers on the tiny screen of the camera, which inspired me to see if the films could be imported to the PC for a little editing and then watching on a decent screen. As readers of this blog know, I also discovered that my PC had Windows Movie Maker, my first experiments with which are found here.

The old Sony Handycam camera however didn't seem to like my PC - despite all the relevant USB cables being shoved in the right holes. Some online searching revealed that the older Sony cameras are incompatible with Vista va USB, that Sony blame Micosoft, and vice versa. The same forums did suggest that connecting via Firewire would sort the problem out though. The result of this is that for the price of a foot or two of firewire - I can now import the hours of film that have been collecting dust in the attic for the last five or so years. On the films there are plenty of dreadful sections when the camera was switched on by mistake. When I saw these I hoped that they might contain scandalous admissions or accusations made by family members unaware that the tape was running; sadly all it revealed were reams of footage of feet crunching across gravel. Still - as these are on the PC, editing these out to leave watchable extracts is a simple, if somewhat time consuming process.

Next I discovered that a lot of the shorter film clips which I have on my PC were shot from an ordinary digital camera. These too can be slotted into the edited films at the relevant places.... mostly. The cameras we have owned over the years have mostly shot their movie clips as AVI's, which indeed slot straight into Windows Movie Maker. One camera however, captured its movies in Quicktime, which Movie Maker doesn't accept. Back online I discovered RAD Video Tools, a piece of freeware that had lots of recommendations as a tool for changing formats. Having downloaded that, and successfully making all my .mov files into .AVI's I can now work my way through chopping editing and putting together the film clips from the different years for the children's lives.

RAD Video Tools had a nice surprise in store for me too. When I opened up the "output" choices in the menu, alongside the various movie formats, it also had options for jpeg, gif and bitmap! In other words, it can separate out each individual frame as a picture, in massively higher quality than freezing the frame on a media player and capturing the screen. The photo of Loch Ossian on Rannoch Moor (above) was captured this way. One thing to note though is that even edited down to three seconds, there were hundreds of frames captured, so don't try that with a long clip!

The next problem is what to do with an old High-8 video that we have also found in the attic, which we used almost ten years ago. It has no USB or Firewire connections, and only outputs a signal on two jacks, audio and video. I am told that a gadget to convert the signal will cost me £90 - surely there is a cheaper solution than that?