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Some of the Details

Yes, this took a bit of time ;-)

But it brought back lots of great memories

Retrieving the Tapes

In August 2023, when I visited Justin and Synthia in Wichita Falls, Justin showed me a box of videotapes that I had recorded in 1988 and in 1993 through 2000. He mentioned that he'd like to convert them to a digital format so that other members of the family could enjoy them. So, I offered to bring them back to Shaker Heights, where a friend of mine, Marc Pelletier, has a son that runs an A/V digitization company. Justin looked at me skeptically: "Dad. I've heard this before. I give you something to convert and it never gets done." I looked at him: "Dude. These are my tapes. If you give them to me, I promise I'll get them converted." With some reluctance, Justin handed over the box of 31 tapes and in it went into the trunk of my trusty Civic Si.

When I returned back to Shaker, I contacted Marc about the transfer. We had discussed it earlier that summer and though his son was in school, Marc said his wife, Maria, could take care of it.

Digitizing the Tapes

The Pelletier's have collected all manner of analog AV gear over the years and have the ability to digitize almost any format. So, I gave the box of tapes to Marc (who delivered them to Maria) and the copying began. Maria messaged me every few days requesting the correct title to some of the tapes (like, my handwriting is hard to read? Who knew?). When she finished, she wasn't satisfied. In the first pass of recording, many of the digital files had a random line or two running through them. So, Maria copied them again. That's another 45+ hours of playing and digitization. Talk about a commitment to quality work!

When she finished, she let me know I could swing by for the original tapes (and yes, Justin, I'll return them to you on my next trip to Texas :-D), pick up the USB flash drives with the .mp4 files, and pay her. So I did and with the USB drives in hand (36+ Gbytes of files), I hurried home (all of one block away) and put them in my computer to see them for the first time in over 30 years.

And boy did the memories come flooding back! From the trip to England and Scotland, the many Christmases, and finally the trip with Babushka to Russia, it's all there.

So now that I had the digital files, then what? I could have simply copied them to USB files and mailed them to everyone (and I'm still happy to do that) but since many (maybe all of you) have an Apple TV, I thought that if I uploaded them to YouTube, you could watch them on a larger screen. But if I were to do that, they needed to be organized in some way because there are, after all, 45+ hours of footage. That's where the next phase of the project kicked in.

  • Marc and Maria Pelletier

    I met Marc earlier this year (2023). Marc is a brilliant scientist and entrepreneur. He and his wife, Maria, moved to Shaker about ten years ago. And his oldest son set up the AV transfer business to help offset college expenses.

  • Marc's Facebook page

Marc and Maria Pelletier

Editing the Tapes

I could have uploaded the tapes as they were but some of the tapes contained subject matter that was very different and needed to be split into parts. Because the tapes had been sitting for decades, some of the magnetic coating on the tape had eroded and when digitized, that decay came through as noise. I wanted to remove those sections of the tapes. Finally, I wanted to add a title so that the viewer would have some idea of what the tape contained.

But I resisted the idea of any heavy editing. Some of the tapes contain long (and I mean long!) sections of bands, orchestras, and choirs playing but someone (I'm looking at you, Josh, Justin, Kristina, and Lindsey) might want to see them in their entirety! So, no heavy editing.

After editing and re-exporting the files to .mp4 again, the file size grew from a total of 36 Gigabytes to 448 Gigabytes!

About the Resolution

The video cameras I used recorded the images at a resolution of 640 px by 480 px. This is the same resolution as the original VGA monitors, circa 1981. This 480 px height was consistent with Standard Definiton recording at the time. And that was the resolution of the televisions we used to own and use to watch these recordings.

HD resolutions range from a screen height of 720 pixels to 1080 pixels. And 4K resolution has a display height of 2160 pixels! Thus, even if you look at these videos on a higher resolution display, they will appear fuzzy and less sharp. And the reason for that is that they are! Oh well.

Color, Dynamic Range, and Focus

Often the colors on the tapes will appear washed out. And in many cases, daylight footage renders the sky "white" as opposed to blue or even with clouds. These are the result of the limitations of the image sensors in these video cameras.

You will notice in many cases that the shadows are very dark and detail is missing. That is because the dynamic range of these sensors was also very limited. Kind of makes you appreciate what the "humble" iPhone can capture these days.

Copyright Issues

Because these videos are uploaded to YouTube, they are subject to copyright strikes. And there were quite a few. I know this may surprise you, but we were and are a very musical family. More frequently than I remember, there was/is music playing the background when I recorded these tapes. And so, some of these tunes were flagged by YouTube and had to be removed (what I chose was to have YouTube merely mute the audio track for the length of the "offending" tune).

  • The Family Archivist

    Yep. He keeps all the goodies. The pics, the tapes, and anything else. And that's great!

The Family Archivist