VHS - Supreme Media

During the week I was going to some old videos that are stored in on of the book shelves at home. There were some amazing gems to be found. Some of which I will be digitizing and uploading, for your universal enjoyment. Apart from the home movies, there were all kinds of stuff, like old RTE broadcasts and televised concerts, sporting events etc. The most amazing thing though, some them are nearly 30 years old. There're tapes there from before I even existed! Think about that for a second, think about life 30 years from now, think about how your current home movies and photographs are being stored. Only today, did we have one panic-stricken blogger asking for help to back up his family videos from HDD to DVD. What will things be like in 30 years time?

Some forecast a media blackspot, where this current abundance of data recording will not exist for future use. Hard drives fail, random bits corrupt over time, optical discs develop laser-rot and die. People forget or think that digital copies left on their own will just last forever. I've found myself having to backup and scrap original CD-R and DVD-R backups I made 5 or 6 years ago because the dyes (Taiyo Yuden) are failing. Not only that but some of my oldest CD's (1980's) are rotting and developing faults in the audio playback. Low cost online redundant data storage has lessened the worries of loosing data, but who's to say that even Google will be around 30 years from now?


My mediocre analogue to digital conversion setup

Analogue VHS though, as many faults as it may have, has proven its ability to hang onto its content over the years. Some of the circa 1980's tapes I found are immaculate (bar the original transmission and VHS quality to begin with). If you get a bad section on the tape you get a little fuzz but it keeps playing. Sometimes with DVDs it seems all you need to do is expose them to the air for them not to play. VHS tapes were limited and simple but with simple design comes simple problems.

One final aspect of recording onto tape that is lost now in the age of digital cut and paste. Its something I have always wondered about since first acquiring a digital camera. It is all too easy to delete digital information. Hard drives get full, space is needed quickly, "we'll just delete some of Mary's Birthday photos, sure we never look at them now anyway". I have boxes of badly framed, fuzzy, nonsense photographs. Even at the time if I think they are a waste of space its still easy to store them away. It's only in years to come when things change that you realise the true value of that slightly over exposed picture of "Mary" by the road that doesn't exist anymore. It's too easy to delete digital video off a hard drive, far too easy.