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, openin...