- So check this thing out.
I have been obsessed with this camera all weekend.
We just moved into this new place
and while we were unpacking,
one of Carrie's boxes,
full of sentimental stuff,
all The Euro book,
old photographs,
came out this guy.
Depending on which generation you grew up in,
might be familiar with one of these
and holy crap, this can store up to four hours
of video if you record it in
that long play mode.
But the thing to keep in mind with these is
that they do not last forever.
They do degrade over time.
So you really want to try to digitize it,
soon as possible before it's too late.
So knowing that the first thing I did
when I saw this camera,
was I popped in a couple of tapes to see
if there was any footage still remaining on these tapes.
It was just a fuzzy white screen.
I was kinda bombed and I thought,
Oh, those tapes are probably too old,
but then I remembered that you're supposed
to run a head cleaner through these cameras once in a while.
So something like this,
I found this on eBay,
ran this tape through the camera for like 30 seconds,
and then suddenly camera started working fine.
All the tapes, the footage was still there.
That's what I'm talking about.
And the other thing I ordered was this thing,
ClearClick Video to Digital 2.0,
I picked this up for $139 on Amazon
and I'll throw a link down there in the description,
and there's definitely cheaper ways to do this.
What I liked about this was how simple it was.
So check it out,
we got that old school,
analog, yellow, red and white.
So really all you gotta do is figure out how
to get your analog signal into this,
and then you could pop in an SD card or a USB stick
and then hit record.
But before you buy this
know that there are some kinks and quirks of this
that I'm still gonna test out a little bit more
in this video, but first,
do you guys want to see
what kinda stuff we dug out from Carrie's old tapes?
Are you excited to see what kind
of stuff we managed to dig up?
- No.
- What do you think of the Christmas lights by the way?
- I don't like it.
- All right, let's take it down.
In my head I thought those fairy lights might look,
kinda cool but it looks stupid.
Girl is that you? - Yeah.
- That's you right there playing soccer?
I didn't even know you played soccer.
You know I used to play soccer?
- No.
- We're learning stuff about each other.
Oh, look at that,
Carrie just doing some vlogging.
Can we hear what you said?
- I would rather listen to it first.
- Okay, Carrie's gonna listen to this on her own.
You started vlogging way before I did.
- Maybe you could show it without audio.
- Yeah, so curious.
Are you gonna let me hear what you're saying?
You look very serious.
(laughing)
And this must be your dad motocrossing.
Motocrossing is that a verb?
Is that your dad right there?
- Yeah, I think so.
Oh yeah, number nine.
That was his number, his favorite number.
- That's cool.
You should send that to your dad.
I think he'll like that.
- Yeah, he'll get a kick out of it, for sure.
- So anyone with like a Gmail
or a Google account has like a YouTube account, right?
It's time Carrie logged in to her YouTube account
where there's nothing there,
but I just dumped all these files as unlisted files.
So you can go ahead and share it with whoever you want.
It's free, so might as well have it there.
There's a lot though.
I pulled four tapes
and each tape had like two hours each.
So there's like eight hours of stuff,
but I'm happy we did it
because now that it's been converted to a digital format,
it will not degrade further from here.
So, that's good.
- And we don't have to carry tapes around
every time we move.
- Yeah, exactly.
But here's the one thing that I think everyone be doing,
is ask your close family, relatives, friends.
Let me know if you have anything
that looks like a tape at all.
Whether it's VHS MiniDV,
anything that looks like a tape,
send it my way.
And I just kinda threw it out there,
not expecting anything.
I didn't actually expect her to have any tapes,
but then look at all this.
I didn't even know that there
was a Hi8 Camcorder in our house.
And it's crazy
cause these go back before I was born,
like 1985, 1986.
- That's kinda weird to look at life before you existed.
- I've been tripping out
and look at this,
even some cassette tapes just for audio, right?
I definitely want to know what audio is recorded
on here though,
because this says Randy,
who's my older brother at three months from 1979.
What is on here?
I must find out.
I still have lots of digitizing to do,
but this is Christmas, 1985.
