The Most Digital Solution
This is a wonderful day, sensation-seekers: I am compelled, nay commanded, to come up with a reference to the Prisoner, the cult Sixties spy series. A secret agent played by Patrick McGoo-han resigns from the Secret Agent Agency and returns to his apartment, which is flooded with knockout gas just as he's leafing through brochures for retirement destinations. He wakes up in The Village, a remote and not entirely unpleasant portside community. It's where spies are sent if they're in that itchy intersection of "no longer of any immediately relevant use" and "potentially too valuable to simply be allowed to run around free."
My version of The Village is a back corner of a basement closet. It contains (as of the last census): a VCR, an 8mm camcorder, and a LaserDisc player. Each of these items has long since been replaced by something far more digital and far less improbable. But like McGoohan's character (referred to in the Village only as "Number 6"), this obsolete gear must be held indefinitely. As long as there might be even just one 8mm cassette of a 17-year-old niece's third birthday party, or one VHS cassette containing the Far Side Halloween Special that aired just once, and as long as I know that I own Let It Be on LaserDisc and that The Beatles are so mortified by this movie that they'll never allow it to be released on DVD ... well, these devices will continue to enjoy a pleasant if marginal existence.
We won't be stuck with this stuff forever, though. I'm steadily converting those home movies, old TV shows, and extended sequences of Paul McCartney acting like a first-class noodge into digital video files so that I can enjoy them on my iPhone just as readily as anything I bought off the iTunes Store last night.
All this is possible because these old devices have standard analog video and audio connectors. Whether they're fat yellow RCA connectors or the higher-grade SVHS plugs, their outputs can be routed into devices that can transmogrify that content into ginchy, wonderful digital video. Some methods are more direct than others; the right choice depends on how much of this old content you have, and how serious you are about archiving it all into digital video.
Mind you, watching Chevy Chase's attempt at alate-night talk show will still suck. But at least it'll suck on an awesome smartphone, instead of via abig, clanky box.
At the top of the list is a video "bridge" that takes analog video and audio as input and converts it into digital video on the fly during playback. It squirts into your PC or Mac via a USB or FireWire port and desk top software takes it from there. The procedure, in broad strokes:
Hook the playback machine (the VHS deck, the old camcorder, the LaserDisc player) to your computer via a hardware interface.
Capture the video to your hard drive.
Edit the video and export it to an iTunes-studly format.
This will cost you anything from (a) nothing to (b) hundreds of dollars, depending on what you already have lying around the house and how good you'd like the final results to be; the complexity of the process will depend on what software you use.
If you're lucky, you already own a digital camcorder. You already know how well these things work with desktop computers. Unless you got the cheapest model in the store — the one they keep in stock just so the salesman can show off its shortcomings and help sell you the better ones — it has a built-in digital interface that lets you plug the camera right into your desktop. You can then "play" the video straight into your computer.
Many of these cameras also have an analog "pass through" feature. If you rummage deep down into the box, you'll find a cable with what appears to be a hyperthyroid headphone plug at one end and connectors at the other and that can accept standard analog RCA and SVHS video and audio. If so ... huzzah! You can connect the old analog video player into this plug, plug the camcorder into your computer, and use the camcorder as a capture device.
You'll have to operate the old player manually, but the camcorder will perform all the format conversions necessary and any standard video editing app (like Windows Movie Maker or the Mac's iMovie) will be able to record the incoming signal to your hard drive.
If you don't have a camcorder, you'll have to exercise the ancient martial art of MasterCard-Fu. You can buy simple USB-based analog-to-digital interfaces fairly cheap, though.
I really like the hardware made by Pinnacle Systems (www.pinnaclesys.com). The big-box stores are full of cheap and questionable products that promise to transfer your old videos to digital, but Pinnacle takes this sort of thing very seriously. Its Video Creator Plus is a solid, all-in-one solution. It captures video and also includes simple editing tools that can export video files directly into iTunes, all for $89.
Pinnacle's equivalent Mac offering is the Pinnacle Video Capture — another all-in-one hardware/software combo, but it'll cost you a full $99 smackers. Mac users might check out Elgato's own creatively named Video Capture, also $99 (www.elgato.com). As a Mac-only product, it's a little better thought-out than Pinnacle's box, which apparently is there in the product line just to cover all the bases.
All these devices capture high-quality video, and the digital conversion is handled by hardware inside the device instead of software running on your desktop — which means that you'll wind up with smooth, clean video with "as good as it's ever going to get" color and detail.
Cheaper gizmos rely on the processing power of your PC. At their worst, they're pretty damned bad. Many of them capture video at only half its original resolution and at a jerky 15 frames per second instead of 30.
If you're ambitious about converting and editing old video, you might want to upgrade to something like Canopus's ADVC-110. If you have any experience with technology, you know that when they give a product a name consisting of a random string of numbers and letters, it's going to cost you.
