Sunday, May 1, 2022

Blackham Home Video

 Both the Blackham and Westra family have some classic film from the 1970s/1980s ... The Westra video camera hit the scene in 1970 (shortly before Jen was born ... coincidence?) It was reel film and only captured the visual, no sound. I remember we'd watch home movies and Dad/Grandpa would set up a projector and the film would go from a reel in front, to the reel in back. Sometimes he'd reverse it and we'd laugh and laugh as our film selves would go up the slide or walk backwards.  The Blackham home movies hit a little later, and they have sound as well as video.



Blackham Home Movie Playlist
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLimW1d0Dxcgz0_ksYe4BJB2P97wpCCV3-

Then there were the VHS Years ... I'm not sure when the Westra family got it's first VHS video camera. There are tapes of my high school productions, but those were "professionally" made and sold to the students. By the time we hit the 1990s, the family had a video camera (Dad/Grandpa/Lamar was the videographer for the LD Singers productions). We must have got our own (or absconded with the Westra one?) in 1995 when the first baby was set to hit the scene ...

 The VHS video recorder was quite large and bulky. It had to fit the standard video tape as well as all the required machinery. There were times it would get quite heavy as the videographer had to hold it up. Most families had a VCR to play the tapes on when it was time to watch the videos, but the camera could also connect to the TV via cables - although the older TVs didn't have nearly as many inputs as the ones today. 

Technology improved, and the new video camera's were 1/3 the size of the old VHS recorders. They still used tapes, miniDV. Unlike the standard VHS tapes, people didn't have a way to easily view their videos. This required hooking up the camcorder to the TV and using it to play the tapes. As DVDs hit the scene, replacing VCRs, many people had their tapes, both VHS and miniDV (and there were other types too) converted to DVD. I remember Grayson got the VHS tapes converted to DVD and the boys enjoyed watching them. We'd almost always get them out at the family birthday parties, to remember the younger years.




Because the tapes could be removed, and another put in, sometimes the end result wouldn't be perfectly chronological. I remember when Callahan was first born, I tried to have a "Callahan" tape and a "Landon" tape, although in the end I probably just went with whichever was already in the machine when it was time to record. Reviewing the smaller tapes, while it looks fairly chronological going by the labeling, there is some jumping around in time. 

The newer video camera must have come on the scene around 2002 ... the earliest recorded on a mini-tape was Christmas 2002. I'm often slow to transition, so it looks like the VHS camera was still in use most of 2003 for Cooper's birth. 2004 there was an official switch to the Cannon miniDV. 

I don't recall how we got these digitized ... it wasn't professionally done (at least not for most of them). I must have figured out how to transfer the files to the computer (it might have been directly to Muvee, it had a "videocamera" input). In 2004 I took a TON of videos and really got into Muvees (making little videos with film/pictures and music). In the later years, I stayed busy making highlight reels of the boy's sports (check out BlackhamBall for all the sports stuff, and dedicated YouTube channels for Callahan, Keaton and Colton).  I got 2004-2006 burned onto DVDs using Muvee and our home computer. When I wanted to create a YouTube backup, I did some shift, moving some sections around to TRY and get things in chorological order. Also, these YouTube versions are slightly edited, as any child nudity (even innocent bath time home movies) will get flagged and removed. So if you compare these versions to the originals (tapes, ripped DVDs) you might notice a few differences. 


I think it must have been 2005/2006 when I received a new digital camera, one that had a "video" setting in addition to several options for still shots. I would use it primarily for pictures, but started switching it up and using the video more and more, instead of using a dedicated video camera (although it was still being used some). So instead of one long video file pulled from a tape, there are lots of little files that were directly digital. Recorded onto a memory card in the camera, easily transferred to the computer. I did burn these to DVD (2008/2009) so they could be watched on the television more easily.


Mother's Day in 2011, I was given a new video camera (the small Samsung in the photo above), and it was an improvement in quality and ease, especially for sports. With all the boy's basketball, it was in constant use over the weekends. I'd sometimes have to record with it plugged into a charger if it hadn't had time to recharge between games. After a few years with this camera, Gray got me a new one (the Sony) which had an external battery pack, so I could have backup power. It also connected directly to the computer via USB, which was just a little easier than moving data with a memory card.

Through the years, phones kept improving as well. Soon, the iphone (we are an Apple family) was as good as a digital camera, and was always with us, not an extra item to carry and keep charged. It worked for videos too, although I kept to a separate video camera for sports still.  All the family videos in later years would come from the iphone. Even still pictures had a "live" setting, which I loved for my One Second Every Day videos (started in 2017).

So hopefully with this post, we'll have a bit of a "table of contents" of the video we have, and where it can be located (in the YouTube links, and on Dropbox in Video Backup). The Dropbox Video Backup has family files from 1995-2011. Then videos filmed with phones are mixed in with the photos for the more recent years (maybe I'll try to get them all organized and together). Plans for the future!



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