Dad, the AV guy

Dad, the AV guy

I, like a lot of fathers I suspect, am the AV person at home.  It is my responsibility that all still images and video are properly archived, and retrievable for quick historical reference.  This is a heavy responsibility that I doubt my father had while I was growing up.  I remember watching projected slides of our family outings so there was some burden to bear for my father I’m sure (dad, in case you’re reading this) .  The game has changed since I was a kid, accumulating content is a lot easier than it used to be.

Right after our first child was born we invested in our first video camera.   I chose a refurbished mini dv camera that was a consumer reports best buy.  A reasonable choice at the time but not anything I would recommend to new dads.  One of the biggest challenges I have is transferring this video to the computer.  First,  if you have 60 minutes of video it will take you 60 minutes to transfer it.  This is okay, I guess, but every time I start to transfer video the computer loses connection with the camera.  Maybe it’s because I bought a refurbished camera.  Maybe it’s because I bought a cheap cable.  I’m hoping it is the cable.  I am resisting paying someone to transfer the videos but if I had the money it would be well spent transferring the headache to someone else.  This is something I have to sort out soon because I have about 30 tapes at home that have not been properly archived. To mitigate this issue I recently purchased a portable HD video camera for the primary reasons of:

• Sharing video clips with family scattered around the country
• Capturing short clips
• Ease of transfer to my computer
• Dissect my golf swing  (60 frames per second)

I was pretty happy with the purchase but soon starting questioning my need to record in HD.  This happened right after I saw that a 3 minute video was 500+MB.  I don’t know if I remember exactly what the size was but it was certainly HUGE!  At this rate my 1TB external drive would fill up in no time.  I quickly fell in love with 640×480.  It is a hard sell at home though.   It is hard to convince everyone in the family that even though you can record in 1080, we probably don’t need to.  First,  unless the lighting is spectacular the video quality won’t be that good.  Second,  in our house we have no way of displaying the majesty of HD unless we leave it on the camera.  I currently have no method of delivering archived HD content to our HD TV unless it is piped there from the device that generated it.  This is why when we buy our next laptop it will have HDMI out!

I do think it’s great that we can collect all of these memories in videos and images but is it better than what my parents had when I was a kid?  Will my kids look back as fondly as I do when I think about how we would load up the carousel, gather the family, turnoff the lights, and watch the slide show?

More Blog Posts

Preparing Recommendations