Home Videos - Why Do We Make Them?

[Andy Dixon]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/why-we-make-home-videos/' target='_blank'>http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2010...ke-home-videos/</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"I can't open some of the musical scores I prepared for Broadway shows in the 1980's, because the sheet-music software company went out of business. I know a film editor who can't see the first movie she ever made, because it uses a Sony videotape format that disappeared ages ago. And I routinely hear from readers who can't open their Microsoft Word documents from the early days, because, incredibly, today's Word can't open those early-version files."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/wpt/auto/1265379985.usr11334.jpg" style="border: 0;" /></p><p><em>Image courtesy of </em><a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sony-hdr-hc1,1235.html" target="_blank"><em>Toms Hardware</em></a></p><p>David Pogue of The New York Times has blogged about the dliemna he faced with media becoming obsolete. As an example he talks about a film editor who can no longer view a film she made years ago because the Sony videotape format has disappeared.&nbsp; No doubt many of us have experienced this issue with the loss of media such as floppy discs over the years.&nbsp; This leads on to&nbsp;David discussing why we even keep home movies, if the media we save them to now, will be obsolete by the time our children grow up.&nbsp; Will our children even care about those movies when they are adults, will their children care?&nbsp; It's a nice thought provoking article that really raises the issue of how to keep media we treasure as the formats continue to evolve and progress.</p>

[Jon Childs]

I totally agree with David. We recently found a random unlabelled miniDV tape. It happenned to contain my younger sons 2nd birthday party. Even though it was only 3 years ago we all got a kick out of watching it and seeing how much everyone has changed. I probably should consider moving them to a digital format though. I think the nice thing about converting them to digital is there is really no cost in keeping the playable. I don't need a physical video recorder.player. I can see losing some sheet music because software from some tiny music software company is gone, but I think mpeg/jpeg being implemented by so many people will have a long enough lifetime that it will be good for me. If my grandkids are really interested then they can find some software to convert it to whatever the popular format is in 2050.

Since we have gone totally digital for photos I have been real careful about backups. In the digital age I am guessing that losing your data to a bad disk is probably much more likely than not being able to find software to display a jpg file.

[Jason Dunn]

The computer industry has learned a lot since the early days - that's why industry-supported file formats are so important. I feel very confident in saying that 20 years from now, photo viewers will still support JPEGs. And if for some reason 50 years from now they don't, you can be sure that along the way there will be software released to migrate JPEGs to whatever new file format comes up.

It's SUPER important to get memories off physical mediums though - tape especially - because it decays more than most people think. Don't trust your miniDV tapes...digitize them.

I should also add that the people who Pogue cites as criticizing him for capturing these memories in the first place are complete morons. I treasure the few photos I have of my great grand-parents and earlier generations and think it's a shame that more memories weren't captured back then by my relatives.

I do think though that if you have the expectation (or hope) of future generations going through the digital memories of their ancestors, you'd better cull those digital photos (http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/28975/sometimes-deleting-can-be-good-the-concept-of-culling-in-digital-photography.html) and edit those video clips!

[Jon Childs]

I should also add that the people who Pogue cites as criticizing him for capturing these memories in the first place are complete morons. I treasure the few photos I have of my great grand-parents and earlier generations and think it's a shame that more memories weren't captured back then by my relatives.


Jason,

I totally agree. My kids love going down my parents house and seeing all the old photo's of their great parents, and it helps me remember them. Even when we dug out some old photo's of my father and saw how much my brother now resembles him at the same age (well except for the big sideburns and questionable choice in bell bottom pants) we all had a good laugh. Also, as the article notes I am already looking forward to pulling out the semi-embarrassing videos when they are getting married.