Yeah, this device isn't designed for random consumers who want to convert a few home movies and old TV shows. It's for people who want the highest level of performance (it captures gorgeous video) and greatest convenience (it doesn't require any special software or drivers; you plug it in and any consumer or professional video editing app that knows how to deal with digital video cameras can accept input from the box).
If you buy it online, it'll run you about $220. So yeah: The Pinnacle hardware is starting to look pretty good.
Onward to editing software. The software you get with the Pinnacle capture hardware (and other gear in its class) tends to be rather basic, like operating a VCR. If you want to do something more ambitious than deleting the commercials from a TV show, you might want to pop for a better app.
If you have a Mac, though, there's really no point in going any farther than the copy of iMovie that came installed on your computer. It's a simple, powerful, and fully mature editing app, and because it has an Apple logo on it you can be sure that when you tell it to export the final video to your iPhone or iPod Touch, the programmers knew what they were doing.
On the PC, there are two good choices. Pinnacle is actually a subsidiary of Avid Technologies, the company that makes the professional standard in TV and film editing systems. Its Pinnacle Studio app is dirt-cheap at $49 and can export finished video to iTunes for syncing.
If you intend to do a lot of this sort of thing, you'll probably be happier giving Adobe $99 of your cash for a copy of Adobe Premiere Elements (www.adobe.com). It's filled with time-saving features and attractive little tweaks that let you turn two hours of boring soccer video into six minutes of terrific highlights, toot sweet.
There's a certain satisfaction to buying a box that turns an old VCR into a desktop computer peripheral, more or less. But there are other ways of converting old video into digital, iPhone-studly formats. You might already have one or two of these things in your house. If you need to go out and buy a solution, you might prefer to buy something that will have a life outside of converting Aunt Mimsy's third bridal shower.
In Chapter 4, I talked about ripping DVDs into digital video. Well, then why bother even hauling your VCR into your home office? Just hook it up to the DVD recorder's inputs, do a direct machine-to-machine copy, burn the disc and then slide it into your computer and rip it as normal.
The sole disadvantage of this method is that the video will be compressed as it's written to the disc. Ordinarily that'd be a drawback — when you're "remastering" content, you want it to arrive as clean as possible — but given the flaws in the original video source, you're not likely to lose much.
A DVD recorder is actually my favorite method of converting video. When I know I have something really important (like video of a newborn kid) I go all-out. But when I have a box of old TV shows — many of which are unlabeled — the recorder is a quick way to move those tapes from the garage into the trash. Put a 50-cent blank DVD in the machine, push Record on the recorder, push Play on the VCR, and walk away for two hours. By the time I remember doing that, the whole tape has been archived and I can toss the original, bulky cassette, saving the actual viewing and editing of its contents for later.
If you really want to be Captain Digital — or if you simply resist the concept of wholesale change — the Neuros OSD is an exciting piece of hardware (shown in Figure 6-1). It's a digital VCR. Really, that explanation is perfect. You plug it into the stack of video gear under your TV. Any time you're watching something and you think, "Oooh, I'd like to record that for my iPhone," you just pick up the Neuros's remote and press Record.
The video is automatically converted into a digital video file and stored on any storage device you've plugged into the Neuros's USB port, or any memory card you've popped into one of its exhaustive menagerie of card slots. When you unplug the hard drive or thumb drive or memory card from the OSD and plug it into your computer, you'll find it full of standard MP4 video files, which you can import directly into iTunes or edit using desktop video software.
Visit www.neurostechnology.com for more info. It costs $170 but man alive, it's a frightfully compelling video-to-digital solution that's right where you want it. Press a button, you've got MP4.
What's the best thing about converting old videos? It removes irreplaceable family memories from decrepit media and puts them in a form where they can easily and flawlessly be duplicated and shared.
The second-best thing is that there's a great deal of fantastic creative work that simply dies because there's no way it'll ever be released on DVD or even re-aired. Either there's no financial incentive, or the rights are tangled up in a huge mess of companies that got bought by other companies which went bust, or it contains music that would be prohibitively expensive to license for home video distribution.
My usual example is a fantastic 1983 production of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, starring the Flying Karamazov Brothers and two dozen other jugglers, rope walkers, and fellow New Vaudevillians. It was a successful stage show and PBS aired a performance on Live from Lincoln Center. It aired live. PBS stations were allowed to rebroadcast it once within the week, and then ... that was it. Gone. It was an utterly brilliant show, but after the performers went their separate ways after the final performance, the show might as well never have happened in the first place.
But! Folks had taped it when it aired more than 25 years ago. I got a great tape duped from the collection of one of the original performers. After less than an afternoon, I had digital video on my iPhone and my desktop. I watch and enjoy it all over again every few months.
I was too young to appreciate the heyday of the telethon, but I still had to reflect that in the Seventies, you'd tune into the first couple of hours of this show and you'd see Frank Sinatra singing a duet with Ella Fitzgerald, followed by Sammy Davis Jr. backed by the Count Basie Orchestra.
Someone has that show on tape. If you do, let me know because I have a Neuros OSD and a desperate need to be entertained.