Home video projects July 1, 2011

Last Fall, I captured old home videos of mine to my computer through Windows Movie Maker as AVI files.  The videos were shot between 1994 and 2007.  Unfortunately, WMM captures AVIs with 32 kHz audio rather than 48.  So, for the last week and a half, I’ve been re-rendering those AVI files in the 48 kHz format.  It’s a good thing I have Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10 (yes, a long name).  I went through each of the 30 VHS tapes, 40 VHS-C masters, and 12 MiniDV masters one at a time.  I imported them into Vegas, Vegas built a 48 kHz audio proxy, I normalized the audio, and rendered.  That took me from last Tuesday through this Monday.  I didn’t stop there.  I captured many MiniDV tapes that I didn’t officially consider home videos.  This included:

• Video of my late chocolate lab Cocoa
• A final project I made for a video production class in my last semester at C.W. Post
• Raw video (most not used) of my senior project, a documentary interview with Joe Falco, a now-retired FDNY firefighter who survived the collapse of the World Trade Center’s South Tower
• The finished senior project
• An updated version of the senior project that I made two years after graduating
• Converted VHS tapes of car video brochures between 1994 and 1998 (I was obsessed with cars at the time and collected printed and video brochures.)

As I write this post, I’m preparing DVDs of my late grandparents’ home movies that I remastered last Fall.  The program I’m using is Sony DVD Architect Studio 5, which came with Vegas 10.