Thursday (14 Jun) - Pinto's Home Movie

Thursday (14 Jun) - Pinto's Home Movie

Diablo 3 has been kicking Wild's barbarian butt something terrible, so I let my demon hunter, Rat, play for awhile yesterday. It was fun, but it was hard to get really excited about it.

So, for a complete change of subject, lately I've been doing some pretty massive organizing of our home movie collection. Our first exposure to home made movies was in 1989, when we borrowed an 8mm analog movie camera to take pictures of our cats. Back then we had only two. Cats, that is. I was immediately hooked. On making home movies, that is. We soon got our own camera, with which I happily recorded years and years of home movies. That camera finally bit the dust (literally) when I fell out of a chair while filming. I was fine, but the camera was in pieces. My next camera was a digital camcorder that could use both my stack of 8mm tapes as well as record digital video (on DV tapes). I was soon back in business.

Those stacks of tapes continued to grow over time. I went through a number of video editing programs and eventually settled on Pinnacle Studio for making videos of those tapes. I still use Studio today (currently at version 15). This stuff was all new to me, and hard drives weren't what they are now. Converting the tapes for use on a computer created AVI files that were so huge I could not afford to store more than a few at a time. Instead, I copied only what I needed at the time to the computer, edited and built my home movie, and then burned it to DVD. The edited files were deleted to make room for the next home movie project.

At various times I made attempts to organize my video collection, but with somewhat haphazard labeling and lack of consistent dates on the tapes, DVDs, and files, those attempts were only partly successful.

The result today is that I have boxes and boxes of old video tapes: 8mm, digital Hi8, DV, and miniDV. Of course, I also had to have a digital camcorder that uses SD cards, not to mention video from our digital camera and even our smartphones. And a whole lot of DVDs, from those original efforts back in the 80's to sometimes multiple backups on other DVDs and on removed hard drives now taking up space in more boxes.

I do have a "mostly" coherent set of DVDs in chronological order that we consider our family video album. As hard drives progressively got cheaper and larger, I also have accumulated a pretty large collection of digital files based on what was not edited out of the original video tapes they came from. And that is where the problem is.

Yesterday I completed a comparison of every digital video file I have with the original source tapes, based on whatever information I could glean without actually having to put tapes in the camcorder to see what was on it. I was pretty happy with the results, which matched up far better than I had any right to think it would.

All of this work had a purpose beyond just getting a handle on our video collection. One of the cats born in our house and given to a very good friend of ours is going to die soon. His name is Pinto, and he went to live with his "forever family" when he was eight weeks old. He was one of ten kittens born back in March 2000. It was a hard birth for the Mom (who is still with us), and required the help of a vet. Even with help, one kitten was stillborn, and two others perished in the first week. That left us with seven mouths for Momma cat and us to feed and take care of. We found homes for four, and kept three.

When Pinto was born, his "starter" name was PW. Long story short, it stood for the "pink and white" one, which helped us tell the kittens apart and figure out who had been fed and who hadn't. His new family named him Pinto, since his coloring was like a pinto pony.

We learned last week that Pinto has cancer. It's located on his tongue, it's aggressive, and it's not treatable. He is deceptively fine right now (we went to see him last night, and stay in close contact with our friend), but his quality of life will rapidly deteriorate beyond help in as little as a couple of weeks.

I'm making a video of Pinto's life right now, and have been pouring over all that old video, putting together those first few precious weeks that he was with us. There is also a videotaped first year birthday party at our house when all of the families who adopted kittens from that litter (with their pets) came over to celebrate. That party belongs on Pinto's video as well.

It's that few minutes of birthday party video that is consuming most of my time. It should have been in the digital source files that I so laboriously collected into one archived hard drive. But the file that should have had it did not. Most likely, it was edited and included on a DVD, but the original avi files were deleted to save space, as was my practice at the time. Yes, we have the DVD that includes the party, so it's not lost. There are ways to pull that information off of the DVD and I've spent considerable time working with various programs to do that, but every single result has been flawed. Even today, manipulating video files is still somewhat of a hit or miss thing, and I've been mostly missing.

The obvious next step is to go back to the original source - the DV tape itself. One way or another I'll get there. It's frustrating, though. The only way for me to be sure that I have ALL of my video content available to me is to digitize all of those original source tapes in unedited form.

Pinto is my first priority right now. The video project helps keep me going even as we worry about Pinto and what his family is going through.