Recently, when Great Aunt Whinnie was named the Explorer of the Year by the St. Elkings Dog Sled Club she asked if I'd help with a video of her acceptance speech. She planned to be in the Antarctic during the awards banquet tagging macaroni penguins, but wanted to personally thank some of the members and torment various others. I brought my video camera and some lights over but no, she said she'd already recorded her speech and handed me a box of VHS tapes.

"It's in there somewhere,' she said, "along with footage of me wrestling a walrus. You should put that on YouTube."

"You already recorded your acceptance speech?" I asked.

"Of course," she replied, "in 1987. Those dopes have taken their own sweet time giving me this award."

And with that, she loaded up her dogsled and was off leaving me wondering how to get her speech to Oslo and her Walrus wrestling to the Internet.

Legacy Equipment

It's always a good idea to have legacy equipment that will play every format you still have footage in - which means don't throw out that Hi8 camcorder if you still have a closet full of birthdays recorded from it. You can still get VHS players new, but that won't always be the case, it's better to spend $45 now on something new that sits in a box in the basement than it is to fight for something used on eBay in ten years. Family tapes that may seem dull now will be priceless when your children are grown up and moved out. Transferring your old footage to digital medium is not only a good idea from a preservation point of view, but it's essential if you want to edit your footage.

Analog vs. Digital

We use the terms "analog" and "digital" a lot, some people may be unclear as to what they mean and why one is better than the other is. The easiest example of the difference between analog and digital is the most familiar - a clock. An analog clock is one that measures value across a continual scale, the hands move from "1" to "2" by proceeding through all the space in between where as in digital, where things are expressed by a discrete value, "1" turns directly into "2".

Because copying analog values is inexact (you look at the clock and see five minutes past three, someone else might read it as four, another as six) each time copies are made, errors are introduced. Looking at a digital clock, everybody agrees on the number.

"Generational loss" occurs each time an analog tape is duplicated because the values are not read back exactly the same way every time. Imagine going into a room, looking at an analog clock, then manually setting another clock based on the first, each time you do this, there will be a slight error in one direction or another. Digital can be duplicated again and again without error; each copy is exactly the same as the original.

But digital's strength can also be its weakness - if the sampling rate is too slow - imagine a digital clock that displays only hours and minutes but not seconds - analog media can be more accurate. You can try outputting audio tracks on your non-linear editor at various sampling rates and see for yourself when you begin to notice a degradation in sound quality.