It's not preserving the still images that bothers me so much as the video---video of our little kids who have grown up or adults who are no longer with us. I can print out still images and preserve them in various ways, but there is no printing out video to save it; it's on disks or tape in order to exist at all. My video is shot on mini-DV, fed into my Mac through a firewire cable, edited in Final Cut, and burned to DVD. These edited videos have titles, captions, and brevity through cuts of unnecessary footage that make it watchable, unlike the raw tapes.
So I just make many copies of my edited videos, burning them slowly (1X) in case that does it any better, distribute them widely among relatives, and then plan on continually copying them onto newer media as time goes by. When I'm gone, I would hope that anyone in the family who cares about these videos would continue such preservation efforts. Actually, it's probably the non-family comedy or instructional videos I've done for YouTube that will last the longest, since it's easy to download such videos, and interested people are no doubt doing that onto their hard drives all over the world. The quality stinks, but they'll probably live forever in the public domain. It's somewhat discouraging to think that if my family videos are lost to future generations of my family, they may only know me through these YouTube videos, as I crash into walls while riding a belt sander or as a slightly loopy art instructor (see <http://tinyurl.com/7l767w> and <http://tinyurl.com/8wotmd>). The person who said that it's bad to pen notes on the back of printed photos is correct. Use pencil, pressing very lightly. I once took a museum management class in which I was told that one of the best way to preserve artifacts is in brown paper bags or cardboard boxes with identification written on them in number 2 pencil. I was told of a museum whose basement, where they stored tons of stuff, was flooded, and after everything dried out the only readable records were the ones penciled, not penned, on the bags, boxes, or tags. Anything written in pen had smeared and was unreadable, whereas the penciled notes, after drying out, were just fine. Tom --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
