Tonight I saw the latest James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace last night with Danny. It had some good action sequences but otherwise was simply an OK movie. It didn’t suck, but it wasn’t so memorable. Casino Royale was a much better movie in my opinion. After the movie Danny and I hit the Heartland Brewery for dinner. I only had one drink because I think I am fighting a cold. Otherwise a relatively uneventful day.
Entertainment
Video Conversion Round 2
I finally put the order in to convert some VHS tapes I have over to DVD. I was so satisfied with the 8mm conversions that I am using the same place. I am also sending in about 400 photo's to be scanned as well. I am really upset at the condition my mom kept these photos. She is now finally keeping them in photo box's after years in baskets near the radiators and open windows in her apartment. Tons of photos have been ruined or damaged by getting wet or really hot. I hope the Home Movie Depot is able to scan everything I sent in. All I can say is thank goodness for Photoshop, or in my case Gimp since I am not paying for Photoshop.
I underestimated the number of photos that my parents actually have. I am at 400 photo's in the one box that I took from my mom. I didn't even get everything out of the box but I figured 400 was a nice round number to start with. There is about 4-5 other box's of photos to go, plus a box of slides. I think I might blow my budget on this project. In the end I think it will be worth it to have everything in digital format. I am also having trouble identifying what I might have already scanned over the past 10 years. I found a bunch of images that I already scanned a few years ago, and I bet a bunch more will be duplicated.
My annal attempt at cataloging everything is paying off to a certain degree. I was able to post a bunch of stuff to Facebook and it is hilarious to see the comments from friends.
On the video side of things I am doing only two VHS tapes in this run. That is because I want the original AVI's of these two tapes, and the HDD I am sending the processing place can only handle about two tapes. I am sending in my sisters sweet sixteen video and my Bar Mitzvah video. The next round of stuff I don't really want or need the original source material so I won't use a hard drive. I will wait until I get this first batch back before I send in the next one. That way I can also spread the expense into another month. This stuff isn't cheap, but this batch is about half the price of the 8mm batch.
Dinner With My Parents Continued
If you read the title of the post you would think that I had dinner with my folks again. Well you would be wrong. I wanted to write a little bit more about what I learned from watching the videos with some color commentary from my parents.
I now know my mom's original hair color. My dad didn't look so bad in the late 60's, early 70's. By the mid 70's he looked like a cabbie. I don't know what happened. He had a major fro by the late 70's but thankfully I didn't see that on any video, but we have photos.
I was a really skinny kid, but in baby video's I looked really fat. My mom always thought that was funny because I did look pudgy but i was never heavy, I just looked it. She called it baby fat. By the time I was 4 I was a twig.
Dinner With My Parents
Tonight my parents came over and we had dinner. We ordered in, which is is a change of pace for us. I finally gave my mom her birthday present. We viewed the raw footage from the 8mm film I had converted to DVD. Seeing the reactions from both my parents was well worth the price I paid to have the film converted. I took notes on when most of the clips were taken so I could resequenced them correctly. I had to guess at the order of teh clips when I had them put to DVD. I am glad I paid to get the raw AVI files since I can go back and add a music sound track and sequence the files using iMovie. I demonstrated one of the 22 clips with a music sound track and my mom loved it. The video editing takes time, but the finished product is fantastic.
Today was basically a trip down memory lane. I had been playing with iMovie for a while before my parents came over. I wish I had more reasons to take more pictures or video, since I have fun editing stuff. The only real stuff I take pictures of now are my niece and nephew. I showed my mom some quick slide shows of them on my Apple TV and she loved them also.
My biggest problem is that there is almost no video of me as a kid except for the 8mm video I just put to DVD. Then there is my Bar Mitzvah video that I have a low quality MPEG-1 of. I am having that converted by the same people that did the 8mm videos in the next week or so.
Once I have the finished DVD with some music to it I will give my parents a remastered copy. If I have time I will also put a web friendly version on my flickr page for other family members.
The stroll down memory lane was fun, but I need to get ready for work tomorrow.
This Weekend
I went to see The Dark Knight with Danny in Union Square Saturday night. We went for some food and a few drinks afterward. The movie was good, but not awesome. Until the last Batman movie I hadn’t been a huge fan of the franchise anyway, so the new ones are converting me over!
Today was more relaxing. I cleaned up my apartment, and did some reorganization on my computer. It took all week to move 1.4+ terabytes of data around on my newly upgraded Drobo. I like the unit, but performance is sucking big time after I put the 4th 1TB drive in. It stinks attached to my Mini or as a NAS. I don’t know what the deal is.
Other than that I relaxed. Having some down time since the weeks are hectic is nice!
I am on the way to see the Dark Knight
Home Videos
Other really cool news that happened yesterday was that I got back my families home movies from Home Movie Depot. They were finished allot sooner than I anticipated, so I was really happy. I browsed the DVD’s since I wanted to see them, but I need to sit with my parents and watch the whole things since they can tell me what and who I am seeing.
First impressions are that this service was fantastic. Some of the clips are really washed out and almost impossible to see, but I think that has more to do with the fact that they were in a box for 35 years and may have been poorly shot when they were taken. Most of the clips looked great.
I am also glad I spent the extra money on the hard drive with the original AVI’s they created before they burned the DVD’s. I do want to re-order the clips since I labeled them wrong. I also would love to try and add music to the video since there is no audio on old 8mm film. All the source material AVI’s equal about 20 Gig’s of drive space. I am going to keep those, and make copies to play with. I want to see if i can convert them to put on my Flickr account, or my Apple TV. To me, cleaning them up will be a fun project. I am going to see what I can do with the clips in iMovie, and iDVD. If I can’t do everything that I want, I will play around with Final Cut Express, but I am not sure if that program is overkill for my needs.
