Family video project
J shared me with a neat idea she had for a project a month or so ago. She wanted to interview members of her family in short video form, and create a set of DVDs for a future gift back to all who participate.
I didn't initially warm up to the idea. She feels a bit stronger about it, largely because her mom passed away a few years ago of cancer, and she wishes that people like me, who came along later than that, could've had something to know her by.
Eventually, I came around... mostly when I realized it gave me an opportunity to buy a new gadget or two. Actually, I felt some of the same desire to preserve my family. We're all notorious for avoiding being captured on film or other reproducible media. After having brought it up at home while visiting this holiday, I can see why - there were quite a few embarrassing photos and videos my parents dragged out.
Anyway, the project is going to take forever. Over the holidays, J and I took about 13 tapes worth of video, probably more than 10 hours worth. We were hoping for about a 20 minute interview per person... and most of J's family hit this mark. A bunch of my family, unsurprisingly, were more verbose. Oh well. We've probably still got that much more video to collect, and probably over a much larger time: we got all of the easy-to-find people already.
Next up is planning how to distribute people amongst the DVDs, and the slow and fairly time-consuming process of "importing" the miniDV tapes to my various arrays of large hard drives. Each tape can hold up to 10gigs worth of video, so it's going to take some careful storage management.
There were lots of good stories told by the old-timers. I hope to eventually add a category here and transcribe some, if only because it's going to be a long time until the Google of video search comes along... not to mention a long time before I start posting any kind of videos like that to the web.
Anyone have any thoughts on the various semi-pro video editing tools? I'm leaning towards Final Cut Express, but I've seen another couple of sets of tools around that look good, particularly PureMotion EditStudio, which, at least if you believe their hype, is a pretty quality product for a pretty decent price.