Digitizing VHS

Ok I have this huge Project I've been waiting to attack for umm 4 years now. It's all about digitizing my VHS tapes. I've been taping since 1985 or so but lost all my tapes in 91 during my move to the states. but in 92 or so I started again to tape and sort of try to recover my lost gems. I was mainly ok with loosing that other stuff because it all was before HI-FI, Stereo recording. so before then it was all in Mono. Most of my "gems" are music related so I do need them to be somewhat decent in sound.

I have a bunch of music videos (from the other blog) live performances from unplugged award shows and so on. I thought YouTube would be fine for this and I wouldn't need to save them but once I saw the overall quality of this stuff, most of them stuff that will never be released officially, I realized that if I wanted to truly enjoy it I had to digitize them. @ first I was thinking of burning the stuff on DVD but after doing some research I realized that I can only record 2 hours DVD without loosing image quality after that, the compression just craps out the stuff more than it already is. Not to mention that videos are 6 hours, well I recorded in EP, and so it would take me 3 DVD per tape...sucks. I was talking to a friend and realized that by now I might as well just digitize them and keep them in a hard drive and play them straight from the hard drive to the TV since this is the way things are already developing. This will save me a heck of a lot of time because I just need to put them in.

almost 4 years ago I digitized stuff I had recorded on my DVr instead of using VHS I used a DVr that could connect my computer to and digitizer right from there, the idea was to @ some point burn them but now I can just organize them and keep them as WMV or AVi or whatever format they're in. Some live stuff and pretty cool shows like Inside the Actor's Studio. Stuff with Morgan Freeman, Harrison Ford, Jack Nicholson, I think and so on.

SO the project is started but hopefully I'll finish it before these tapes disintegrate. I had some trouble getting the Audio and video to sync. You can see this happen a lot on YouTube. I'm hoping that it's just a processing problem not just an impossibility.

Music Video project

When the year 2000 came along MTV2 decided to play all of their videos from A-Z. I knew it'd be crazy but I just might be able to schedule my life for a bit and be able to record in Stereo and better quality all those songs I grew up watching. See for me music, for the most part, came with the visuals of the music video. So when this was announced I planned and basically used my 2 VCRs and programmed it to record 6 hours on one and 6 hours on the other. MTV2 would show 12 hours of this a day and the start over. So If I missed something between tapes I could get it later. But it worked out fine. The hassle was coming home from work and spending the extra hour or 2 of going through them and and picking the ones I wanted to keep. So I would put a tape on video 1 and fast forward until I found something and then I had a cued a video where I would find the video and record it. and then the next. I had about 16 tapes I would use to tape. so I could be behind a few days before I would run out of tapes. I managed to keep it up until the T. at this point I knew I'd be able to finish the recording with all my tapes and took it easy. So I finished recording but didn't finish editing them. The Project took a whole 3 months and in no way MTV played every video they had, believe me, I know. but they did play most of them.
Recently I was going through my tapes, not just these but all of them. To figure out which ones had stuff I wanted to keep and which ones were just crap, like old Seinfeld episodes or Friends or some old interview or whatever. I was convinced that with YouTube and the Internets I wouldn't have a use for all these videos, but still I'm popping everything in and checking it out so I checked out one of the Mix blends that I had put together. It took but a min and I realized that I did want to keep this stuff. It comes out in CD quality stereo, the picture is much much better than YouTube and it just rocks. It was hard to stop because, like I said, I grew up watching these videos. They were my music collection, which includes these visuals. I lost a lot of time that day watching and then decided to not play those @ all and pile them up.

Right now there's about 24-30 hours of this stuff. But it's only from A-T...basically I still need to finish the project which might take a bit less time by now. I think I have like 13 tapes still unchecked that would be from T-Z @ 6 hours each tape. Thankfully I recognize most of these videos so I don't even have to stop to see what they are. Hopefully before the 10 year anniversary of this project I can finish it eh? Oh but now I have to digitize them so all the ones I already did need to go on a hard drive....more on that on another blog.

I want my MTV

Once upon a time there MTV actually played music. It was to the point where they were dictating the way pop music went. VH1 to a lesser extent but they did too. So you basically were not going to have a hit single without it being a hit on MTV first. Hence the song "video killed the radio star".

If there was an MTV generation it was mine. me and my friends had cable to mainly watch this channel 24-7. It had very trendy looking VJs (video DJ) that seemed to be replace once their style and looked stopped being the thing of the day.
There were a few music related shows, Obviously the Top 20 Video Countdown once a week who shows who's the hottest around. "Dail MTV" was the early version of TRL, were people would call and vote for their fave vid to play in the evening. it was a top 10. They actually played the whole videos. There was a show called 120 Min which played alternative, not this term has changed a lot over the years, it's pretty much college radio. The show got somewhat washed out during the 90's when the genre became pop. There was "Yo! MTV Raps" which was pretty much the only place to see rap music, again, until the 90's when it became pop and it just became redundant, Then there was the almighty "Headbangers Ball" Sat from midnight until 3a. Thousands of Teenage boys falling asleep in front of the TV. I usually made it but not all the time. the last 30-45 min were more odd stuff and so one would usually fade. The 90's music slowly killed this off as well. Also, as the 90's dragged along Little by little they added more and more non music shows until now that they play music from 5a-10a or so. It's sad.

When I was in Europe in Oct 08 I got to watch music channels, yes it still exists there, both in Spain and Dublin and it pretty much instantly gave me a whole new view of the artists that I watched. I am convinced that the music industry could revive quite a bit of the interest in their artists if they had very accessible music channels. I mean quality media all round. No pixalated, broken up, laptop sounding, music. Well, I guess it would make the most sense if it was online, maybe a TV channel that's web based. Since they only play music videos it doesn't matter if you watch online or on TV as long as you watch it. Have a few shows that specializes on specific genres but otherwise just play a nice blend of it all.
In a big way it just helps us experience the image the artist is trying to share, the idea behind the song.