So this was four years before I was born
and oh my God.
- Look at your mum.
- Yeah, and my grandma.
My grandma passed away about five years ago
or something like that,
but like it's crazy seeing her just walk around like that.
Look at that,
my grandma hopped out of the RV like that?
Oh my God.
There's my mom, my sister,
my brother and my grandma.
I was negative five years old then.
This is 1985 and my mom was born in 1954.
So she's 31.
That's my...
My mom is my age right here.
How weird is that?
Think about your parents,
they are like, oh yeah,
they're older people,
they're your parents.
But I'm watching video of my mom
at my age.
She already had a home,
she was taking care of my brother and my sister
and another kid on the way.
At my age?
This is Randy's seventh birthday.
My older brother that went to Thailand with us.
Oh my God,
look, he's tiny.
And who's that?
I don't know.
That was scary though.
Let's skip through that.
Giving us some serious side eye right there.
Wait a second,
my grandma's like my mom's age here.
Whoa.
Here's the thing like if I never made an effort
to digitize these tapes,
my mom probably would have never dug into the basement
to try to dig these up,
and by the time we found them again next time
it might've been too late.
So this is awesome.
I'm so happy that we're able to preserve these files,
cause it's like wine you know.
The older they get the finer and more,
I don't know, something like that.
I think I'm gonna just start filming my videos on this cam.
- So what's the difference between your camera
and my camera?
- Well, my camera's MiniDV,
which is slightly newer,
but this is Hi8 which has been around for longer.
So that's why all these tapes are before my time.
- So that's why you are playing everything on this camera.
- Are you glad that your boyfriend's a nerd
and just digitizing all these old tapes?
- Yes.
- I'll be the historian of the family.
All these batteries are so old
that they literally power the camera for 20 seconds.
Here let me get the plug.
Is it working?
I think it is, the timer's going.
How are you doing there?
- Wow.
- It is actually a really convenient vlog setup.
I would love for a good mirrorless camera
to have this form factor.
I mean, it just feels so good,
and just look at that,
holding it out here.
Yeah, flip screen?
- Oh look we are cute.
- Yes this is an old video now.
Look, this is from...
- From where we high school.
- Yeah, the sound quality is probably pretty bad,
but if we sync this sound quality into this.
Hey look at this.
Can I use this?
This is an acceptable vlogging camera.
Should I just make a whole video on this camera?
There's my camera right there and there's my monitor
where I'm filming myself.
Wow, look at this,
I got a mirror effect.
- A mirror effect.
Didn't they do like music videos like this and stuff.
(upbeat music)
- I need to do a camera comparison,
which camera's the camera from 15 years ago?
A or B?
(laughing)
Also, even if you don't have a Hi8 Camcorder,
if you have these tapes lying around,
it might even be worth buying the old used one on eBay.
I was looking around for them.
I saw some for like $50, $60,
and usually on there it says the description,
if it works well enough to at least digitize tapes.
But if you do have one,
definitely try the head cleaner first,
cause I think a majority
of the time they'll fix your problem.
But anyways, I got a lot of tapes to digitize
and I also want to figure out the quirks on
this thing before I officially give my thumbs up
or down on this.
So let's get to business.
(soft music)
Hey Steve, these tapes were your time.
Give us a little history lesson about your time
and your tapes.
- My time and my tapes.
- [Gene] Yeah, I mean,
you were probably using these kinds of tapes, right?
- Yeah, but we had tapes before this too.
Betamax tapes and Super VHS, Betamax.
- [Gene] I just want a history lesson,
I'm not talking about trying to figure out
how the Neanderthals...
- Then the dinosaurs came
and they got too big and fat.
- [Gene] What'd you do with all your tapes?
- Somewhere, I still have a bunch of MiniDV and Beta tapes.
- [Gene] You should digitize them
just for like archival purposes.
- It was something I would have to probably do on my own.
- [Gene] Privately.
- Cause there's some silly stuff.
- [Gene] Sam and I will totally keep it safe.
We won't put any blackmail material on YouTube.
- I totally believe you.
