Slow Blogging Ahead

The pace has been slow around here, and will continue to be so, as I am spending most of my blogging time transferring home videos to the computer, editing them, rendering them, and burning them to DVD.

So far, I have covered the months December 2003 through July 2004. I have about 30 hours of old VHS tapes to digitally encode (1995 through 2003) and about 9 hours of MiniDV video dating from mid-2004 to the present.

The transfer process is one-to-one. I.e., for every hour of raw video, it takes an hour to dump to the hard drive.

Then, it takes about 3 hours of editing per hour of raw video.

The rendering process is about 2:1, but is something the computer can do when I go to bed. Same for the burning process (1:1).

After I've burned the DVD from the top-quality DV master, I save the project as an mpg file (which can be backed up on a couple of different hard drives and used to recreate the DVD in the future).

You can understand why I fell so far behind, and why I am now spending as much time as possible to catch up.

Oh, and to counter any "helpful" suggestions, I have looked into paying someone to do this. But having seen the overpriced and kitschy output of most video-transfer companies, that is not an option. (And, like blogging, it's a creative and relaxing outlet for me, much like scrapbooking is for my wife).