A few years ago, I realized that time was flying by and that I wasn't always capturing memories as much as I could be. Thus, I put a concerted effort in taking photos of my various activities and tried to capture as much as I could. This effort got me interested in photography so much that I did a "photo a day" project for the better part of a year though that has slowed down. I've also purchased a Digital SLR camera and learned how to do some manual photography.
In regards to video, I personally didn't capture many video memories. The only videos I had in my possession were from three trips to China. I had purchased an old DV8 tape camcorder and used them all for the trips to China. Otherwise, I had not used the camcorder for anything else.
However, recently, my interest in video and video editing was kindled. A friend of mine was taking video of a basketball league we both played in. My friend was trying to do some stuff for the league. His project got me into researching things and I realized that I had iMovie on my iMac at home.
I also had TONS of old video (on VHS no less) from previous basketball leagues I had played in (1998, 2001, 2003).
Put the two together and that formed an archival project the past month or so. I still had a VCR at home and a Sony DVD recorder machine that could take input from various devices. I popped in the various VHS tapes to the VCR, popped in a DVD in the Sony device and hit record to burn the videos onto DVD.
I took the DVD to my iMac and covered the videos into digital form. I still had to further convert the videos into a format that iMovie could use. From there, I viewed, chopped and put together many highlight reels from these old VHS tapes. I then uploaded these highlights to YouTube for preservation and sharing.
The response to these highlights have been quite positive from everyone who were involved (teammates / fans). The videos brought back a lot of positive memories and I was thanked a lot for doing them.
In doing the video highlights, I realized that videos do play a much different part than photos in preserving memories. Videos show you what happened and show some of the emotion and the scenes during those moments in time. Photos capture the action and the scene to a certain extent but it's much more passive. The memories you remember are left to your imagination.
It's interesting that I have been doing these video highlights and "archiving" them to DVD / YouTube. When I was unemployed for a time last year, I had looked into a program for a Master's Degree in Library Information Systems with a focus on digital archiving.
Though I soon started working and have not focused on the Master's Degree, it is interesting that I am doing some archiving. It may be something for me to consider for a future career.