- All right finally,
I finished digitizing around 30 to 40 hours worth
of old archived footage.
It was honestly really nice having this displayed,
so that when you plug something in,
it's just all built in.
It was really a big part
of the reason why I went for this unit over
some of the others,
is because you don't require a computer
to be hooked up to it or anything.
It's a very simple all-in-one solution.
It is not the cheapest solution.
What is it like $139?
Some of the other solutions I was looking at
are some USB ports.
So instead you would actually plug it into a computer
and capture the video using software.
Haven't tried it myself,
so can't speak too much on it,
but definitely read the reviews,
make sure it's compatible with your system.
Now, some of the specific issues I had with this thing,
my biggest issue was the files getting corrupted
after I captured.
So I'm gonna go ahead
and start capturing this tape right here
and notice that if the signal gets interrupted,
like I pull out this cable,
or sometimes if it's the end of the tape or whatever,
it can actually corrupt it.
If I go back to check on the file,
see there's a little sad face on there,
you see that, means that file is corrupt.
So let's say you were capturing a clip for an hour
and then something goes wrong
with the connection or whatever,
then you end up with a corrupt file.
And that was the most frustrating part of all of it
because the signal can get lost,
whether it's a slight disconnection
or sometimes when the tape's reached the end.
And sometimes the tapes would just do something weird
because they're so old,
that they'll skip a point or something like that.
That was super frustrating.
So one of the first things you definitely want to go do
is go into the menu and see this signal loss detection,
make sure you have a check mark next to that.
But even after you turn that on, the file still do corrupt,
so best way to do it,
is to stop the recording before the tape ends.
It's an extra step.
It's kinda of a hussle,
but as long as you're the one that stops the recording,
the files have been good.
Another issue I did see a few times was
that the audio sync would be completely off at the end
of the tape.
So the video would start off perfectly in sync
with the video and audio
and by the end of it,
it would just be off.
So at some point in the video,
there would be a big gap of either no audio
or the audio would skip ahead.
Another thing I did notice with the finalized files was
that Premier did not seem to love these files.
Now I don't want to get too much into it
because I don't know if it's an issue with Adobe Premier
or if it's an issue with the files
that this thing generates.
But what would happen is I would load up a file
and let's say it's an hour long clip.
When I load it into Premiere,
it might see it as a 30 minute clip
or 45 minute clip.
It just wouldn't see that last chunk of the video,
but the videos play in full,
if you open it up in QuickTime player,
or even if you uploaded straight to YouTube,
it would see the whole clip.
So few times I did just have
to run the clips through a random conversion,
so that Premiere would just see the whole video clip.
But again, not 100% sure if that was an issue
with Adobe Premiere, my editing software or this.
But aside from those speed bumps,
I'm really glad I have this thing,
and I actually want to hand this off to one of you guys.
So let me know in the comments,
if you guys have some tapes you want to digitize.
I'll send it out to one of you
and it'd be cool if whoever I send it out to,
you sent it out to another person,
then you sent it out to another person
and it just kept going,
and a bunch of people had digitized tapes.
That'd be cool.
That sounds like an operation that seems cool,
but in practice it's a little complicated.
I don't know.
What do you think? - I think it's a good idea.
Yeah, let's do it.
Let's see how far we can make this Tucci train go.
- So yeah, let me know in the comments,
if you want this
and if you're willing to pass it on afterwards.
We'll send this around town a little bit,
but otherwise I'll go ahead and throw a link
to this in the description
and yeah, if you guys have any suggestions on simple ways
to convert analog tapes to digital,
let me know in the comments.
- Or some of your favorite bands from the 80's, 70's, 60's.
- What direction are you taking this video Sam?
- I just want to learn about history, Gene.
- Yeah, it's definitely been a trip watching some
of these old videos.
I even sent some of these clips to my dad,
and you want to know what he said?
This is very valuable,
you did a good job.
I got a pat on the head from my pops.
When was the last time your dad said good job to you?
- Let's not talk about that right now, Gene.
- Should I read some comments?
- No, just send it.
- Okay.
(gentle music)