I am planning on having my family over and have a BBQ and then view the DVD’s!!!
8mm Film Conversion
Being in technology I have tried to digitize as much stuff as possible. I have been scanning documents since 2000. I have been using a Tivo vs VCR’s since 2001. Over the years (since 1995 actually) I have made it a project to scan as many photos that I could. In the past 8 years all new photos have been in digitial format making archiving them easy. I still have a long way to go scanning all my families old photos, but I have allot of the really good ones scanned already.
The one area of digital archiving that I have had an issue with was old videos. I have done crude conversions of VCR tapes to AVI a few years ago of my Bar Mitzvah video and my sisters sweet sixteen video. The source material wasn’t so great so the quality of the video wasn’t so hot. I never was able to clean it up using final cut since I would have had to do a bunch of converting to different file formats. The biggest amount of video that my parents have of me and my sister growing up is on 8mm however. Converting that to some sort of digital media is not something you can do a good job of doing yourself. I have looked for places locally that would do the job, but wasn’t too happy with the selection (aka I thought most of them seemed kind of shady). Last year I found two different places online that looked like they were very reputable and did this sort of digital archiving all the time. I proceeded to loose the links to the sites and tossed out hours of research. I promised my mom that I would convert all the 8mm video to DVD. I thought she would be really happy but didn’t seem to into it. I think she just didn’t want that as her birthday gift:( Well last week I decided to find the sites I researched last year. I found them and selected one of them to send in my videos to.
I ended up choosing The Home Movie Depot. At first I was going to send in one reel of 25′ to see how the quality was. I was also concerned about the fact that I was shipping irreplaceable family history, and I didn’t have any backups. After reading the reviews of the site, and weighing all my options I just decided to send in everything. I figured there aren’t many places that look like they can do this type of work very well, and if I didn’t convert them they wouldn’t be looked at anyway. I also want to get them onto another format before the film goes bad. I don’t even know if the film is still good now, but the two canisters I opened looked ok.
I am waiting for the Home Movie Depot to send me the packing materials to ship in my 20 25′ reels and two 350′ reels. For something like this I paid extra for the packing materials as well as overnight shipping. I heard from a logistics guy I know that overnight is always better for sensitive stuff since it has less of a chance to get lost. Once I send in the film it will be about 2 weeks until I get them back on DVD. I also paid to have the original AVI’s they create put onto a hard drive. That way I should be able to create my own DVD’s and add sound tracks and stuff to the video’s.
I am excited to see these films once I get them back. I remember being little and watching them with the family. It was always a production to get out the projector and look at them. I don’t think I have seen then in at least 25 years. If this comes out well, I will send in any remaining slides my dad hasn’t scanned to just get those done also. The process for the film conversion isn’t cheap but if it does what I want it to, the cost is worth it. I will probably write more about this once I get the film back.
Grand Theft Auto 4
A few weeks after it came out I broke down and bought Grand Theft Auto 4. I have never played any of the other versions of the game, but I heard tons of good things about it and I was done with Mass Effect. If I haven’t said this before on the blog I will say it now. I am not a gamer. The stereotype for a guy in the Technology field is to be the huge computer geek and gamer. I may like my gadgets and all, but I have never been a hard core gamer. I didn’t buy my first gaming console until around two years ago. That being said, recently I have found that I do enjoy to spend some free time on the Xbox 360. What is funny is I know people that their lives revolve around the games. For me I will play if I have free time and nothing else to do. It is a great escape, but I cannot play for hours. It gives me a head ache.
So what does all that have to do with GTA 4? Well in my free time recently I have been playing, and it is fun. That game is so funny because it takes everything that is wrong with society and goes to the extreme with it in the game. Some of the stuff that goes on is almost comical. For the record I do not believe that game is for kids, but I don’t see why people wanted to totally ban it.
On a final note, I am glad I drive better in real life than I do in that game. I go through like 3 cars a day in GTA 4!
The Do Nothing Weekend
My plans for this weekend are very simple, I am to do nothing. I am happy to report that as of noon Sunday I am successful in that mission. My goal is to stay in and kick the remnants of my cold so I am fresh and normal for next week. I may have stayed in, but the cold is not 100% gone yet. I am coughing a little, that is actually a new development. My noise is still slightly stuffed up, but better than before. My throat is still slightly soar. An improvement over last week yes, but I am still not my normal self yet.
I missed my nephews birthday party yesterday due to this cold. As much as I am upset that I missed it, I am glad I didn’t have to do all that traveling to get there. That and there would be tons of kids over, and I don’t want to get anyone else sick. Instead I sat around and watched allot of TV. I have all but cleaned out my backlog of things to watch on my Tivo and Apple TV.
It is weird to think that it was 95 degrees out yesterday and currently 93 degrees outside when I am cool and comfortable with the AC on low in my apartment. I will say this, my current apartment stays cool. In my last two apartments before this without AC on high the place would be sweltering with the temperature in the 90’s outside. When I woke up this morning my living room was a bit warm but not completely unlivable when the AC was off for more than 12 hours. There is allot to be said for that!
I am not sure what the agenda holds for today, but probably more of the same lying around letting the meds kill my cold. Maybe I will get some more writing in this afternoon if I am in the mood.