Working Out and Digitizing VHS

Getting out of shape. Restless. Not any heavier, thankfully, but clumsier. The remedy: a membership at Carleton Athletics. I enjoyed using their facilities while at university, and the grad discounts are too good to pass up.

This evening I spent an hour "warming up" in the fitness room (until my muscles could take no more), then I swam 32 lengths. Making this a three-time-per-week would do me well. I will sleep well tonight.

My current computer project is to digitize all of the family videos to DVD, much like I did with whatever originals were still on 8mm tape last year. The results of that were fantastic. However, I was worried that digitizing the old VCR through the Firewire camera would produce bad, blurry results, or worse, that the VHS tapes since 1992 had degraded. Unfortunately, they were all recorded in the fastest speed, meaning that the image would look bad. Furthermore, that was after an analog transformation from the source camera. A further annoyance is that dual-layer discs are only available in the '+' format, and the good ones are a whopping seven dollars per disc.

The results of the earliest tape look quite good. They really could not be better. It is comforting know that since they are 10Mbps MPEG2 they will not deteriorate any further. While that is about 4.5GB per hour, I'm going to keep a backup of all of the DVDs on hard drive. If CD-Rs are any indication of how discs can deteriorate, it's good to have a copy. Storage is cheap.

Sidenote: I was a cute kid at 10 years.