As part of the historical trust project for my own family, I've been working on converting all of our camcorder footage from tape to digital. Once loaded up on the computer, it gets backed up (one local backup plus remote backup) and can be easily shared with anyone who wants a copy.
The video comes in two varieties. From 1990 to 2000 we had a gigantic and somewhat ungainly VHS camcorder. From 2003 to the present, we had a digital 8 camcorder. We don't record 8mm movies any more - last Christmas we got a Canon digital SLR that records beautiful 720p.
The first phase was to convert all of the VHS tape. Since it was older, it got higher precedence. 7 tapes, approximately 14 hours of video became 310 individual video clips. We haven't finished the inventory yet but we've been working on it.
During the second phase, I converted all of the digital 8 footage. 12 tapes yielded about 10 hours of video for 78 individual clips (nearly 3 hours of it from the Summer Academy productions of "Godspell", "Once on This Island" and "Send Me On My Way").
So what I found out during this process surprised me. VHS tape, as it ages, the video gets snowy, the color becomes weak and the audio becomes noisy. Digital 8 tapes, as they age, you get drop outs - short sections where parts of frames or whole frames are lost. During a dropout, the audio goes to white noise.
So what does this mean exactly? Well, mostly it means that, if you have any video tapes containing important family memories that you should get started on converting them, before age causes them to degrade any further. However, it also means that, if you have both analog and digital footage then you should convert the digital stuff first - it just doesn't hold up as well.
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