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.