Digital Decluttering: Home Videos (Premium)

I take far more personal photos than videos, but we also have a collection of home videos that were created with a variety of analog and digital cameras over the years before we moved to smartphones. Most of these videos were created in the very early 2000s, when the kids were little. And today, edited versions of these home movies are archived in my OneDrive cloud storage and on the NAS.

As I thought about this collection while doing my current digital decluttering work, a few ideas immediately popped into my head. I was pretty sure I still had the original tapes on which at least some of these videos were recorded, and there was even a chance that I had one of the cameras too. Perhaps I could re-digitize them and create new, clean copies of these videos, and if I was especially lucky maybe they’d be of higher quality than those I had made in the early 2000s. Either way, I resolved to upload whatever home videos we had to YouTube as well (using my personal account), where they can be stored privately for free and shared with my wife and kids.

Related to this, I had made multiple work-related videos at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in both 2003 and 2005, and those videos are already available on the Thurrott.com channel on YouTube. The problem is, I made them 20 years ago using Windows Movie Maker, and so the quality is terrible, with a postage stamp-sized resolution of just 320 x 240. If I still had the original tapes from those events, I could release new, clean copies of them as well, and they would definitely be of higher quality.

This was all very exciting. But it was also a bit frustrating because I was thinking about this while in upstate New York over Labor Day weekend, when I was completing my documents archive in my downtime between visiting wineries. So when we got home, one of the first things I did was look through one of two possible places the tapes might be, the storage bins near my work desk. And sure enough, there they were. And not just the tapes, but also a video camera. Jackpot.

A closer examination of this bin revealed that I had several DV tapes and a Sony DCR-HC42 DV camera to go with them, plus three or four 8 mm video tapes, but no camera. If the DV camera worked, I could use that to play each tape, see what was on there, and then use some kind of camera-to-USB connection to record the contents of each on a PC.

It was time to figure out what I could do here.

First, the DV camera. I plugged it into power to make sure it’d even come on. Otherwise, I’d be looking at possibly using a tape transfer service of some kind. But it powered on immediately.

And then I noticed something incredible. There was a DV tape in the camera.

I rewound it using the touch controls on its built-in swivel screen and then pressed Play. And what I saw was both familiar and surprising. It was some Christmas morning and the kids were very young, and they were racing around the room, opening presents. But I didn’t recall ever seeing this video, so I looked through the home videos we have on the NAS and in OneDrive, and couldn’t find a copy of it. Then I looked at our Christmas photos over a few years, based on how old the kids looked, and identified the year based on what they were wearing: it was 2005. And then I looked at our 2005 home videos specifically. And … nope. I had never digitized this video. It’s possible I had never even watched it.

Incredible.

After showing it to my wife, and popping the little tab on the tape so I couldn’t overwrite it, I knew that I needed to start with that video. So I moved on to the next step: I examined the camera (and found its user manual online) to see how one might output video from it. As it turns out the DV camera has what was a very common A/V port on it. And the manual told me that it originally came with a cable set that connected to the composite audio (red and white) and video (yellow) connectors that were likewise common on TVs back in that day.

I looked through my cable bins, but couldn’t find that cable, so I must have tossed it out at some point, no doubt as part of some decluttering push years ago (ironic!). But there are many cheap choices on Amazon, including the one I got for just $10 (which also includes S-video for a slightly better picture).

I would also need some kind of USB-based video capture device that would accept these inputs and allow me to record the video playback on a Windows PC. It’s been a long time since I’ve done this kind of thing—thanks to smartphones, there’s no need for intermediate connections like this anymore—and so I was worried I’d have to spend a bit of money on this next device. But then I noticed there were some very inexpensive options and figured it was worth at least trying one of them first. And so I purchased a $10 USB audio-video converter too.

You gotta love Amazon. I purchased both devices last Friday and they were delivered the next day. And as soon as they arrived, I just had to see if this setup would work. So I connected the USB AV converter to the laptop first, just to make sure it showed up properly in both Device Manager (with no errors) and the Settings app (as separate camera and sound devices), which it did.

And then I connected the other set of cables, with the DV camera on one end and the S-video/composite audio attached to the USB AV converter. (Plus a USB-A to USB-C adapter I already had for the computer connection.)

But … how to test the quality of the connection? Where could I see—and then record—the output coming off the camera?

Given my love of Clipchamp, I naturally started there. I knew from using and then writing about Clipchamp that it has many hidden and surprisingly powerful features that most casual users would overlook, and that one of them is the ability to capture off a camera. Because Windows sees the USB AV converter as a camera (and, separately, as a microphone), I figured I could use that feature to see and record the output from the camera.

And it worked. But the free version of Clipchamp places a 30-minute limit on this kind of recording, and I knew that some of the videos I’d import during this process—like those PDC videos—are longer than 30 minutes. And so I moved on from Clipchamp for this project.

My next thought was OBS Studio, the free but incredibly powerful video recording software that I use for Hands-On Windows. Like most complex software, OBS Studio can be a bear to configure correctly, especially when you’re unfamiliar with it. But because I had to use and configure it on multiple PCs since July 2022, I’d gotten to know it pretty well. And I was able to quickly set it up to connect to and record from the DV camera. Unfortunately, the low resolution of the camera required some additional configuration and testing until I got it just right. I’m pretty sure the maximum output quality of the DV camera and tapes is DVD-level, or 720 x 480. But I set it up so that the recorded files are 1280 x 720. It looks/seems about the same as the quality was back in the early 2000s, honestly.

And then I set it up to record that Christmas video. It was a bit over 8 minutes long, and there was nothing else on the tape.

I took the raw output, imported it into a new Clipchamp project, trimmed the beginning and the end of the video, and added fades on each end. And it was done: 8:10 of never-before-seen footage from 2005.

I’ve alluded to this a few times in this series, but part of the digital decluttering work I’m doing involves a rethinking and reconfiguration of my online accounts, in part to separate work stuff (*.thurrott.com) from personal stuff. From a video perspective, that means that my work-related content—the new Thurrott.com channel on YouTube—is tied to my Google Workspace account, and I’m in the process of moving all personal content to my personal Gmail account.

As part of that work, I removed all of the videos from the YouTube account associated with my Gmail account and decided I would upload my personal videos—i.e. this home video archive—to this place because it is free and widely available. And this is an interesting tip: anyone can use YouTube for unlimited video storage, and you don’t have to make any (or all) of them available publicly. Instead, these videos can be private to you (or unlisted, your choice) and you can share them explicitly with an individual or a group of people in various ways.

Given this, my personal YouTube channel will be private going forward. But I’ll upload my home movies there as I re-digitize them. (And then upload any existing home movies that aren’t re-digitized for whatever reason.) And so I started with this Christmas video and then shared the link with my wife and kids. Nostalgic happiness achieved.

This week, I’ll get cracking on re-digitizing more home videos and then, of course, those PDC videos. So I’m not as far along here as I am with some other digital decluttering tasks I’m working—among other things, I literally have PCs sitting on the dining room table just uploading various archives to various services—but it’s something I will absolutely finish in short order. It’s just a matter of recording the videos, making slight edits, archiving them (to the NAS, OneDrive, and Google Photos), and uploading them to YouTube.

More soon.