I wonder in my head

B&L day. Today wondering about kids and computers. I just read about how kids in grade school have the capacity to take computer classes in middle school or even High school. One of the main problems is that the computers needed to efficiently teach these kids would need to be much more powerful than what schools can afford and most importantly is the fact that this would require teachers to keep up and that can be even harder to do.

I wonder if some of the subjects in school should adapt to the changing times.

I wonder if some of what used to be math should be exchanged for some computer skills.

I wonder if some of grammar and spelling even should be focused so its done with spell check and pc culture.
I'm not saying that kids would not learn how to spell but maybe how to spell in a pc context. I can say that my English and grammar has improved greatly because of auto spell check and those green lines. Is that grammar check? I mean remember that this is still my second language. You'd be surprised the little things I'm clueless about. I know that it Isn't always right but actually paying attention to it and trying to be in tune with it has helped me fix some of the wording and stuff. So i don't know i think history should still be there but how about more time developing typing skills and a bit less time on penmanship. Again not that we loose that skill but being able to type in the keyboard, if You're young enough not to know either one. I'd say learning the keys will get you further

Glues of my life

oh glue. Today i was thinking about it slightly. mainly while thinking about what sort of topics i could talk about here. There's really not many different types of glues in my life. well maybe there are but i didn't think so when I used to use them often. One thing was that I used to try them all with my mouth and nose. some were better than others and some just seem to suck in both aspect but I gues they could stick things together. Do i have to have a reason why I'm blogging? can i just blog about whatever? anyway unto my glue.

Well the 1st type of glue I remember is Elmer's white liquid. nice, smooth and non toxic. I remember that we would drink that baby up @ school just because we could. We would put the glue on our hands so they would dry up and be like a second skin that you could then peel off. You could even write with it and it would dry all cool.





Then we got this glue stick . not good to eat. too solid and just nasty. I didn't think it even glue things very well. I put this glue along with the good for nothing fat scissors that didn't have the pointy and dangerous tip.






Next was the UHU glue...yesssss!! This one felt cold always and it was more petroleum based or something. you could not eat it unless it was pretty dry. not one to put in your mouth much but the smell. ohh I never did get high on glue but I did love smelling this one. It glued stronger than the other two, made more for solid stuff than for gluing paper. it was also more expensive so I didn't get much of it. Ahh and it would dry easier and quicker.



Next was the rubber cement. I think this was annoyingly clunky. it came in a bottle and was not as fun as the others. no good to eat and it didn't smell as nice as the UHU for some reason. but it was good to smell too. This one had a brush for larger gluing projects. Didn't deal with this one a heck of a lot.





And lastly was the Crazy glue. This one is not to be put in the mouth unless it's 100% dry. but then it's just stuff. I remember the first time I glued my fingers toghether..that was funny and scary...I think I did glue my mouth @ some point because i do remember beng affraid for my lips and then having a little raw spot for a while so I guess I did put it in my mounth eventually. ayayay. This one was great for pranks, me and my friends went through a phace where we would go around gluing things that weren't supposed to be glued. we did damamge some property beng teen-agers. I remember gluing a phone so when it rang one could not answer the phone.hehe we did get to see it work. Also glued a cassette case and later a cassette so when it plays it gets "eaten" by the player. Anyway this was fun and scary.



Yeah that's pretty much all the kids of glue that were in my life I think. There were more kinds around but I managed to stick to these. I even found the right brands for my glues in pics. that was pretty cool.

...oh hi Carrie!!

my old PC

I have my laptop where i try new approaches to using the computer but I guess it would be good to know is that i actually also have a desktop. I like to think of it as my baby because I actually built it form the ground up and picked each and every part to be awesome. So It's obviously it's getting old...Actually I was thinking and figured that I actually built this PC in 2002 and got a DVD-R in 2003 or 2004. Added more RAM in 2005 but actually my PC is about to turn 7 years old. WHOA!! you'd think it's an ancient machine but it actually runs pretty good. I get to play with newer machines and the difference is not quite as big as you'd expect. partly it's because I quit trying to play the latest games on it. Actually, when i use some photoshop tools I can start to notice it's age.
It sucks because to upgrade @ all means to change the whole motherboard, basically everything would have to go but the hard drives. I still use it quite a bit and I'm starting to wonder how much faster and nicer a dual or quad procesor would work on it. It should be @ least twice as fast...DANG !!! 7 YEARS!!!

not much to it.

So I've been thinking about the idea of using a minimalist approach for my laptop. I have enough Hard drive space and power, I just don't use my laptop for much else than web stuff and I find the idea of trying out a more web or browser based computer experience. I tried a few months ago to "googlize" my PC, which is to see how far I can go with Google products in terms of using as many Google programs as possible. The 1st thing that drove m crazy was the browser itself. I could not use Google Chrome. maybe they've gotten better by now but I can tell that it'll be awhile before they're ready to truly compete with Firefox. I switched to Firefox and learned to use some programs like Picasa, Google docs and the widgy tool thingy. Learning what's out there was part of the reason why I wanted to try it out. I'm still working on it but slowly I've tuned back to what I know and a lot less googles.

And so now I'm going toward the minimalist idea. Haven't decided to go for it but I just like the idea of having a machine that actually can load the OS system in a very short time. I've been thinking about using the recovery disks and starting from scratch. I guess we'll see.