Backed into the corner with miniDV and buried under a pile of content
A situation entirely of my making, I find myself backed into a corner, swamped under a visual data tsunami. Years of photo taking and videoing has left me with a mound of great content but not a great deal of organization to these memories. Over the years I have made good faith efforts to make sense of this madness, trying many tools, investing time, yet in the end always stopping short of the finish line. Likewise I’m fickle and change platforms and toolboxes for this project, necessitating restarting from scratch.
I’ve finally settled into a software tool I am (mostly) content with, Google Picasa, and have begun this process anew. More than a decade of capturing photos of my two sons, while simultaneously not always effectively pruning and post-processing these images have resulted in 30,000 photos. Recent years are in better shape, having been effectively geo-tagged and facial-tagged but years of legacy shots are in rough shape. I don’t want to estimate the total time I need to sink into pruning, geo-tagging, facial ID, post processing and meta tagging these images. I know it will be well worth it but it is incredibly intimidating.
To make matters worse I find myself with a shoebox full of miniDV tapes, captured between 2000 and 2006. I gave away to charity (perhaps within the last year) my last DV camcorder but that issue aside I have sixty+ hours of DV footage to transfer. These tapes have been (relatively) well cared for but are butting up against the lifespan of the media.
Some back of the napkin math:
- 60 hours of transfer time (miniDV transfers over Firewire in real-time to a computer)
- 60 hours of computing time to transcode (approximate)
- 201 GB of storage required (8 megabit per second date rate, 60 hours of content)
This goes atop the current 32GB of personal video I currently have archived and 48GB of photos (granted that will drop as I prune). All told I am immensely grateful for CrashPlan and their unlimited cloud storage to keep all this content safe.
If I can only make the time to get all this content transfered, edited and tagged I would be in great shape.
