"Heirlooming" and the Family Network

Looking into the Future

A friend of mine in the biz sent the above link to a very interesting article by David Pogue, tech maven of The Times on the perils of "data rot" as they pertain, here to family videos.

Pogue writes:

As you may be aware, we're about to enter a whole new era of data rot, one of the biggest and most personal of all: consumer videotape is going away. At the Consumer Electronics Show last month, I was astounded to see that Canon, for example, has only one MiniDV (tape) camcorder model left—which hasn't been updated for several years. The other companies are following suit. It's all about built-in hard drives or memory cards now. That development hit me especially hard, because I've always loved documenting my family.

It got me thinking about the work I've done to establish our own clan's Family Media Network but as you can see, I take a different tack than Pogue. I've read his column and don’t always know what to make of him. If he’s such a tech maven, why should he be stymied by, or even surprised with the phasing out of tape as a storage medium? Tape? Take it from somebody who used to thread portapaks and 1” Ampex machines by hand with it. I won’t miss it!!!! No siree.

Wanna talk about classical media formats? Okay. I collected all my Dad’s super 8 films and Mom’s Bell and Howell projector to transfer my family’s heirlooms to Digital 8 and then from there, straight to the family network drive. Probably the same cheap 2Tb one that Pogue picked up. Last year, I picked up a BVU-800 for a $125 (on Ebay) last year to transfer the handful of ¾” projects I want to keep. I have a handful of portapak tapes, but most of those I’m sure I transferred to ¾” back in the 80’s. Mom just gave me 4 milkcrates with of 78’s from the 20's-40’s. Big Band and lots of RCA Victor classical pressings. Most of them pristine. Haven’t quite figured what I’m going to do with them yet, but my turntable is up and operating again after a 10 year hiatus. I've never had it on the '78 setting before, but it might be fun to rip some of that old wax to mp3.

Bennett interviewed my Dad about his mother over the phone for a school project. I have about 15 minutes of Dad reminiscing about his mother's anti-child labor marching days. This gem will be easy to deal with. I don't have to do anything. It's already an MP3 file.
Pogue again:

Every time I write about this issue, I hear from hundreds of readers. A certain percentage of them takes a surprising stance, which boils down to this: "You shouldn't be taking home movies at all." .... You're missing the actual moment, hiding behind the lens. Second, who cares about preserving your life for future generations?

Welcome to the era of the family network, Mr. Pogue.

Maybe it takes getting to a certain age, but I even talk back to Dad’s voice on Mom’s answering machine. Dad isn't around anymore, so now I ask myself, would I have wanted movies of his parents, my grandparents when they were children? I’d give anything to have heard them speak and interact as young people. Nobody’s ever told me don’t take home movies. That’s just nonsense. Cheap, abundant digital media, disks, drives, are the first true archival media available to Joe Pro/Consumer. These movies and the ones I've taken are most assuredly for future generations and I want to make sure my children's children's children can access them easily--no shoeboxes or searching through dusty films, tapes or disks. All clean and digital forever.

They'll be on the family network. All the stuff I care about will soon be accessible to any family member with a decent internet connection. I'll find some simple means of organizing and cataloguing sound and image files, so they'll be searchable by date and keyword and playable on any digital device. The network is what I'll hand down. Whatever the storage medium, be it crystal cube or ether cloud, or whatever, soon it will all be bytes and nobody will have to worry about hunting down an old tape machine after I'm gone. That will be my legacy.

Pogue writes elegiacly but not always accurately about technology. I dashed him an email when he made the blanket and misleading statement about pixel count’s diminished importance to image resolution in digital photography. His rationale was all very unscientific. He never got back to me.

Data rot. It’s been around forever. Learn to deal. Photographs and films crumble. Tape stretches and degrades. Even CD's and DVD's (which were originally touted as archival) lose their luster. I'll be happy to see the back of them too. They take up too much space and collect dust. But to preserve what's important, you record in the highest resolution available to you. You archive your masters and distribute agnostically. Some of us have done this our whole professional lives. It's cool to finally be able apply this modest expertise to the family heirlooms. My contribution.Yes, the tapes will eventually get taken out in a box someday. That too will be my contribution. Good riddance to tape and all degradable media. It's the Network that's eternal.
 
My tech take for the day. Anybody have any experience in the area of archiving family images and memories? This is a huge and growing interest of mine. Care to share? Love to hear from you.